Cover of "Caddyshack"
Cover of Caddyshack

Sir Rodney. He don’t get no respect.

Rodney Dangerfield was a tremendous talent for several decades and is still well-represented online by his official website, www.rodneydangerfield.com

His official biography from that site is much like Dangerfield was in real life – modest, to the point, and yet encapsulating a life well lived:

Rodney “No Respect” Dangerfield began his career at the age of 15 when he started writing jokes. At 17 he started performing at amateur nights. At 19 he had two jobs, one as a comic who couldn’t make a living, and the other as a singing waiter. Rodney would sing and people threw money at him.

He traveled the comedy circuit for ten years but reluctantly gave up showbiz for a more stable income.

It wasn’t until the age of 40 that Dangerfield made the decision to relaunch his career as a performer and comedy writer for the second time. He spent his days in a business office and his nights working in New York clubs. Not satisfied, Rodney opened his own club, the now famous Dangerfield’s on First Avenue in Manhattan.

The club was a huge success and so was Rodney. Rodney introduced many of today’s comedy stars to television for the first time on his HBO shows which emanated from Dangerfield’s, such as Tim Allen, Roseanne Barr, Andrew Dice Clay, Jeff Foxworthy, Sam Kinison, Bob Saget, Jerry Seinfeld, Rita Rudner, Robert Townsend, Louie Anderson and others.

How amazing that Dangerfield’s “real” comedy career did not start until he was 40 years old.

And how typical of him to be dissatisfied with existing clubs, open up his own club, and help launch so many future stars of comedy.

Here are some of the highlights of Dangerfield’s onscreen career as captured by these new mediums such as “compact disc” and “dee vee dee”. So if you have such fancy playing machines maybe you would enjoy one of these fine products from the Amazon. Just roll your mouse around to learn more about them:

Or if you have one of those “em pee three iZune” thingees that seem to be the latest fad, the same place has mp3′s from some of Rodney’s CD’s available for cheap. How they can send us things from the Amazon River so cheaply I will never know. Until I figure out how to upgrade my Victrola to play these thirty-three and one-third long players, I’ll just stick to my beloved radio teleplays of Amos & Andy.

A less modest biography of Dangerfield can be found from that mysterious source of “user-provided” content on the Internet, wikipiedia. While being of somewhat dubious origin, the bio on that site does include an interesting section about his life (or lives – onstage and off):

The confusion of Dangerfield’s stage persona with his real-life personality was a conception that he long resented. While Child described him as “classy, gentlemanly, sensitive and intelligent,” people who met the comedian nonetheless treated him as the belligerent loser whose character he adopted in performance. In 2004, Dangerfield’s autobiography, “It’s Not Easy Bein’ Me: A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs” was published.

According to the internets, Rodney smoked mary jane. Alright kids, glad we cleared that up.

Sir Rodney’s films included:

  • Caddyshack (1980)
  • Easy Money (1983)
  • Back to School (1986)
  • Moving (1988) (Cameo)
  • Rover Dangerfield (1991) (voice) (also writer and producer)
  • Ladybugs (1992)
  • Natural Born Killers (not as funny a movie as you might think from the zany title, but worth watching for the sit-com vignette with Dangerfield playing Mallory’s dad Ed Wilson)
  • Meet Wally Sparks (1997) (also Writer and Producer)
  • The Godson (1998)
  • My 5 Wives
    (2000) (also Writer and Producer)
  • Little Nicky
    (2000) (Sandler with another funny accent alert!)
  • Back by Midnight (2002) (also Writer)
  • The 4th Tenor (2002) (also Writer)
  • Three’s a Crowd (2005)
  • Angels with Angles (2005)
  • The Onion Movie
    (2008)

Prior to becoming such a “big druggie” who did nothing but smoke weed and CONSTANTLY work on contributing to comedic genius  (thank you interweb thingee for shattering my virginal illusions about another celebrity), Sir Rodney worked on many television shows, including:

  • The Dean Martin Show (regular performer from 1972-1973)
  • The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (frequent guest)
  • Benny and Barney: Las Vegas Undercover (1977)
  • Hollywood Squares (frequent Square for the block!)
  • The Rodney Dangerfield Show: It’s Not Easy Bein’ Me (1982)
  • Rodney Dangerfield: I Can’t Take It No More
    (1983)
  • Rodney Dangerfield: It’s Not Easy Bein’ Me(1986)
  • Rodney Dangerfield: Nothin’ Goes Right (1988)
  • Where’s Rodney (1990) (unsold pilot)
  • Rodney Dangerfield’s The Really Big Show (1991)
  • Rodney Dangerfield: It’s Lonely at the Top (1992)
  • In Living Color (1993)
  • The Simpsons (1996) (voice of Mr. Burns’s son, Larry Burns in the episode “Burns, Baby Burns”)
  • Suddenly Susan (1996) (Plays Artie-an appliance repairman who dies while fixing Susans oven)
  • Home Improvement (1997) Himself
  • Rodney Dangerfield’s 75th Birthday Toast (1997)
  • Dr. Katz Professional Therapist (1997) (voice, as himself) in the episode “Day Planner”
  • The Electric Piper (2003) (voice)
  • Phil of the Future (2004) (voice of Max the Dog in episode “Doggie Daycare”)
  • Still Standing (2004)
  • Rodney (2004) Himself (Episode aired shortly after his death)
  • The George Lopez Show (2004) Leave it to Lopez – Life insurance agent – Episode dedicated to his memory

