King of insult comedy pulled off jokes few others could
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, Nev., to Atlantic City, N.J., and livened up latenight 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.”
Some reaction to Rickles’ death matched his style.
“In lieu of flowers, Don Rickles’ family has requested that people drop their pants and fire a rocket,” Patton Oswald tweeted.
Rickles patented a confrontational style that stand-up 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 as 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 labeling 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’ honor and told the comedian, “You are the only man I know who has bombed more places than I have.”
In 2008, he won the Emmy for best individual performance in a variety show for the Landis film, Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project. In 2012, he received the Johnny Carson Award for Comedic Excellence, a fitting tribute for a man whose big breakthrough came on The Tonight Show more than 40 years earlier.
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.
In a 1993 Associated Press interview, Don Rickles’ brassy voice softened when he was asked how he wanted people to remember him.
“If people know me well, they know I’m an honest friend. I’m emotional; I’m caring; I’m loyal. Loyalty in this business is very important.”
Rickles’ survivors include his wife, Barbara Sklar; their daughter, Mindy Mann; her husband, Ed; and Rickles’ two grandchildren, Ethan and Harrison Mann. Funeral services will be private.