Rodney Dangerfield, Beating Troubles To the Punch Line

Rodney Dangerfield poses at his home in July. The film star and longtime stand-up comic was best known for bemoaning a lack of respect. (John Raoux -- Orlando Sentinel Via AP)

Perhaps if Steinbeck's Tom Joad or Kafka's Joseph K had been stand-up comics, they might have been something like Rodney Dangerfield.

No, wait -- not at all. Forget that stuff. There was only one Rodney -- one put-upon, perpetually pained, always discouraged Rodney. If he looked for that famous silver living, it would fall out of a cloud and hit him on the head. His was a humor that, like so many of the great comics of his generation (though his popularity spanned several generations), grew out of pain. Born Jacob Cohen, he remembered all his life how teachers -- not just students, but teachers -- made anti-Semitic remarks about him in front of classmates at New York's P.S. 99.

And so he told jokes about being a miserable kid. But not about that aspect of being a miserable kid. The anger never came out in the comedy -- not directly. He was a professional joke teller, not a guy looking for psychoanalysis from an audience in a nightclub, so you got jokes and gags, not anecdotes about the way it really was.

"My mother had morning sickness after I was born," he'd say of his earliest days.

"My old man didn't help, either. One time I was kidnapped. They sent back a piece of my finger. He said he wanted more proof!"

"I was lost at the beach once and a cop helped me look for my parents. I said to him, 'You think we'll find them?' He said, 'I don't know, kid. There's so many places they could hide.' "

Thus, according to his act -- the way Chaplin's or Keaton's or Harold Lloyd's characters were established -- the patterns of this Rodney's ramshackle life were immutably established.

"The other day they asked me to leave a bar I was drinking in. They said they wanted to start the happy hour."

"Once the cops arrested me for jaywalking. The crowd shouted, 'Don't take him alive!' "

The litany of abuse would be punctuated with the occasional "I tell ya, I don't get no respect. No respect at all." The crowd would cheer.

And then back to the jokes.

The no-respect theme was encouraged by one of the most artful and adored of all stand-ups, Jack Benny. "He was an ace. He was a doll," Dangerfield recalled in a 1979 interview. "And he says to me, 'Rodney, I'm cheap and I'm 39, that's my image, but your 'no respect' thing, that's into the soul of everybody. Everybody can identify with that. Everyone gets cut off in traffic, everyone gets stood up by a girl, kids are rude to them, whatever.' He says to me, 'Every day something happens where people feel they didn't get respect.' "

No matter how Dangerfield complained onstage about how life treated him, the comic never exploited it for pathos or poignancy. Still, there was just a trace of it in a soliloquy in which he talked about the fact that nobody ever gave him "one of these," and made the "okay" sign, the little circle, with his thumb and finger. So if you saw him in the street after the show or in a club later or anywhere, he would tell an audience, it would be doing him a great service just to flash him "one of these."

He figured it wasn't much to ask. "You know what the trouble with me is? I appeal to everyone who can do me absolutely no good," he'd mockingly lament. "At my age, if I don't drink, don't smoke, and eat only certain foods, what can I look forward to? From this point on, if I take excellent care of myself -- I'll get very sick and die."

And so he did.

But he left behind infinite echoes of laughter, laughter that survives somehow even if it appears to have evaporated. And who knows but that right now, at this very moment, someone, somewhere is giving Rodney "one of these."