So obviously all that pot he was smoking really slowed him down in later life.

Okay, for the record, here are some excerpts from a profile of the Man himself from a 2004 interview with Rolling Stone:

His voice sounds tired, like maybe he’s aged some since his wiseacre Caddyshack and Back to School days.

“That’s a nice scar you have on your tummy,” I say.

“A lot of big operations,” Rodney says.

“Yes, this is the memorabilia room,” Joan [Rodney's wife] says. “See that picture? That’s a picture of Rodney and his lions. He has a love of lions. That one next to him is named after him. Rodney Jr. He was rejected by his mother and lives at the MGM habitat. Notice how brave Rodney is? That’s no small cat!”

Back at the table, Rodney lifts his big head and says,

“You want to smoke a little shit? I don’t know how good this is. I just got it. Decent shit costs you a minimum of $500 an ounce. As a kid I bought pot for $25 an ounce. An ounce! Oh, everything’s insane. Oh, everything’s wild!”

He hands me a joint, fires it up, then fires one up for himself. He says he’s been getting high since he was twenty-one. He says he once got stoned at the White House, during the Reagan years. He says that about two years ago, during a heart-attack scare, after being wheeled into the intensive-care unit at an L.A. hospital, he lit up a joint in the bathroom and caught holy hell for it.

He says that the only days he isn’t smoking pot are the days when he’s in surgery or similarly indisposed; most recently, he went under the knife to have the superficial temporal artery near his left ear inserted into the middle cerebral artery of his Rodney brain, in a high-risk, high-cost, no-laughs procedure known as an extracranial-intracranial brain bypass. “The surgeon who did that one calls Rodney his Picasso,” says Joan. Joan also says that she’s a good Mormon and never gets high with her pothead husband. Rodney says that he’s a legal pothead these days, having received doctor’s orders to smoke the stuff, mostly to control his high blood pressure.

So there you have it. But now here’s Paul Harvey with the rest…of the story…I think it is actually told best by the Kew Gardens, NY, Picture History web site:

The greatest comic personality of his time was born Jacob Cohen on November 22, 1921. He came to Kew Gardens at the age of 10 after his parents divorced and his mother took an apartment in a two story Tudor Building on Austin Street. Unlike most who grew up here, young Jacob never felt he belonged. The Great Depression was on and his mother had no money. He remembers being the only child in the neighborhood who had to work to help support the family – all while attending P.S. 99 and Richmond Hill High School. It was not until he was a forty-something door-to-door salesman named Jack Roy that he created the luckless, neurotic character that was to make him famous.

In 1981, he won a Grammy Award for his comedy album, No Respect, and in 1994, he was given the Lifetime Creative Achievement Award from the American Comedy Awards. He was the first show business personality to have his own web site. His trademark white shirt and red tie are now on permanent display at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington.

Unfortunately, in life as in comedy, respect is not always easy to come by. In 1990, a tabloid newspaper ran an article about him under a headline which said that he, “Swills Vodka by the Tumblerful, Smokes Pot All Day and Uses Cocaine”. He sued for defamation, and although the allegations of drug and alcohol use were found to be false, he was awarded only $1 for emotional distress and $1 as actual damages since there was no proof his career had been harmed. The court threw in an extra $45,000 as “presumed damages” to soothe his feelings, but felt he was entitled to more. The U.S. Supreme Court, which had the last word on the case, showed him no respect at all. It refused to hear his appeal.

Short version of that:

  • greatest comic personality of his time
  • only child in the neighborhood who had to work to help support the family
  • won a Grammy
  • given the Lifetime Creative Achievement Award from the American Comedy Awards
  • first show business personality to have his own web site
  • trademark white shirt and red tie are now on permanent display at the Smithsonian
  • screwed by the tabloids and the courts

You can hear more from the Man himself in this interview with National Public Radio’s Terry Gross from 2004: Comedian Rodney Dangerfield, July 6, 2004 interview with Terry Gross on the release of his new book It’s Not Easy Bein’ Me: A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs. Enjoy.

Wow, did you know they have TV on this internet thing? What next – porn?

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