Rickles, ‘Mr. Warmth,’ Bows Out at 90

Don Rickles died April 6 at the age of 90, and many, many people in the world he inhabited with such aplomb shed tears. Given that his world was the world of comedy and American humor of the live and live-wire variety, as well as the larger circus tent of American showbiz, quite a few of those same people probably had a laugh or two as well.

He was touring and appearing on talk shows, laying waste to his hosts and audiences as always, but never wasting opportunities for skewering, making shrewd and often tasteless observations, until he couldn’t. After having had numerous surgeries late in his life, he died of kidney failure at his home in Beverly Hills.

Anybody who’s every watched late-night shows — from the beginnings of Jack Paar, Steve Allen and Johnny Carson through David Letterman and later Jay Leno and now the Jimmys, Fallon and Kimmel — or watched him in major and minor network sitcoms or Dean Martin roast collections probably thinks he has a handle on Don Rickles and his comedy.

He was the don of insult comedy, a category he cultivated if not invented (he listed the rude and crude Milton Berle as an inspiration). He had nicknames. The “Merchant of Venom” was one and Johnny Carson, a close friend, was said to have dubbed him “Mr. Warmth” — acidly, a not entirely complimentary compliment.

We saw him as pugnacious, brash, combative, a respecter of nobody and nothing, not race, not women. He mocked other men’s wives from the dais about their looks and their, well, just about every cliché you could think of. He was Don Quixote trashing the windmills that spread the wind of political correctness.

He was stocky, with a baby-like baldness that seems to have come sooner than it should have. When he was a guest on a talk show, he would sit down like a rock and stare at his host with laser eyes. He had his verbal dukes up in an instant, and hosts, when not rolling on the stage with laughter, often seem to have had their hands up in defense.

It wasn’t exactly a pose, although everybody that knew him loved him pretty much all the way through, especially his fellow denizens of showbiz. If a man could insult Frank Sinatra repeatedly and make him like it, why, that was some gift. At one roast, he said he insulted everybody, Italians, Irish, Jews (Jewish himself, he raised his eyebrows and sighed), “and you [looking at Sammy David Jr.], you’re black … I’m so sorry.”

Although he wanted to be an actor, and he sometimes was on television, in a cartoon and in big and little Hollywood movies, he was first, last and foremost a comic, a comedian, a funny guy, a standup and a stand-up guy both. If it is true that there is a tragic actor, or just a tragedy, in every comedian, it wasn’t self-evident with Rickles.

But it is true that there is a little boy in every male comedian. That little leer — that look that appears on the face of a five-year-old after getting caught calling his sister a nasty name — was part of his bag of tricks, his weaponry, like a bow and arrow for Cupid.

He was born in Queens in 1926. His nine-decade trajectory encompassed an American life, but also the singular world of American show business. It’s the geography of television studios, Catskill comedy clubs, the Vegas strip and its higher and lower echelons, the jokebook as bible, cocktails and cigarette smoke. The people that mourned him the most, and with whom he spent much of his time with, could be broken up into his friends — the talk-show comics and hosts, actors, comedians, barkers and talkers, big stars and little shiners and his insult victims — and members of his audiences, groups that sometimes intersected.

His thumb print and laugh prints are like Kilroy in all the myriad endeavors of showbiz, which is not to say that you’d find him in a Shakespeare company or as a lead in an Arthur Miller play — although, you know, you could almost see him as a really angry, batty Willy Loman. Rather, he tried almost everything: acting classes (his classmates were people like Grace Kelly and Anne Bancroft), snarky movie roles, a stint in the navy, his own television sitcom, a voice role as Mr. Potato Head in the “Toy Story” films.

As an insult comedian, he probably had no peer, although the late Joan Rivers came pretty close when she was working on all cylinders. He would needle anybody; famously, when he saw Frank Sinatra in his audience, he yelled: “Make yourself at home Frank. Hit somebody!”

He was in A movies: “Run Silent, Run Deep” (based on Commander Edward Beach’s book) with Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster and “Kelly’s Heroes” as a smartass scrounger in an Eastwood war movie. He was on “Get Smart” and in a movie called “X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes,” playing a carnival barker. He guested in “The Mothers-in-Law,” “Gilligan’s Island,” “I Dream of Jeannie,” ‘The Munsters,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show” — a roster of time-machine sitcoms. It’s a post-vaudeville, post-burlesque record of achievement.

He got married late and made it last — 52 years married to Barbara Sklar — and had children and grandchildren. He played New York, he was on television and in Vegas and Beverly Hills.

To get perhaps a true sense of Rickles, watch those Dean Martin roasts he hosted, at which big names were the “honorees”: Martin, Sinatra, Jimmy Stewart, the Rat Pack, Ronald Reagan during his post-governorship and Rickles himself. Sometimes he tells the same jokes, but he is always bravely, without apology, in his element, among friends, at home. He is also always funny. All that’s needed is a couch. He’s the family’s biting dog. On the dais, he was always among friends, no matter what he said about them.

We liked watching him insult the big and the powerful and the shiny stars as they almost cried with laughter. Secretly, I suppose we were glad he never got a crack at us.