November 18, 2015 • 57 mins
Other comedians cry on the inside, but Rodney Dangerfield built his entire act around his sad life. Get to know this legendary comic who was nearing 50 when he got his break.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know from house stuff works
dot com. Hey, and well, hey, I guess I want
to say hey and welcome to the podcast. But this
is a little different because this is a this is
the intro to the podcast. That's right. We recorded a
live episode at the l A Podcast Festival and uh,
(00:24):
this is it. Yeah, this is it. We did one
on Rodney Dangerfield. It was September nineteen fifteen. The Sophie
Tell and Beverly Hill. Very chic, very che and it
was a lot of fun. So greed. We hope you
guys have fun listening to it and stick around after
the credits roll, so to speak, because we have a
little bonus track at the end of this one. How
(00:51):
are you guys doing? Thank you very much for coming
to our show. We do this normally, but um, it's
usually just two of us and Jay are you sitting
here on Facebook while we record like eating me so soup?
She loves me so soup? Um, and then you know,
we do live shows too, but normally there's like a
gulf of a stage between us and like, you guys
(01:14):
are right here, so we're watching YouTube. I guess that's
what I'm saying. She's got one of our shirts. Nice,
nice shirt, and she's the only one. Oh I like that.
I oh there, of course they are, he says, I
listened to podcasts before Cereal burn. Yeah, and on the
(01:38):
back it says, but I love serially right we should.
We should also say hi to everybody in lives Oh yeah,
streaming folks Hello, and of course thanks to Audible and
square Space and the rest of those people don't sponsor us.
So I don't feel right then anything? Does that count
as a mid role land? Sure? Okay, check out with
(02:01):
a stack of money waiting outside, Mr Monopolies hanging out outside? Okay, So, um,
what do you got anything to start with? I've got
nothing to start with. I usually don't drink this early
in the day, but coming the nerves and is U
felt it would be fitting as a tribute to our
our topic, which we're gonna get into. So I decided
(02:22):
to work up a heavy sweat because Rodney Dangerfield is
known for drinking and sweating. Yeah, you're basically missing the tie.
Got everything else covered? Thanks you guys familiar with the
one Mr Rodney Dangerfield. Yeah that's good. I'm glad to
hear that he's a an increasingly underappreciated comedian. Like I've
talked to it at least a couple of people who
(02:44):
have not seen Back to School? I know boom And
I was actually talking to someone who works here at
the festival who said, is he dead? And I said, yeah,
that happens a lot to that, because she said, why
don't I remember that? Al it's no respect, no respect.
That's the cool thing about the guy like he that
(03:06):
was his whole stick, that was his whole um hook. Right, Well,
we need to start in the traditional way. Okay, you're ready,
very nice, hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W. Chuckers Bryant, and we are here at
l A Pop Fest and uh all you lovely people,
(03:26):
give yourselves a hand. Thank Is that better you feel
a little more? You guys happy with that too? Okay? Um, well,
now we have to start over people. How many people
have seen Back to School? Great start? So, as we
(03:51):
were saying, um, the weird thing about Rodney Dangerfield is that,
um he was his whole, his whole stick about um
no spect. It was actually really really close to accurate
as a matter of fact, and and not just while
he was growing up. He had a really tragic, terrible childhood,
but also as he got older and older, and even
(04:11):
after he blew up, um, he's still people just kind
of took what he was saying and ran with it.
Like he he had this one story where, um, he
opened a club which we'll talk about called Danger Fields,
so it's very obviously his club, and he was on
his way up to the stage. He'd just been like
called up there, and on his way some guy stops
(04:31):
him and says, Rodney, can I have your autograph? And
can you also give me some more butter? And like
this this happened to this guy quite a bit. Actually, Yeah,
so it does turn out that you will see even
after death, the guy got no respect. But um, as
Chuck will assert later, I predict um he he is.
(04:51):
He's a comedians comedian and very actually well respected by
the ones that count. And Uh, I don't know if
you guys know this, but a lot of can medians
have inner pain, uh, which is the reason a lot
of them get into comedy and a reason that many
of them drink until they black out on many nights. Uh.
(05:12):
Interer pain is no secret to the comedy world. But
you'd be hard pressed to find someone who was as
legitimately depressed and sad as Rodney Dangerfield. He was like
a crying clown for real. He was. He often talked
about the heaviness he felt every day when he woke up.
He said he would wake up in every day and
there it was, lingering above him, was his heaviness. Yeah.
(05:35):
And if you've ever if you ever want to go
down to YouTube rat hole, just look up some interviews
with the guy on YouTube from like the eighties, and
you know, he does a lot of interviews that just
like local TV stations promoting movies and stuff. And when
he's out of his stick element, it's one of the
saddest things you've ever seen. Man, it's really depressing. Uh.
