Comedian Don Rickles has passed

Don Rickles, the irrepressible master of the comic insult whose humor was a fast-paced, high-volume litany of mockery in which members of his audience were the (usually) willing victims of his verbal assaults, died April 6 at his home Los Angeles. He was 90.

The cause was kidney failure, said his publicist, Paul Shefrin.

When Mr. Rickles developed his stand-up act in the 1950s, his humor was considered shocking, with a raw, abrasive, deeply personal edge. If he wasn't the first "insult comic," he was by far the most successful and most widely imitated, becoming a fixture on television and in nightclubs for decades.

Trained as a dramatic actor, Mr. Rickles appeared in films and television series and was the voice of Mr. Potato Head in the popular "Toy Story" series of animated features from 1995 to 2010. But for more than 50 years, he practiced a distinctive brand of improvisational, sarcastic humor that made him one of the most original and influential comedians of his time.

His brash, snappish style became a major influence on many younger performers, including comedians Louis CK, Lewis Black and Zach Galifianakis, radio shock jock Howard Stern and even the writers of the mouthy cartoon character Howard the Duck.

People vied for front-row seats at nightclubs, practically begging to be skewered by Mr. Rickles, who was variously known as the Merchant of Venom, the Sultan of Insult or, as "Tonight Show" host Johnny Carson dubbed him in ironic endearment, Mr. Warmth.

No one was spared from his hectoring, whether celebrities, royalty, presidents or, especially, Mr. Rickles himself. His reputation was established in 1957, when he noticed the often-combative Frank Sinatra in the audience at a nightclub in Miami Beach. Mr. Rickles poked fun at a recent movie Sinatra had made, then said, "Hey, Frank, make yourself at home. Hit somebody!"

Sinatra burst out laughing, became one of Mr. Rickles's biggest supporters, and a career was launched.

Mr. Rickles did not tell jokes with traditional punch lines, did not make topical comments about the news and did not use crude profanity. Every show was spontaneous, built largely around his caustic observations about members of the audience.

"There's something truly artful about his delivery," director Martin Scorsese - who hired Mr. Rickles to play a Las Vegas casino manager in the 1995 film "Casino" - once told the New York Times.

"Many other comedians who practice insult humor are either way too broad or they hide behind a character," Scorsese added, "but Rickles keeps this balance between levity and relentlessness. And it's all improvised, which is really the hardest thing to do, and he makes it look like the easiest, most graceful thing in the world."

Short, bald and stocky, Mr. Rickles walked on the stage "looking like a snapping turtle surfacing in a pond," as a New Yorker profile put it in 2004. He glanced around the room at his prey. Overweight people, men accompanied by younger women, racial and ethnic minorities - all were subject to his relentless barrage of smart-aleck buckshot.

Mr. Rickles's chief comedic weapons were exaggeration and ridicule, deployed in a rapid, sharp-tongued style that stacked one quip on top of another until audiences were helpless with laughter. He especially delighted in tweaking the rich and mighty and became renowned for his biting performances at celebrity roasts.

"The bigger a person is," Mr. Rickles told the Newark Star-Ledger in 1993, "the more pleasure I take in knocking them down a notch."

At a tribute to Clint Eastwood, Mr. Rickles said, "Clint, I'm sorry, but I just gotta say what's on everybody's mind here tonight: You're a terrible actor."

While filming "Casino," Mr. Rickles decided to needle the film's star, Robert De Niro, who had twice won Academy Awards.

"They warned me what a serious guy De Niro is," Mr. Rickles told the New York Daily News. "They warned me not to make jokes. So the third day of shooting, I looked him straight in the face and told him: 'I can't work with you. You can't act.' The guy fell on the floor. He didn't stop laughing for 18 weeks. Scorsese fell on the floor too, but he's so small we couldn't find him."

In spite of his many forays into acting, Mr. Rickles was always at his best alone on stage, armed only with a microphone and his wit.

For years, until he got married at 38, Mr. Rickles lived with his mother. She then moved into the adjoining apartment. Survivors include his wife of 52 years, the former Barbara Sklar, of Los Angeles; a daughter, Mindy Mann; and two grandchildren. A son, Larry Rickles, a TV comedy writer and producer, died in 2011.

Mr. Rickles's closest friend in show business was comedian Bob Newhart, whose mild, cerebral style of humor could not have been more different.

"There's a part of all comedians that remains a child, while other people get civility pounded into them," Newhart told The Washington Post in 2007. "But somehow comedians don't. This is particularly evident in Don. Whatever he sees, he says. And it's what we all think, but we're too civilized to say."

Watch Don's funniest moments in the video above. 

This article was first published on spy.co.nz and is republished here with permission.