Barry Crimmins, comedian and advocate, dies at 64

Barry Crimmins, a standup comedian who was at the center of Boston’s comedy scene for years and whose political satire took a serious turn in the 1990s when he became an advocate for abused children after revealing that he had been raped as a child, died Feb. 28 in Syracuse, N.Y. He was 64.

His wife, Helen Crimmins, announced his death on Twitter. Crimmins said last month that he had cancer. Late last year, he had organized fundraising efforts for his wife, who has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

During his heyday in the 1980s, Crimmins was considered a comedian’s comedian, with his cerebral political satire and his well-honed mastery of the standup craft. He was broad and bearish — his nickname was Bearcat — and prowled the stage with a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other.

“We have a presidential election coming up,” he said in a joke he first delivered in 1988 and revisited many times thereafter. “I think you’ll agree with me, the big problem is somebody’s going to win.”

He was unabashedly liberal and sometimes profanely stage-heckled by conservative-leaning customers who took exception to his act.

“People ask, ‘If you don’t love this country why don’t you get out of it?’ “he said in his routine. “Because I don’t want to be victimized by its foreign policy.”

Crimmins was also founder and manager of two Boston-area comedy clubs, the first at a Chinese restaurant called Ding Ho, the second called Stitches. He was credited with helping launch the careers of comedians such as Steven Wright, Denis Leary, Paula Poundstone and Bobcat Goldthwait.

Goldthwait, who was 16 when he began working alongside Crimmins, made a documentary about his mentor, “Call Me Lucky,” chronicling Crimmins’ career and his long-suppressed memories of childhood abuse.

Over the years, people had noticed that Crimmins’ onstage persona had grown increasingly angry, until he revealed during a monologue in 1992 that he had been repeatedly raped as a 4-year-old by a male relative of the family baby sitter.

Barry Francis Crimmins was born July 3, 1953, in Kingston, N.Y., and grew up in Skaneateles, N.Y. — “an Indian name,” Crimmins said, “meaning, ‘small lake surrounded by fascists.’” His father was a traveling salesman.