Don Rickles, 90, was the ‘Sultan of Insult’
King of sarcasm, considered one of the most influential comedians of his time, dies of kidney failure
Don Rickles, the irrepressible master of the comic insult whose humour was a fast-paced, high-volume litany of mockery in which members of his audience were the (usually) willing victims of his verbal assaults, died Friday at his home Los Angeles. He was 90. The cause was kidney failure, said his publicist, Paul Shefrin.
When Mr. 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 series of animated features 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, snappish 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 the writers of the mouthy cartoon character Howard the Duck.
People vied for front-row seats at nightclubs.
They practically begged 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.
No one was spared from his hectoring, whether celebrities, royalty, presidents or, especially, Rickles himself. 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 Rickles’s biggest supporters, and a career was launched.
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. He glanced around the room at his prey. Overweight people, men accompanied by younger women, racial and ethnic minorities — all were subject to his relentless barrage of smartaleck buckshot.
“The bigger a person is,” Rickles told the Newark Star-Ledger in 1993, “the more pleasure I take in knocking them down a notch.”
Rickles developed a persona that was a carefully crafted combination of cocksure wise guy, playground bully and naughty, insecure child who just pulled the dog’s tail.
In the 1950s, he was working in Washington at a cramped strip club called the Wayne Room when he hit on a formula that became his stock-in-trade: He became a heckler from the stage.
“The place was like a hallway,” he recalled in a 1977 Washington Post interview. “The customers were right on top of you, always heckling, and I began giving it right back to them.”
The secret of his comedy was in his delivery, which was a blizzard of mockery, raillery and mayhem. His all-purpose put-down for dolts was to call them “hockey puck.”
He often mentioned his Jewish background, his mother and his wife, Barbara, for comic effect, as one sharp-edged observation collided with another in madcap verbal detonations.
Donald Jay Rickles was born May 8, 1926, in Queens. 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 World War II, Mr. Rickles served with the U.S. Navy in the Philippines, which he often referred to in his comedy 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, billed in the early 1950s as Don “Glass Head” Rickles.
By the late 1950s, he was appearing in Las Vegas. 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, and in 1970 played a supply sergeant-con artist in Kelly’s Heroes, starring Eastwood.
Mr. Rickles appeared in dozens of sitcom episodes, from The Dick Van Dyke Show to Gilligan’s Island, and starred in several short-lived comedy shows of his own, the best-known of which was probably C.P.O. Sharkey, in which he played a Navy non-commissioned officer for two seasons on NBC in the 1970s.
Rickles’s 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 secret of his comedy was in his delivery; his all-purpose put-down for dolts was to call them ‘hockey puck’