Don Rickles, in 2007.
Credit
Richard Drew/Associated Press
Don
Rickles, the acidic stand-up comic who became world-famous not by
telling jokes but by insulting his audience, died on Thursday at his
home in Los Angeles. He was 90.
The cause was kidney failure, said a spokesman, Paul Shefrin.
For more than half a century, on nightclub stages, in concert halls and on television,
Mr. Rickles made outrageously derisive comments about people’s looks,
their ethnicity, their spouses, their sexual orientation, their jobs or
anything else he could think of. He didn’t discriminate: His incendiary
unpleasantries were aimed at the biggest stars in show business (Frank Sinatra was a favorite target) and at ordinary paying customers.
His
rise to national prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s roughly
coincided with the success of “All in the Family,” the groundbreaking
situation comedy whose protagonist, Archie Bunker, was an outspoken
bigot. Mr. Rickles’s humor was similarly transgressive. But he went
further than Archie Bunker, and while Carroll O’Connor,
who played Archie, was speaking words someone else had written — and
was invariably the butt of the joke — Mr. Rickles, whose targets
included his fellow Jews, never needed a script and was always in
charge.
One
night, on learning that some members of his audience were German, he
said, “Forty million Jews in this country, and I got four Nazis sitting
here in front waiting for the rally to start.” He said that America
needed Italians “to keep the cops busy” and blacks “so we can have
cotton in the drugstore,” and that “Asians are nice people, but they
burn a lot of shirts.” He might ask a man in the audience,
“Is that your
wife?” and, when the man answered yes, respond: “Oh, well. Keep your
chin up.”
As
brutal as his remarks could be, they rarely left a mark. (“I’m not
really a mean, vicious guy,” he told an interviewer in 2000.) Sidney
Poitier was said to have once been offended by Mr. Rickles’s racial
jokes. But in “Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project,” a 2007 documentary directed by John Landis, Mr. Poitier sang Mr. Rickles’s praises.
Recalling
the first time he saw Mr. Rickles perform, Mr. Poitier said: “He was
explosive. He was impactful. He was funny. I mean, outrageously funny.”
Mr.
Rickles got his first break, the story goes, when Sinatra and some of
his friends came to see him perform in 1957 — in Hollywood, according to
most sources, although Mr. Rickles said it was in Miami. “Make yourself
at home, Frank,” Mr. Rickles said to Sinatra, whom he had never met.
“Hit somebody.” Sinatra laughed so hard, he fell out of his seat.
Mr.
Rickles was soon being championed by Sinatra, Dean Martin and the other
members of the show business circle known as the Rat Pack. Steady work
in Las Vegas followed. But he was hardly an overnight success: He spent a
decade in the comedy trenches before he broke through to a national
audience.
In
1965, he made the first of numerous appearances on “The Tonight Show,”
treating Johnny Carson with his trademark disdain to the audience’s (and
Carson’s) delight. He also became a regular on Dean Martin’s televised
roasts, where no celebrity was safe from his onslaughts. (“What’s Bob
Hope doing here? Is the war over?”)
Mr.
Rickles’s wife, who he said “likes to lie in bed, signaling ships with
her jewelry,” was not immune to his attacks. Neither was his mother,
Etta, whom he referred to as “the Jewish Patton.” But off the stage, he
didn’t hesitate to express his gratitude to his mother for unflaggingly
believing in his talent, even when he himself wasn’t so sure.
“She had a tremendous drive,” he recalled in “Mr. Warmth.” “Drove me crazy. But she was like the driving force for me.”
He
shared an apartment with his mother and did not marry until he was
almost 40. After marrying Barbara Sklar in 1965, he saw to it that his
mother had the apartment next door. His wife survives him, as do a
daughter, Mindy Mann, and two grandchildren. Mr. Rickles’s son,
Lawrence, died in 2011.
Donald
Jay Rickles was born in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens on
May 8, 1926, to Max Rickles, an insurance salesman, and the former Etta
Feldman. During World War II, he honed his comedic skills while serving
in the Navy. (“On the ship that I went over to the Philippines,” he told
The New York Times in 2015, “out of 300 men I was the class comedian.”)
After being discharged, he followed his father into the insurance
business, but when he had trouble getting his customers to sign on the
dotted line, decided to try acting.
