'All I Do Is Laugh at Ourselves'

I can’t listen to music while writing. For a break I might play the video of a song that had been nagging my memory. More often I’ll select a comedy clip – Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, Jack Benny, Blazing Saddles, Jackie Mason, Jonathan Winters or, most often, Don Rickles. All, especially the latter two, pass the tear test. They have a gift for making me, while seated alone in my office, laugh until tears fall from my eyes. It says something about human nature that grief and comedy can make us cry.

Rickles was born one-hundred years ago today. His humor never gets old. He's called an insult comedian but that’s the least of it. He’s a truth-teller in the sense that he subverts politeness and other social niceties. He reminds us that clichés are lazy and empty. I tried to think of a literary analogue to Rickles. What writer most resembles him? I would suggest Stanley Elkin, whose novels are often crazed monologues. His verbal energy and relentless rudeness recall Rickles. Try reading a page of The Dick Gibson Show or The Franchiser aloud and imagine them coming out of Rickles’ mouth.    

 

Go here to watch a video of Rickles on The Dick Cavett Show in 1972. The other guest, typical for Cavett, is the operatic soprano Beverly Sills, whom Rickles treats deferentially. Rickles reminds us that politeness and self-conscious displays of sensitivity -- we might call it “virtue signaling” --are not funny. They quickly becomes displays of vanity and snobbery. “All I do is laugh at ourselves,” Rickles tells Cavett. “I make fun of life.” Rickles was all show-biz and all the while mocking show-biz. There was nothing countercultural about him. I suspect hippies would not have approved. He was not George Carlin.

 

Rickles was born May 8, 1926, in Queens and died April 6, 2017, in Los Angeles at age ninety.