(05:55):
He's he just had this air about him. You could
tell he had the weight of life on his shoulders
and at all. Pretty much stems from his awful, awful,
awful childhood. Childhood. It is hilarious so far, everybody. Uh,
so we should start at the beginning with him. Um
he was born in n on Long Island. Not in
(06:16):
Long Island, Chuck tells me. Um, And uh, he was
born to a Vauvilian father who took off with one
of Rodney's brothers to go hit the circuit. And that
was that. Like he I think he saw him like
once or twice a year for a half hour, an
hour or something like that. Yeah, he said he saw
his dad literally like twice a year growing up. And uh.
He was born Jacob Cohen. Uh, and his dad was
(06:40):
a juggler and a comic who, um, apparently hit the
road because of his wife, Um, who was. You know,
we were talking about what an awful person she was,
and we were going over this stuff and that she was.
But the more I thought about it, Um, she she
had a serious problem. It was you know, back in
the nineteen twenties. He didn't diagnose things like they do today, right,
(07:00):
you just ran off to the vaudeville pretty much. But
she was clearly depressed, like profoundly depressed and uh sadly
completely abandoned emotionally and neglected a little rot or I guess,
a little Jacob. Uh he was. He was left on
his own from the time he could remember. His mom
(07:22):
literally never hugged him once, never kissed him once. He
swore up and down, Yeah, and never complimented him or
like tried to build him up. She Uh, she was
a bad lady. And Um. At starting probably around age
eight or something like that, he um realized that if
he was going to eat dinner on a regular basis,
he was gonna have to go get a job and
(07:43):
go grocery shopping himself. Right, So he basically raised himself
storrying about age eight or so. Um and uh, speaking
of grocer's one of the one of the great things
that stuck out to him about his childhood. He was, Um,
he had to get a job, and after after school job,
he was still in school. Um. And he lived in
a fairly wealthy neighborhood, but he was not wealthy, so
(08:04):
he used to deliver groceries to his classmates UM home,
which is kind of demoralizing when you're like ten, you know. Um.
And he also, while he was out there running around
on the streets, there's a he wrote an autobiography the
year he died in two thousand and four, and um
he called this chapter male Prostitute because he was like
(08:26):
ten and he was so unsupervised that they were apparently
at least one or two local molesters that were like Hey, Rodney,
come on up, I got a nickel for you. And
he swears up and down that it was just uh
that it was it was just kissing. Everybody, don't worry.
The child was just kissed by the grown man for
a nickel. Um. But he and it happened a lot,
(08:47):
and he was doing it because he needed the money.
So anyway, Rodney danger feel, let's fast forward out of
this horrible, horrible funk. And by the way, we're gonna
Pepper in some of his bets boakes here and there. Uh.
And I debated on whether or not to try and
do it as him, because it's I've already promised certain
(09:08):
people here there. It's hard to do that. It's hard
to tell a Rodney Dangerfield joke without kind of doing him.
And I took a little informal pole last night with
some folks and they're like, yeah, you sort of have to. Yeah,
I think that's not like it's a good impression. But
plus it makes me delivering it my flat weirdo affect
where I'm not even trying it all the weirder, So
prepare for that too. But one thing that he did,
(09:29):
and that, of course a lot of comics do is
They turned that pain into funny, and he really relied
on his uh. His jokes is a way to uh.
I mean the only time he was happy was when
he was on stage performing, and as soon as he left,
that heaviness would come back. But he often joked about
his mom. He would say, uh, my mom never breastfed me.
She told me she always thought of me as a friend,
(09:52):
which is a funny joke. But when you know the
real pain behind it, it's it's just like the saddest
thing you've ever heard. It takes a dead bit of
the funniness away from it. I've got a good parent one.
You're ready. So I remember the time, and this is
my writing danger, Phil. I remember the time I was kidnapped.
They sent a piece of my finger to my father.
He said he wanted more proof. That probably did not happen.
(10:16):
But it gets the point across, you know, And plus
it's funny, and so if you're a one more parent joke, Okay,
So I tell you my parents hated me. My bath
toys were a toaster in a radio funny. All right,
that's going over better than I thought it wouldn't. So so,
starting about age fifteen, he starts, he realizes he's actually
(10:38):
kind of hilarious and that he has a talent for
taking all of this horrible, tragic stuff and turning into
funny stuff. Um and uh, he started writing jokes and
he got good pretty quick. He started selling jokes age
fifteen or sixteen to establish comedians, right, yeah, and he
kept them. He had the stuffel bag. He would write
jokes by hand his entire career and put him in
the stuffel bag. So he literally had a suffel bag
(11:00):
full of like thousands and thousands of jokes. And apparently
I think, uh you said that. During a typical performance
later like once he hit the big time, he would
tell like over three hundred jokes in a set, like
three fifty Yeah, in an hour. He ran at their
quick jokes, but still, but he remembered them all and
he knew which one's fit best. Like the guy was
(11:22):
a comic genius. Hopefully that's coming across here or will
by the end of this, right. So he gets this
big break at age nineteen. He's written jokes for a
few years and he's gonna try this out, and he
gets a job at a cat skills resort for twelve
bucks a week, ten weeks, including room and board, thin
dirty dancing, that kind of scene very much. So. Yeah,
(11:43):
but he's like the up and coming comic on stage. Right.
