Rickles, Don, 1926-2017

<p>Donald Jay Rickles (May 8, 1926 – April 6, 2017) was an American stand-up comedian and actor. He became known especially for his insult comedy. His film roles include Run Silent, Run Deep (1958) with Clark Gable, Carl Reiner's Enter Laughing (1967), the Clint Eastwood-led Kelly's Heroes (1970), and Martin Scorsese's Casino (1995) with Robert De Niro. From 1976 to 1978, Rickles had a two-season starring role in the NBC television sitcom C.P.O. Sharkey, having previously starred in the eponymous sitcom The Don Rickles Show (1972).</p>

<p>A veteran headline performer at Las Vegas hotel-casinos and peripheral member of the Rat Pack via friendship with Frank Sinatra, Rickles received widespread exposure as a frequent guest on talk and variety shows, including The Dean Martin Show, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and Late Show with David Letterman, and later voicing Mr. Potato Head in the Toy Story franchise. He won a Primetime Emmy Award for the 2007 documentary Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project. In 2014, he was honored by fellow comedians at the Apollo Theater which was taped and released on Spike TV entitled, Don Rickles: One Night Only.</p>

<p>Don Rickles, the acidic stand-up comic who became world-famous not by telling jokes but by insulting his audience, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 90.</p>

<p>The cause was kidney failure, said a spokesman, Paul Shefrin.</p>

<p>For more than half a century, on nightclub stages, in concert halls and on television, Mr. Rickles made outrageously derisive comments about people’s looks, their ethnicity, their spouses, their sexual orientation, their jobs or anything else he could think of. He didn’t discriminate: His incendiary unpleasantries were aimed at the biggest stars in show business (Frank Sinatra was a favorite target) and at ordinary paying customers.</p>

<p>His rise to national prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s roughly coincided with the success of “All in the Family,” the groundbreaking situation comedy whose protagonist, Archie Bunker, was an outspoken bigot. Mr. Rickles’s humor was similarly transgressive. But he went further than Archie Bunker, and while Carroll O’Connor, who played Archie, was speaking words someone else had written — and was invariably the butt of the joke — Mr. Rickles, whose targets included his fellow Jews, never needed a script and was always in charge.</p>