Here’s a joke.
“I was an ugly kid. I worked in a pet store. People kept asking how big I get.”
That’s a joke the way people used to tell jokes, a one-liner, though no one told jokes quite as effectively as did the man who delivered that one.
His name was Rodney Dangerfield, and he had a million of them, similar in their self-effacing substance and world-weariness, tightly constructed and delivered rapid fire.
Another? Here you go.
“A girl phoned me the other day and said, ‘Come on over. There’s nobody home.’ I went over. Nobody was home.”
OK, one more.
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“My psychiatrist told me I was crazy and I said I want a second opinion. He said OK, you’re ugly too.”
Dangerfield has been dead for more than 20 years, but he came rushing back to me when a young woman told me she had never heard of Rodney Dangerfield, even with an internet filled with clips of Dangerfield’s TV talk show work and his film roles easy to find.
For a generation of comics, he remains an inspiration, a model of the comedic craft. There are few comedians as beloved and timeless as Dangerfield, and he is a topic when comedians gather to discuss their favorites.
One of those is Jerry Seinfeld, as big a comedy star as there is, who will be here for three shows in October at the Chicago Theatre, filling its 3,600-some seats.
He was among the many young comics — Roseanne Barr, Sam Kinison, Bob Saget — to perform at Dangerfield’s, the Upper East Side Manhattan comedy club Dangerfield ran from 1969 to 2000.
In a New York Times article in 2018, Seinfeld was asked to select one joke to include on a recording meant to represent comedy to aliens. His answer, “I would put in Rodney Dangerfield’s joke ‘I was making love with my wife, and she had a faraway look in her eyes, and I said, ‘Darling, is there someone else?’ and she said, ‘There must be.’ That’s as perfect a joke as I can imagine.”
Dangerfield was born Jacob Cohen in 1921 and raised on Long Island, New York. His father, a vaudeville comedian, was never around, and he was raised by an unstable mother. He wrote jokes as a teenager and drifted uneasily into a hard-knock professional scene, changing his name to Jack Roy and working as a singing, joke-telling waiter in down-at-the-heels local clubs and the resorts of the Catskills. It was horrible, he would later say, turning the experiences into this joke: “To give you an idea how well I was doing at the time I quit, I was the only one who knew I quit.”
He married in the early 1950s, had two children and worked as a paint and aluminum siding salesman. He also hung out at Hanson’s Drugstore, a 24-hour diner in midtown Manhattan where up-and-coming comedians gathered, including Don Rickles, Shecky Greene and Buddy Hackett.Eventually, he was back on stage, telling one reporter, “Who knows why? I wasn’t looking for a big success. I was very depressed. I was going to an analyst, and suddenly I had this tremendous urge to go out on the floor, to perform.”
He took the Rodney Dangerfield name — suggested by a club owner — and started forming an act based on the signature line “I don’t get no respect.”
His first Chicago appearance was in November 1965, when he opened for Nancy Wilson at Mister Kelly’s. Tribune critic Will Leonard called him “a new comic … who proves to be a bulky individual with a New York City east side accent. … A guy like that is funny already and he gets funnier.”
What lit the fuse of his career was a 1967 appearance on the “Ed Sullivan Show.” That would be the first of a rather astonishing talk show run, which would include hundreds of appearances on shows hosted by Dean Martin, Merv Griffin and, most often, Johnny Carson.
Then came the first of a series of Miller Lite beer TV commercials and, in 1980, a movie named “Caddyshack.”
Initially, director Harold Ramis wanted Don Rickles in the role of Al Czervik, the loud-mouthed, newly rich real estate developer whose obnoxious antics outrage the country club members.
Dangerfield garishly soared. The role made him a star, for better and for worse.
Before that film opened in July 1980, Dangerfield was performing at the Copa Room of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. My former colleague, Larry Kart, reviewed the show, interviewed him and wrote that he was “the rarest of rare comedic creatures — one of the last comedians in America who is serious about jokes.”
But then came “Caddyshack,” followed by starring roles in “Easy Money” (1983) and “Back to School” (1986). Here is what Kart saw at a 1986 show at the Arie Crown Theater here: “Gone were the perfect little perfections of rhythm, sound and nonsense that burst into laughter even when you know what’s coming. … This Dangerfield fan found himself longing for a glimpse of the genuine old hipster who used to lurk behind all those frantic one-liners.”
One can’t begrudge Dangerfield his success, especially since he used it to nurture and support all those young comics. And it’s hard to say whether success made him happy? He battled insecurity and a constant need for reassurance, which he self-medicated with daily use of marijuana for his entire adult life.
If you, as I did, want to revisit or care to meet this unique entertainer, our current plugged-in world makes it easy. I just encountered this: “When I was a kid I got no respect. When my parents got divorced, there was a custody fight over me, and no one showed up.”
He deserves some respect now.