Have you guys ever seen iron Man meets Dirty Dancing
that mash up? Now go check it out. Actually, it's
so bizarre. It's one of the better things you'll ever see.
That has nothing to do with the Rodney dangerfield. That
was just to add on basically. But um, so he's working.
He's working hard. Um the stint and the cats skills. Like,
(12:06):
I don't think he gets read up, but he he
keeps going back to the cat skills. It's one of
his regular gigs. But on the on the side, while
he's working, he's a singing waiter at the Polish Falcons
nightclub where, yeah, where Lenny Bruce's mom was the MC.
He was an acrobatic diver, right, Um, but I don't
know what you're all thinking, triple indy. No, he did
(12:29):
not do the triple indy in the movie obviously. Uh
for those of you who have not seen Back to School,
that was an in joke. He was a diver in
the movie, a competitive diver. Yeah, well, I was going
to punish them for not having seen it. Okay, sorry,
he's trying to drive him a point. Uh. So, in
nineteen fifty one, he gets married for the first time
(12:51):
to a jazz singer name Joyce Indig, and he had
a couple of kids and moved to New Jersey, which
we all know is the death knell for any comedian
trying to work in New York. Kind of means you've
given up. Um, But he didn't give up just yet.
He did for a minute, for sure. Yeah, not not
at that point though. He was still trying to work.
(13:12):
But when he turned twenty seven, he quit comedy and
literally did not perform from the age of forty one.
And at forty one he was like, let's try this again, right, Well,
he and his wife divorced, so he's like, I've got
a little more time. I think I'm gonna go try
comedy again. And they actually got back together like the
next year and stayed married for another ten years or
(13:33):
something like that. But this time around, um, he was like,
let me see if I can figure out how to
how to balance home life with this. I'm trying to
break into comedy, right yeah, and let me try and
develop an act. I think the first time, he flounder
because he didn't he didn't know what kind of comedian
he wanted to be. He tried singing, he tried impressions,
he even tried prop comedy for a little while. But
he also I mean, and he had these jokes about
(13:53):
how much his life sucked. Like he used some of
these same jokes his whole life, um, but they just
didn't hang on him quite right, because he had his
whole life ahead of him and he was young and
full of promise. That second time around, he was right
there in the sweet spot, like age forty one ish,
a little desperate, kind of sweaty, and uh, these jokes
about how bad is life, these jokes about how bad
(14:15):
his life where it was going, um like really just
kind of hit a lot more. He adopted a persona basically,
and uh, that definitely helped. Yeah, I mean it was
it was sort of him, but it was also a character.
And when I was researching this, I was like, I
was kind of thinking about the you don't see a
lot of character comedians anymore. Like that was the sort
(14:37):
of the Heyday with like Andrew Dice Clay and uh,
while Ronnie Dangerfield and Emo Phillips, and it seemed like
there were a lot of characters, but now no one.
Now it's just like, look at this thing that happened
in my life, and how funny it is. Look at
all these witty observations about my life. I'd like to
(14:57):
see some good character comedians come. I can't think of it.
There any out there. I guess Brent Winback. That's kind
of a wait. Wait, what about like Larry the Cable Guy.
He's total I assume a character because he started out
as as a completely different kind of comedian and then
adopted that persona. But I don't count him as a comedian.
So yeah, he's not watching. Don't worry, he's not. He's
(15:23):
writing bad jokes and start a flame war with Larry
the Cable Guy. I'll totally take him up on that
flame war. Uh, although kids squashed me with his sacks
of money. Um, so he adopts his character. Uh. He
changes his name legally at this point to Jack Roy,
(15:44):
which was that his father's name. His father's stage name
was Phil Roy. Yeah, and so he changed his name
legally to Jack Roy and that was his real name
till the day he died. Uh. And he was performing
under that name for a while until he tried this
second go and decide, I don't want anyone to remember
Jack Roy. So um, he told this guy that was
(16:05):
booking him at a club in Manhattan, could you just
make up a name for me and put that on
the on the I guess it would a marquee, but yeah,
or you know, in any ad they took out. So
the guy who ran this place, the Inwood Lounge, I
think um came up the Rodney danger Field, right. But
the weird thing is um he had actually lifted the
name from a Jack Benny character, Like there was an
(16:26):
original Rodney Dangerfield and it wasn't Rodney Dangerfield, right, were
the giant twist of of the podcast. It's all downhill
from here. So the the Jack Benny came up with
his character and I think the forties maybe or something
like that, Um of this grade Z Western hero named
Rodney Dangerfield, and um, I guess the the lounge owner
(16:50):
remembered it and came up with that Rodney Dangerfield had
no idea about this. So he's walking around like using
this name for years And apparently he met Johnny Carson
once that one of his shows and Johnny Carson was like,
you know where your name came from? Right, and he said,
what are you talking about? Yeah, he explained that the
whole Jack Benny thing, and later on he uh saw
(17:11):
Jack Benny, and Jack Benny wasn't like Matt or anything.
Actually said I really love what you did with the character,
and you really you know, you did it just right.
