November 22: He Don’t Get No Respect

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