THE ART OF THE INSULT
Late comic Rickles brash, but beloved
There’s a part of all comedians that remains a child, while other people get civility pounded into them.
Don Rickles, the irrepressible master of the comic insult whose humour was a fast-paced, highvolume litany of mockery in which members of his audience were the (usually) willing victims of his verbal assaults, died Thursday at his home Los Angeles. He was 90.
The cause was kidney failure, said his publicist, Paul Shefrin.
When Rickles developed his standup act in the 1950s, his humour was considered shocking, with a raw, abrasive, deeply personal edge. If he wasn’t the first “insult comic,” he was by far the most successful and most widely imitated, becoming a fixture on television and in nightclubs for decades.
Trained as a dramatic actor, Rickles appeared in films and television series and was the voice of Mr. Potato Head in the popular Toy Story movies from 1995 to 2010. But for more than 50 years, he practised a distinctive brand of improvisational, sarcastic humour that made him one of the most original and influential comedians of his time.
His brash style became a major influence on many younger performers, including comedians Louis CK, Lewis Black and Zach Galifianakis, radio shock jock Howard Stern and even for the mouthy cartoon character Howard the Duck.
People vied for front-row seats at nightclubs, practically begging to be skewered by Rickles, who was variously known as the Merchant of Venom, the Sultan of Insult or, as Tonight Show host Johnny Carson dubbed him in ironic endearment, Mr. Warmth.
His reputation was established in 1957, when he noticed the often-combative Frank Sinatra in the audience at a nightclub in Miami Beach.
Rickles poked fun at a recent movie Sinatra had made, then said, “Hey, Frank, make yourself at home. Hit somebody!”
Sinatra burst out laughing, became one of his biggest supporters, and a career was launched.
Rickles did not tell jokes with traditional punchlines, did not make topical comments about the news and did not use crude profanity. Every show was spontaneous, built largely around his caustic observations about members of the audience.
“There’s something truly artful about his delivery,” director Martin Scorsese — who hired Rickles to play a Las Vegas casino manager in the 1995 film Casino — once told The New York Times.
Short, bald and stocky, Rickles walked on the stage “looking like a snapping turtle surfacing in a pond,” as a New Yorker profile put it in 2004.
His chief comedic weapons were exaggeration and ridicule, deployed in a rapid, sharp-tongued style. He especially delighted in tweaking the rich and mighty and became renowned for his biting performances at celebrity roasts.
While filming Casino, Rickles decided to needle the film’s star, Robert De Niro.
“They warned me what a serious guy De Niro is,” Rickles told the New York Daily News. “They warned me not to make jokes. So the third day of shooting, I looked him straight in the face and told him: ‘I can’t work with you. You can’t act.’ The guy fell on the floor. He didn’t stop laughing for 18 weeks. Scorsese fell on the floor too, but he’s so small we couldn’t find him.”
Rickles seldom used language that would have to be censored on television, but many people considered his humour brazen and in poor taste, especially early in his career. As time went on, his style seemed caught in a sometimes uncomfortable time warp.
Donald Jay Rickles was born May 8, 1926, in Queens, N.Y. His father, who sold insurance, had an acerbic sense of humour, but it was his mother who encouraged him to stand up at family gatherings and poke fun at his uncles.
During the Second World War, Rickles served with the navy in the Philippines, which he often referred to in his act. After the war, he studied for two years at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where his classmates included Anne Bancroft, Grace Kelly and Jason Robards.
While looking for work as an actor, he sold used cars, life insurance and pots and pans. Almost out of desperation, he turned to comedy.
By the late 1950s, he was appearing in Las Vegas, while still finding occasional work as a dramatic and comic actor. He was in the 1958 submarine movie Run Silent, Run Deep with Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster. He played a nightclub bouncer in The Rat Race (1960), alongside Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds. He was in two Annette Funicello-Frankie Avalon beach movies in the mid-1960s.
His closest friend in show business was comedian Bob Newhart, whose mild, cerebral style of humour could not have been more different.
“There’s a part of all comedians that remains a child, while other people get civility pounded into them,” Newhart told The Washington Post in 2007. “But somehow comedians don’t. This is particularly evident in Don. Whatever he sees, he says. And it’s what we all think, but we’re too civilized to say.” The Washington Post