So no harm, no felt, and they hugged it out
from that very famously. So on the second go round
he was he was making a living doing okay. But
(17:31):
he got his real big break in nineteen six seven
with Ed Sullivan. He was, um, he couldn't get booked
on Ed Sullivan, but at the time they would book
other comedians for the run throughs as like just placeholders
for dress rehearsal basically, And so he got a spot
booked on that and apparently did so well and dress
rehearsal that Ed Sullivan, you know, took note on the
(17:53):
side of the stage, which means he went like this,
you know you're funny. That's how you knew Sullivan thought
you were funny. It works for Nixon to do that.
Nixon actually that was the result of a huge long shot.
He told his agent like, just get me on Ed
(18:15):
Sullivan and it it played out, panned out very well.
He ended up being on Ed Sullivan like seventeen times
or something like that, and it led to all these
other late night appearances. He was on Carson, like I
think a record. He holds the record for being on
Carson the most seventy times something like that. Merv Griffin, Dino,
like all the dudes who are running late night and
(18:35):
basically where the taste makers for all of the comedians
were suddenly promoting the sweaty, weird, coked up uh pothead,
booze hound, huge potha Rodney dangerfield, right, and he took
it and ran with it, like right when he hit
the nineteen sixty seven he got to work like that.
He was such a big pothead. Actually, the original name
(18:58):
of his biography was going to be My Love Affair
with Marijuana, and he was serious he wanted to call
it that because he smoked potty, said for you know,
sixty something years. Uh, but well up until the day
he died. Really, I think from on like he was
smoking pot in I see you in the hospital. Because
he had an early medical marijuana exemption long before anyone
(19:21):
even knew it that way. I don't even knew what
that was. But if he flashed it in your face,
you didn't ask questions. So, uh, he got his big break. Actually,
Carson had blackballed them for a while because he accused
Carson in a letter of stealing or one of his
writers of stealing one of his jokes. So Carson famously
wouldn't have him on the show for a long time
(19:43):
until they eventually right, until they eventually met um and
worked it out, and then Johnny became like the biggest
fan ever. And if you want to enjoy yourself at
home on the YouTube's just go look up Johnny Carson
on Rodney or Rodney Danger Build on Carson. There's a
lot of clips where I mean Carson was just like
the ultimate set up dude. It just let him do
(20:04):
his thing. Yeah, and he would laugh until he was
crying because he couldn't believe that Danger Fields Getting Away
was saying most of the stuff he was saying on
TV on Carson's own show, it was good. So he's
he's married, he's working a lot, and uh, he decides
that he doesn't want to happen to his own kids.
What happened to him, which was to be neglected. So
he said, you know what I'm gonna do, Um, even
(20:25):
though no one's ever done this. I'm gonna borrow a
bunch of money of a million dollars and I'm gonna
open my own comedy club in New York City so
I can stay home with my children, Brian and Melanie.
I think, right. And it's not like he had any money,
right then, you know, like this is a huge, huge risk.
He's doing okay, but he had to borrow off not
that okay, right, so um, everybody tries to talk him
(20:46):
out of it. He goes ahead with it, and it's
such a success. He has a loan paid off in
like eighteen months. Just a huge success. And this this
club actually became venerable in its own right. Yeah, still
there today, run the Danger Fields in New York And um,
it had this HBO special that broadcast out of in
A bunch of comedians got their big breaks on that show,
like Seinfeld, Um, Chris Rock I think, yeah, Jim Carey, Uh,
(21:10):
what's his face, saggot, Jeff Foxworthy, Yeah, Jeff Foxworthy, fans
in the room, Rita Rudner of course, Sam Kennison completely
made Sam Kennison's career and that was what he uh,
and that's why comedians love him so much, because it
meant more to him to play father to these young
comics and to give them their start than almost anything else.
He really that was sort of his life's goal, was
(21:32):
to seek out talent that he thought was original and
really kind of boost them up. He was a huge Freudian. Yeah, yeah,
the whole father son thing. And I wonder why, so, Chuck,
where were you at? Uh? We are at danger Fields.
It is nineteen eighty and he decides that, you know what,
(21:55):
I should start making movies because well he may a
few movies before that, but nothing that anyone would know.
He's actually cast first by Stanley Kubrick in nineteen fifty
six for the movie Uh, the Killer, The Killing, The Killing,
great movie. Who said, yeah, wow, yeah, great movie. So
(22:17):
he plays onlooker, um, big part. Uh. And then he
was in another movie what was that up on? Called
The Projectionist. Yeah, it was a big part in a
very small movie. He said that it was the type
of movie where they went to go shoot on location
by taking the subway. Um, it's probably true. Yeah, I
think it was. But he played this movie projectionist boss
(22:39):
and the projectionists had quite an imagination and he was
a superhero, and um, Dangerfield was this arch villain nemesis.
Didn't it didn't go very far. But he learned almost
nothing about how to shoot a movie because this was
seventy seven and apparently his huge, huge breakthrough came in Caddyshack. Right,
he was already very much a well respe the comedian.
