King of insults
Comedian Don Rickles has died at age 90
LOS ANGELES — Don Rickles, the big-mouthed, bald-headed “Mr. Warmth” whose verbal assaults endeared him to audiences and peers and made him the acknowledged grandmaster of insult comedy, died Thursday. He was 90.
Rickles, who would have been 91 on May 8, suffered kidney failure and died Thursday morning at his home, said Paul Shefrin, his longtime publicist and friend.
For more than half a century, Rickles headlined casinos and nightclubs from Las Vegas to Atlantic City, New Jersey, and livened up late-night talk shows. No one was exempt from Rickles’ insults, not fans or presidents or such fellow celebrities as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Johnny Carson.
Even volatile Sinatra let Rickles have his comedic way with him.
“Hey, Frank, make yourself at home. Hit somebody,” Rickles snapped at the singer attending his show. Sinatra laughed.
Despite jokes that from other comics might have inspired boycotts, he was one of the most beloved people in show business, idolized by everyone from Joan Rivers and Louis CK to Chris Rock and Sarah Silverman.
Billy Crystal tweeted simply, “A giant loss.”
Rickles patented a confrontational style that standup performers still emulate, but one that kept him on the right side of trouble. He emerged in the late 1950s, a time when comics such as Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl were taking greater risks, becoming more politicized and more introspective.
Rickles managed to shock his audiences without cutting social commentary or truly personal self-criticism. He operated under a code as old the Borscht Belt: Go far — ethnic jokes, sex jokes, ribbing Carson for his many marriages — but make sure everyone knows it’s for fun.
“I think the reason that (my act) caught on and gave me a wonderful career is that I was never mean-spirited,” he once said. “Not that you had to like it, but you had to be under a rock somewhere not to get it.”
Rickles’ many friends returned the wisecracks, whether labelling him a man everyone loved to hate or, as his pal Bob Newhart once joked, as a man annoying to travel with. But the topper came, from all people, the radio host Casey Kasem, who dressed up as Hitler at a Martin roast in Rickles’ honour and told the comedian, “You are the only man I know who has bombed more places than I have.”
Rickles was a stage comic and occasional movie actor when he sat down on the couch next to Carson’s desk and muttered, “Hello, dummy.” The studio audience was initially startled, but when the host began laughing uncontrollably, so did everyone else. He would appear countless more times, haranguing Carson about not being invited more often or mocking his own love life.
“My wife just lays there, saying, ‘Help me with my jewelry,’” was a typical joke.
For his standup act, Rickles would begin a show by charging on stage and berating the people sitting down front. To an elderly lady he might say, “What are you doing up, Mom? Go lie down.” To a young man: “Look at this kid staring. That comes from locking yourself in the bathroom too much.” After kissing a woman’s hand: “What’d you have for dinner? Fish?”
His bald heading shining, he would gleefully croon his theme song, “I’m a Nice Guy,” and make fun of blacks and gays, the Irish and the Italians, with special attention for his own people, the Jews. A favourite epithet was the nonsensical “hockey puck,” as in, “You’re a real hockey puck.”
He recalled during a 2003 interview that he began using it on hecklers in the 1950s, although he couldn’t recall exactly why. As to why it caught on: “I guess it sounded like swearing,” said Rickles.
Donald Jay Rickles was born in 1926 in New York City’s borough of Queens. Rickles jokingly called his mother the “Jewish General Patton,” but owed some of his success to her; she was friendly with Sinatra’s mother, who convinced the singer to check out Rickles’ act.
He married Barbara Sklar, his agent’s secretary, in 1965, and they had two children, actress Mindy Rickles and writer-producer Lawrence Rickles, who helped on the HBO film about his father. Lawrence Rickles died of complications from pneumonia in 2011.