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.
Posted by:badanov
#8 ...roughly coincided with the success of “All in the Family,” the groundbreaking situation comedy whose protagonist, Archie Bunker, was an outspoken bigot.
How predictable, NYT!
Posted by: Raj
2017-04-07 11:55
#7 Estimates of Rickles net worth are somewhere between 30M and 300M--all from insulting people.
Posted by: JohnQC
2017-04-07 11:48
#6 Did it with out crude four letter words.
Posted by: Procopius2k
2017-04-07 09:21
#5
Posted by: Skidmark
2017-04-07 08:29
#4 "You hockey puck."
Posted by: AlanC
2017-04-07 07:27
#3 He made a lot of people laugh. Some laughed at themselves, which was a good thing. I hate to see him go.