(23:01):
But um, when he when he shot Keddy shacked Harold Ramos, right, yeah,
when he directed it, he said later on that, Um,
clearly Dangerfield didn't know what he was doing. He was
a live performer. So when when Harold Ramos said action,
Rodney Dajerfield was just stand there and be like, you
want me to do my bit? Now, Like that's what
action means, right, do your bit? And uh So then
(23:23):
Rodney would just turn to the camera and like do
his whole bit into the camera. He's like, hold on,
we gotta we gotta get this right here, so pretend
the camera's not there one and um, he finally got
to do it because that was the thing that just
broke him out. Yeah, and he hated making movies. Um,
Like you said, he loved performing live in front of
people and that's where he got his his rush. And
(23:44):
he once compared making movies to um. He said, like
you know when you make a kid write something a
hundred times on the chalkboard and they've done something wrong,
He's like, that's what making the movies like, he hated
doing all these takes. He hated standing around and waiting. Uh,
that's why he didn't make a ton of him. And
he felt like the live audience is like he compared
it to a heroin attic, like shooting up. You know,
(24:04):
like he just loved that rush. And uh, he definitely
didn't get that from movies, which I mean you got
like the crew standing around looking at you, waiting for lunch.
You know, it wasn't his bag at all. It was
not his bag. Uh. You found this um description from
Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong Torres, which I think describes
him like to a t. Do you want to read that?
(24:27):
S okay? So Ben Fong Torres, who was in almost
famous Uh he Uh, he had a quote he says, Uh,
Rodney Deserfield looks like a midlife crisis. There's a surface
orderliness he's groomed, and he's dressed like a businessman at
a convention. Gray hair slicked back over a haggard shades
of mayor daily face. Dark suit, white shirt, bright red tie, silk,
(24:51):
silk stockings, shiny shoes. But the neatness gives way to
what he calls the heaviness that looms over him. Life
gives Rodney Dangerfield the He's in a constant sweat. He
wipes his brow incessantly, tugs at his tie, herky jerky
as he recounts the horrors of his daily life. He
shifts his shoulders uncomfortably, and his eyes bug out of
their bags. He moves the floor, mic around as he
(25:14):
roams the comedy store stage looking for sympathy, but all
he gets their laughs. I just think that's fantastic man.
He nailed Rodney dangerfielding absolutely and his shirt and tie
that came about because well, he hated clothes in fashion. Yeah,
let's just go ahead and say that. I think it's
time he was a slab. He was a slab, he
(25:35):
said in interviews how much he hated clothes, so he
never cared about clothes and fashion and was comfortable in
a robe. Basically and uh. But for one of his
first acts, he put on the red tie in the
black suit and like dressed all dapper, and when it
came for the second performance, he was like, well, they
liked me in that, so I'm just gonna wear that.
And that became his stick. Was you know, this very
(25:57):
dapper looking guy who's always a very will put together.
In fact, I just saw earlier today, um, when he
gave out a Best Makeup award at the think eight
seven Academy Awards. Yeah, and he and he walked up
and he said, hey, nice tuxed to everybody, right, and
he went underneath torn under shorts. You get this feeling
(26:17):
that like that was the dead truth. Yeah, probably had
like holy underwear. You should look at it too. Man.
That's great because he basically does five minutes of stand
up at the Academy Awards and it gives out an award.
So iron Man versus dirty dancing. Yeah, take some notes
and then some danger fields stuff. Um, should we take
(26:38):
a break here, Chuck, take an ad break? Yeah, yeah,
and we'll be right back after this big announcement folks.
It's called a podcast event. All the message that's right,
(27:00):
thanks to ge podcast Theater and Panoply. There is an
eight part series out right now called The Message, and
you can get it wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah,
and you know what, it's gonna blow your collective scientific
minds because it's currently rocking our worlds. So The Message
follows the story of Nicki Tomlin, who is a PhD
in linguistics, right, that's right at the University of Chicago,
(27:22):
if I'm not mistaken, that's right. And she's following a
team of cryptologists, which, really, if you say cryptology, you've
really got me hooked already. Their research thank tank called Cipher,
and they're trying to dacode a message received from outer
space from seventy years ago. Yeah, it's from outer space,
we think. And if you're not familiar with the story,
well then I guess you better go listen to the Message.
You can get it on iTunes, you can get it
(27:44):
on any of your podcast apps. Just go search for
the Message and subscribe today. Yeah, so thanks to the
podcast Theater and Panopoly for pushing the boundaries of the medium.
You guys are doing a great job. Subscribe to The
Message and listen today, and we're back, all right. I
(28:10):
told you that would work. So he makes Caddy Shack huge,
huge hit. Um, he's allowed to kind of just do
his thing in that movie. And I'm sure most people
have seen that classic comedy, which Josh said would stink
if it weren't for Rodney Dangerfield and m Bill Murray.
