One-liner comedian Rodney Dangerfield (Jacob Cohen) was born to a vaudeville performer and his wife on Long Island on this date in 1921. Cohen got started in show biz at the age of 15, but his career tanked in the 1950s and early 1960s (“I played one club . . . it was so far out, my act was reviewed in Field & Stream,” he later said) until he developed the “Rodney Dangerfield” persona as man for whom nothing good ever happens. In 1967, Dangerfield was a last-minute replacement act on The Ed Sullivan Show and stole the show. He built a career in Las Vegas and on late-night television before launching Dangerfield’s Comedy Club in New York in 1969. In the ’80s, Dangerfield starred in a series of raucous comedy movies, including Caddyshack, Easy Money and Back to School. As the host of HBO specials from his club, he helped cultivate the careers of many young comedians, including Jerry Seinfeld, Rita Rudner, Roseanne Barr, Jim Carrey, and numerous others. His own comedy routines continued to focus on the evils of a soured marriage and the frustrations of unfulfilled desire, which gave Dangerfield a kind of old-school, politically incorrect mystique. His 1980 album, I Don’t Get No Respect, won a Grammy Award, and he wrote an autobiography, It’s Not Easy Bein’ Me: A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs (Dangerfield was a famously compulsive pot smoker) published in 2004, the year of his death at age 82. For excerpts from his 1981 show (with a young Bill Murray), see below.
“My psychiatrist told me I was crazy and I said I want a second opinion. He said okay, you’re ugly too. . . . I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. He said I was being ridiculous — everyone hasn’t met me yet.” —Rodney Dangerfield
Leonard Alfred Schneider died 46 years agoon August 3, age 40. He was not the kind of Jewish boy you’d want your daughter or son to date, let alone marry. A hustler, he was arrested in 1951 on charges of falsely “soliciting funds for some non-sectarian organization that had sponsored a leper colony.” At the time he was married, later divorced, to a stripper stage-named Honey Harlowe. Bruce was a substance abuser who died of an overdose — and he cursed a lot, and went to jail for it, and then obsessively told the story of going to jail while continuing to curse. From such elements, a career was wrought: the New York Times called him, in 1959, “a sort of abstract expressionist stand-up comedian paid $1,750 a week to vent his outrage on the clientele . . .” $1,750 a week wasn’t bad in 1959; my dad was making less than $120 a week as a pharmacist. Yet five years later, Bruce was legally declared a bankrupt pauper in San Francisco. He was not a man of self-restraint. [click to continue…]
Calvin Trillin, “Deadline Poet” for The Nation and one of America’s finest humorists and memoirists, was born on this date in 1935. Trillin has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1963. His many books include An Education in Georgia, on racial integration; Barnett Frummer Is An Unbloomed Flower, a collection of short stories; About Alice, on his late wife, Alice Stewart, a writer and teacher who died in 2001; and Tepper Isn’t Going Out, a novel about parking on the streets of New York City. Trillin is also a well-known food writer.
“The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.” —Calvin Trillin
Whenever I find myself sharing family stories with new friends, I find myself saying, “Let me tell you about my Aunt Bess”. Well — let me tell you about my Aunt Bess.
Aunt Bess was a pistol and you tried very hard not to irritate her because she had a rapier-like tongue. She spoke English with a heavy Yiddish accent, which was then proper for all good Jews, but her vocabulary was extensive and accurate. I can remember only one malapropism, when she announced that she was going to tell me an interesting “anagoat.” It is, therefore, fit and proper for me to tell you two interesting “anagoats.” [click to continue…]
My return home from the army after World War II was not completely free of unpleasantness. For one thing, I learned that shoeshine boys had raised their price from ten cents to a quarter. Was this why we had fought against the evils of fascism?
The words nerd, geek and dweeb were probably created by somebody who knew me in high school. All through elementary school and junior high, I was always one of the two shortest kids in the class. It was just about the time I entered high school that I enjoyed a sudden spurt of growth. I [...]
You call this a Depression? Sure the economy is bad right now, but it is vastly superior to the time of the Great Depression that we had when I was a young guy. Like every other brand-new high school graduate in January of 1938, I started to look for a job. A friend of the [...]
Dave Berg, who chronicled the fast-shifting American culture for four decades in “The Lighter Side of . . .”, MAD magazine’s longest-running feature, was born on this date in 1920. Berg was trained at Pratt Institute and Cooper Union and worked with Will Eisner and Stan Lee before joining the staff at MAD in 1956. [...]
Lorne Michaels (Lorne David Lipowitz), the creator of Saturday Night Live, made an offer to the Beatles $3,000 to reunite on his show on this date in 1976. As it happened, Paul McCartney was visiting John Lennon in New York for the last time in Lennon’s life, and after watching the skit (during which Michaels [...]
Allan Sherman, one of the creative kings of low-brow comedy, was born on this date in 1924. His 1962 debut song-parody record, My Son, the Folksinger, became the fastest-selling album, with a million copies snatched up, until the Beatles broke out the following year. Sherman’s strength was in setting silly lyrics to classical music (as [...]
One-liner comedian Rodney Dangerfield (Jacob Cohen) was born to a vaudeville performer and his wife on Long Island on this date in 1921. Cohen got started in show biz at the age of 15, but his career tanked in the 1950s and early 1960s (“I played one club . . . it was so far out, my act was reviewed in Field & Stream,” he later said) until he developed the “Rodney Dangerfield” persona as man for whom nothing good ever happens. In 1967, Dangerfield was a last-minute replacement act on The Ed Sullivan Show and stole the show. He built a career in Las Vegas and on late-night television before launching Dangerfield’s Comedy Club in New York in 1969. In the ’80s, Dangerfield starred in a series of raucous comedy movies, including Caddyshack, Easy Money and Back to School. As the host of HBO specials from his club, he helped cultivate the careers of many young comedians, including Jerry Seinfeld, Rita Rudner, Roseanne Barr, Jim Carrey, and numerous others. His own comedy routines continued to focus on the evils of a soured marriage and the frustrations of unfulfilled desire, which gave Dangerfield a kind of old-school, politically incorrect mystique. His 1980 album, I Don’t Get No Respect, won a Grammy Award, and he wrote an autobiography, It’s Not Easy Bein’ Me: A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs (Dangerfield was a famously compulsive pot smoker) published in 2004, the year of his death at age 82. For excerpts from his 1981 show (with a young Bill Murray), see below.