He
studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, an
experience that he later said gave him a greater sense of himself. But
he found it difficult to get acting jobs and turned to stand-up comedy.
For
a while, he pursued acting and comedy simultaneously. He did his
stand-up act at Catskills resorts and in strip clubs, and his movie
career got off to an auspicious start with a small part in the 1958
submarine drama “Run Silent, Run Deep,” starring Clark Gable and Burt
Lancaster. But the bulk of his film work in the 1960s was in low-budget
beach movies: “Bikini Beach,” “Muscle Beach Party” and “Pajama Party,”
all in 1964, and “Beach Blanket Bingo” in 1965.
By
that time, his comedy career had begun gathering momentum. Focusing
less on prepared material and more on interaction with his audience, he
had found his voice. He was not the first insult comedian — and in fact
an earlier master of the comic insult, Jack E. Leonard, was known to
complain that Mr. Rickles’s act was too similar to his — but he soon
became far and away the most successful.
Bookings
in the late 1950s at the Slate Brothers nightclub in Hollywood and the
lounge of the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas spread the word. During his
Slate Brothers engagement, Carl Reiner recalled in
“Mr. Warmth,” the
biggest names in show business felt that “if they hadn’t been insulted
by Rickles, they weren’t with it.”
His
appearances insulting celebrities on the Dean Martin roasts and his
sparring matches with Carson cemented Mr. Rickles’s reputation, but his
unscripted brand of humor proved an uneasy fit for weekly television. A
variety show in 1968 and a situation comedy in 1972, both called “The
Don Rickles Show,” were short-lived, as was “Daddy Dearest,” a 1993
sitcom in which he and the comedian Richard Lewis played father and son.
The closest thing to a hit show he had was “CPO Sharkey,” a
Navy
comedy, which aired from 1976 to 1978.
Critics were often not sure what to make of Mr. Rickles. John J. O’Connor of The Times wrote in 1972
that for some his humor “will always remain tasteless,” while for
others “it has its delicious moments of madness.” Tom Shales of The
Washington Post, 26 years later, was more enthusiastic, praising him as
“mythic, timeless, fearless — endowed by the gods with some absurd
miraculous gift.”
No
critic, however thoughtful, could quite explain Mr. Rickles’s
durability in show business, given that until the end of his career he
was peppering his act with slurs and stereotypes long out of favor.
And
yet he not only got away with it, but he also flourished.
His
own theory was that he was being rewarded for saying things others
wanted to say but couldn’t. “I’m the guy at the Christmas party,” he
said more than once, “who makes fun of the boss on Friday night and
still has his job on Monday morning.”
Although
Mr. Rickles sometimes expressed regret that he did not have more of a
career as an actor, he did enjoy unexpected cinematic success late in
life. In 1995, Martin Scorsese cast him in “Casino,” with Robert De Niro
and Sharon Stone, and that same year he found a new audience as the
voice of Mr. Potato Head in the hugely successful animated feature “Toy
Story,” a role he reprised in its sequels. “Toy Story 4” is scheduled
for release in 2019, but it is not known whether Mr. Rickles had done
any recording for it before his death. In 2011, he was the voice of a
frog in the movie “Zookeeper” and played the long-lost husband of Betty
White’s character on the sitcom “Hot in Cleveland.”
In
2007, Mr. Rickles published a loosely structured memoir, “Rickles’
Book,” and was the subject of Mr. Landis’s documentary, shown on HBO,
which was built around a performance at the Stardust Hotel-Casino in Las
Vegas shortly before it was torn down.
In
2014, he was the subject of an all-star tribute (inevitably, it turned
out to be more like a roast) broadcast on the Spike cable channel. That
show included appearances by David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon
Stewart and Bob Newhart, whose soft-spoken style of comedy could not be
further removed from Mr. Rickles’s, but who he often said was his
closest friend in show business.
Health
problems inevitably slowed Mr. Rickles down, but even after a leg
infection in 2014 affected his ability to walk, he continued performing,
making occasional concert and television appearances. In May 2015, he
was one of the last guests on “Late Show With David Letterman.”
As recently as 2007, the year he turned 81, Mr. Rickles had been working, by his count, about 75 nights a year.
“The
only way I would stop is if my health goes, God forbid, or the audience
isn’t with me anymore,” he told The Times that year. “Besides, I got to
keep going. My manager told me he has to put his kid through college.
His kid is 10 years old.”
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