The rest of it. It's like a tepid coming of
age dramedy sucks. Ted Knight he was fine, but I mean,
(28:36):
you can watch too close for Comfort and get just
as much as you want. You know, I just don't
think it needs to be in the movie. I think
it was Bill Murray and Rodney Dangerfield That's what made
Caddy Shack a classic. Chevy Chase tada. You know how
I feel about Chevy Chase. My father raised me to
hate Chevy Chase. Did he really? He really did? Your
(28:57):
dad didn't like him? Oh man, still does not like
Chevy Chase. Why. I just didn't think he's funny or
he thought, yeah yeah, something about Chevy Chase sticks in
my dad's crawl and he passed it on me. Isn't
that weird? It is totally weird. That's what you get
when your dad's not a vaudevillian. They pass on weird
(29:17):
stuff like that to you, you know. So, Uh, he
makes Caddyshack. It was a huge hit. Now he was
a legitimate Uh, he was sought after for movies. Uh.
And then a nineteen three he wrote a movie called
Easy Money. Uh. Where's anybody seen that? Anyway, it's actually
pretty cool movie. It's not bad. It's a little weird structurally,
which kind of makes sense that he wrote it, because
(29:38):
he clearly did not how to write it right a scratch,
you know, how to write a bunch of good jokes though.
So he played Monty Capelletti, an Italian American drunk pothead,
uh baby photographer because because this is back in the
early eighties when anyone of any ethnicity could play any
one of another ethnicity, right, because he was Hungarian born,
(29:59):
but hey, play an Italian guy. It's cool. Uh. So
in the movie, his mother in law was the inspiration
for twin beds and uh hated her son in law.
And when she died, she said, all right, you can
have all this money, Um if for one year, I
think like ten million bucks, if for one year you
quit gambling and boozing and smoking and uh and doing drugs.
(30:21):
So easy money was you know I had Joe Pesci
it was it was okay, right, Like the first half
of this movie is just a series of vignettes to
where he just completely screws everything up and like that
your stomachs all upset and everything, and like you're really emotional,
and then nothing comes of it whatsoever. Right, and then
(30:41):
finally halfway through the plot arrives and then it gets
kind of good. Actually, yeah, I agreed. Yeah, a lot
of build up, not a lot of payoff in that one.
But one Roger Ebert uh like the movie, even though
it was a little weird, and said, uh, basically the
movie was about watching Ronney danger beale. He said, Rodney
Dangerfield gloriously playing himself as the nearest thing we were
(31:04):
likely to get to W. C. Fields in this lifetime. Uh.
And Rodney himself said that it was that was pretty
much me on screen. That's as close as you can
come to my real life in Easy Money. Yeah right, Yeah,
he's a maybe photographer. So nineteen six is when he
finally makes back to school, which was his biggest hit.
(31:24):
I think it costs like million to eleven million a
gross swell over a hundred million um, which in nineteen
eighties six. I mean today that's still good money. And
today dollars, that's a hundred fifty billion dollars. It's inflation
for you, right. Uh. And uh, this one he played,
he he had the idea. I think he got a
(31:46):
story credit of a guy, a father that goes back
to school. He was a big loser in life, so
he goes back to school with his son to get
his degree. And he and he told that idea to
Harold Ramos and he was like, that's good. But what
if he was rich. What if he was wealthy and
had it all and still goes back to school like
knowing what he knows now with a lot of money,
And and Riney was like, Okay, that's the movie. Yeah,
(32:07):
it's a good idea, and it actually, I mean that
was a huge movie when it came out. It was
the sixth biggest movie of n six. That was behind
Top Gun, Platoon, Karate Kid, to Star Trek four, and
there's one other one that's written down somewhere and here,
but they were big movies. And it was like the
(32:27):
six highest grossing movie of the year. And it's Rodney Dangerfield,
right yeah, And so he has hit it big at
this time and is a huge, huge movie star and
in the in the biggest comic. I think they did
a survey in the late seventies right before his movies
with college students that said that they were Rodney Dangerfield
was their favorite comic and he was sixty one years old,
(32:53):
fifty eight years old. Same thing basically was when he
hit it big as a comedian. Fifty eight years old, right,
and like, college kids are like into this guy. And actually,
if you've seen if all you've seen back to school,
if that's all you've seen of Rodney danger Phil, you
don't quite have the the understanding of what he was
actually like. He was pretty edgy comic actually, and pretty hilarious,
(33:13):
and college kids loved him. In the seventies, he hosted
Sarah Live in when when he was I think like
sixty or something fifty nine, um, and he started to
blow up like at about age sixty. Isn't that crazy? Uh?
Should we tell a few more of his favorite jokes?
I think it's high time now to you guys. We'll
go over a few of these. Uh. He has a
(33:33):
great joke about his psychiatrists. I told my psychiatrist that
everyone hates me. And he said, I was being ridiculous.
Everyone hasn't met me yet. Classic. Uh, let's see. Uh,
I like this one. It's a little brow, but I
like it. You know what classes when you were alone,
(33:54):
you far you say, excuse me, that's class. That weird.
