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A Hot Time With Mr. Warmth
by Patricia O'haire
Daily News (New York)
©Daily News (New York) June 11, 1996, Tuesday
LAST TIME DON Rickles played New York City, two years ago, he insulted Frank Sinatra from the stage of Radio City Music Hall. Know what? Frank loved it. Laughed out loud. Nearly plotzed, he did. Not too many people could get away with that, but Rickles can.
"Mr. Warmth" returns to town this week tomorrow at Carnegie Hall as part of the Toyota Comedy Festival and who will his targets be this time? Well, Alan King, for one. King, in charge of the festival, hosts that night's performance and probably is arming himself right this minute with tweezers to pick out the expected needles. Rita Rudner's another. She's on the bill with Rickles. Sid Caesar makes three, he'll be honored during the show (and won't Rickles have fun with that).
Rickles is a man who doesn't need binoculars to spot weaknesses, and he plays them in such a way that everyone laughs. Even the target. Example: A few years back, he was working a room when Bob Hope walked in. "What's he doing here?" Rickles demanded. "Is the war over?" Another time, he greeted his buddy Sinatra with the quip "Make yourself at home, Frank. . . . Hit somebody."
His quick wit can be deadlier than a guillotine, but he swears he's not a mean man, not even an angry one. Matter of fact, over the phone from his office in Los Angeles, he sounds more like a pussycat than a tiger. "If I were to insult people and mean it, that wouldn't be funny," he says. "There's a difference between an actual insult and a friendly jab. So I don't think I'm offensive onstage. I wouldn't be hanging around for 35 years, God knows, if I was. "I like to think I'm like the guy who goes to the office Christmas party Friday night, insults some people, but still has his job Monday morning."
Purr, purr, purr.
"I never started out to be a comic," he said. "When I got out of high school, back in the '40s, I had to go to a thing called a war against Japan. What did I know then? I was still trying to figure out why I had pimples. But thank God for the war. Otherwise, I'd probably still be in Newtown High School in Elmhurst. I wound up on a ship in the Philippines.
"When I got out, I went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. You can believe it. Jason Robards, Grace Kelly, Anne Bancroft they were my classmates. I didn't do great getting jobs, though. I thought I'd be right for 'Mister Roberts,' 'Stalag 17,' but I didn't make the cut, so I got a job telling jokes in a strip club." That was the '50s. Comedy clubs were unheard of then.
"Think that was easy? Guys there wanted strippers, not comics. But it was a job. Now and then I'd go to functions or affairs, tell jokes and be handed five or 10 bucks. One night at the strip club, the owner said to me, come on, make fun of my customers. "So I did. That started it all."
Rickles says he writes all his own material, except for TV shows, and he has done a few series: "The Don Rickles Show"; "C.P.O. Sharkey," and "Daddy Dearest," with Richard Lewis. He has a series of promo spots about to start on Comedy Central. Otherwise, he insists, everything he does onstage "I try out in my room the night before and laugh my youknowhat off. When you're selling yourself, you're out there alone and you can't please the world. But if it pleases me, it should please my listeners."
Purr, purr, purr.
Copyright Daily News (New York) June 11, 1996, Tuesday