So if you haven't noticed, a lot of his jokes
were they were self deprecating for himself, but also about
his family. He talked about his wife was dumb and fat,
and his son it was stupid. Uh. And even when
(34:14):
he wasn't I mean, it was all a character. So
even when he wasn't married, he was telling jokes about
his wife, which must have made it a lot easier
when he went home. And I probably so. But one
of my favorite wife jokes was, I tell you my
wife can't cook at all? How can toast have bones?
And and your impression is getting better as well. I'm
(34:36):
drinking whiskey, so I'm not saying that all of us.
Let's see, I've got one. Um. So this is so
like I said, it's a little weird, and I like
that in a comic, just just bizarre stuff. Um. He
was talking about the bar that he was doing stand
up in that night. Says what did joint. I asked
the bartender for a double and he brought out a
(34:57):
guy who looks like me. And those days, man, where
comedians just wrote great jokes, set up punchlines, set up
punchline over and over. Yeah, I'll tell you a drink
too much. The last time I went to the doctor,
I gave him a yurine sample. I had an olive
in it. Classic. And then another thing I've learned about
(35:20):
Rodney Danger Hilman. You go back and listen to his stuff.
He wasn't like mean, He was self deprecating. Even when
he was targeting like his family, mostly non existent family,
all of it reflected back on him and basically what
a loser he was, right, um, And he didn't have
very many mean jokes. He didn't tell like many gay jokes.
He he didn't tell racist jokes anything like that. Which
(35:41):
and this is like in the seventies when like everybody
was telling jokes like that, Right, But he did have
this bat joke that stuck out to me. Are you fat?
Do you look at the menu and say, okay, I
(36:03):
love love getting laughs from Ronnie Daserfields chocks we should
just do this was about to say, I think we
have a new act. You should know one day talk
about a rush. I got one more. I'll tell you
I was dating a woman. She called and said, come
on over. Nobody's home. I went over and nobody was home.
(36:25):
Good stuff. I have a new career reading Rodney Dangerfield chokes.
That's the whole. No one's done that cover comedians, Oh Man, Sharknado,
and now this you're all aware of? Chuck predicted Sharknado.
Right he did. You're welcome. Okay, no more, you got
(36:51):
any more? You like the one about his dog, tell
that one? Okay, all right? My dog is lazy. He's
so lazy. He doesn't chase cars. He just lays in
the driveway taking own license plates. All right, So now
we're in Uh, it's a nut stop last. In the
early nineteen eighties, he's making these movies. He won Best
(37:13):
Comedy Album Grammy for the album No Respect, beating out
Richard Pryor, Monty Python, Gilda Radner, and father Guido Sarducci. Uh.
And in nineteen eighty two, the Smithsonian Institution put his
red tie and his shirt uh in the Smithsonian Uh,
the American History National Museum of American History. Uh. Right,
(37:34):
along with Jimmy Dranny's hat, Archie Bunker's recliner, and Charles
Lindbergh's plane. But the joke Bridden, he said, was he
got a feeling after they left they were just gonna
use the shirt to wipe down the plane. Always self deprecating. Yeah, Andy,
And when he handed him the shirt, he said, this
is a big, big deal. I only have two shirts,
(37:55):
which may have been true. Uh. And also in the
nineteen eighties, Um, who remembers the Miller Lete commercials from
the nineteen eighties tastes great less spelling. That man back
there has his hand up the best, right. They were
great commercials. They were named it was like named the
eight best advertising campaign in history. Uh, from McCann ericson
(38:15):
the ad agency. And uh I went and watched a
ton of them earlier today, and uh I remember them
all from being a little kid, and it was weird.
They were. Um, for those of you who haven't seen them,
the premise was you would get a bunch of ex
athletes and then Mickey Spillane and Rodney Dangerfield and some
(38:35):
other random pop cultural icons at the time and to
sell Miller Lite and you know, getting a big argument
about tastes great and less felling. At the end. Rodney
would usually come in as the ship who does something
wrong to spoil everything. It was just such a weird
like Bubba Smith and Dick Buckus and baseball players. I
(38:56):
don't know, it was so strange, but they were huge
and they he was the one who could score the
weed for everybody else. They him. They led him on
uh January. Um, if anyone remembers his hit rap single
rapping Rodney, have you guys heard this? Really? It's something
(39:17):
else it is And it was a big hit. Actually
it was a top sixty hit, just pretty big, top
top fifty nine, Chuck, give it its du That means
it was number fifty nine. Yeah, yeah. So um it
was right behind Uptown Girl. And it was Rodney Dangerfield
rapping about being old, which sounds really bizarre now, but
(39:40):
like legitimate rappers at the time, like say the sugar
Hill Gang, we're rapping about like having dinner at your
friend's mom's house. So it wasn't that far off the
mark for the time. You know, it's like being nice
to your family. That's what raps were about. It the
good old days. Uh. He was on the Simpsons, I
think a couple of times. Whitney, Um, yeah, I don't
(40:02):
know if he was on more than once. I think
he's on twice. But in he played Mr Burns, illegitimate
sun herb who got no regard, no regard at all.
I wonder why they didn't say respect to day Not.
I think there was just a joke, messing around. Okay, yeah,
the man himself was there. I would have been surprised
if he was like, look, guys, just one thing, I
(40:23):
don't want to say respect? Maybe not? Can we just
avoid on trying new things here? Trying to branch out,
which actually he did branch out. He was actually a
really creative guy. Um. He had a live Broadway show
that ran for a couple of weeks in called appropriately
Um Rodney Daingerfield Live on Broadway exclamation point. For a
couple of weeks. He wrote a romance novel, uh called
(40:47):
La Contessa. And if you google the image for this, um,
it's it's disturbing. Yeah, it's basically like uh, your typical.
It was like it's fabio basically with a woman, except
it's got Rodney Dangerfield's face on it. Uh. And and
it's available on Audible. Oh is it really Yes, it
is with Rodney Dangerfield reading it. No way, I I
(41:08):
kid you not what I joke about. What's on Audible?
Well his I looked up earlier to see if his
autoback autobiography was on there. It is not. It's the
only Rodney Dangerfield thing on there. It's awesome because it
has the album mark too, so you get that for
free with the audiobook he wrote. Uh, and I guess
(41:31):
he didn't direct it, but he produced and wrote the
movie Rover danger Field, the animated UM classic about a
dog who gets no respect. And then, uh, Mr Oliver
Stone called him up one day and said, I had
this role for you in a movie UM called Natural
Born Killers, and it's about this sadistic father who was
(41:51):
molesting his daughter raping his daughter, and I think he'd
be perfect for it. And Rodney didn't get it at first.
He was like, do you want me for for this
kind of role? He's like you'll see yeah, And uh,
did you guys see that Natural Born Killers? You can
get the scene on YouTube. It's when Oliver Stone did
the phony sitcom. That's how they portrayed that that part
(42:13):
of the movie. Uh. So they have a laugh track,
and it's it's really disturbing. It's like three layers of bizarre, right,
So there's so it's like Rodney Dangerville is a sadistic,
ancestuous molester um, but it's Rodney danger Fields. That's the
weird part. And then there's a laugh track to just
throw you off that little extra bit. You know, it is.
(42:34):
It's very jarring. It was pretty well done. But the um.
The notable thing about that is that Oliver Stone let
Rodney Dangerfield rewrite all of his lines and he got
a lot of critical acclaimed for it, but he was like,
Rodney Dangerfield, we had no idea And he's like, seriously, Uh,
if you go today and just google um the Rodney
(42:56):
Dangerfield of you can find a whole list of things.
He's such a cultural icon that phrase itself has become
a thing now, like Petit Sara is the Rodney danger
Field of California wines, or the Memphis, Tennessee City Council
is the Rodney danger Field of local government. Seriously, that's
the thing. Evan saw. A guitar pre amp was known
(43:20):
as the Rodney danger Field of guitar preamps. My favorite
is a palladium is the Rodney danger field of precious metals.
That's stupid. We're not making this up, so chuck right
about now, let's uh, let's step back a second, press
pause on this and have a beautiful little message break.
(44:02):
Uh So, here's some more examples of the lack of
respect and and here's sort of the thing. The irony is,
he got nothing but respect from his peers throughout his career. Um,
but outside of that that was still just Doses Pepper
throughout his life. And examples of times where he didn't
get any respect, like when he sued Star magazine. They
(44:23):
published a story about him being in Las Vegas and
said he would drink like tumblerfuls of vodka and smoke
pot all day long in duke cocaine, which was all
completely true on but he knew that they couldn't prove it,
so he sued them for libel and the court ruled
in his favor. Right, Yeah, so that's respect. Right, So
they awarded him one dollar for his damage to his
(44:45):
reputation and one dollar for personal distresss Yeah, and then
the judge went, yeah, sorry, live stream people, he did uh,
he did get awarded forty five tho dollars for presumed
damages and uh, I did a little more research today
on that he um. Apparently he blew it all on
(45:06):
cocon weed. Apparently Star Magazine showed that they didn't turn
a profit, so he couldn't go after him for uh.
He couldn't appeal for more money, so he tried to
go after their parent company and it went all the
way to the Supreme Court and they said you you
didn't start the suit that way. They were no respect. Uh.
(45:27):
And even in death, as we mentioned earlier, Rodney Dangerfield
is dead. Why didn't I know that? Oh? I have
an example for you, hold on before he dies. He
was on Howard's during the year he died, and somebody
watched that interview. Yeah, man, that's depressing. He's eighty one.
He's clearly like at death store, but he still has
this his sense of humor about him. Um. But somebody
(45:47):
called in to Howard Stern and said, hey, Rodney, it's
Bob Hope. I'll see you in fifteen minutes. And Howard
Stern is like, well, that's not funny. Bob Hope is dead.
So they were saying like that Bob Hope was calling
from behind the grade even with see Rodney Dangerfield in
fifteen minutes and if you can't get respect from a
caller on the Howard Stern Show, where can you get respect?
(46:10):
So it's actually in that interview, which I said, is
it's like forty five minutes long and it's completely depressing,
so don't go watch it. Um but uh, and not
just because he was old, but Howards trying to talk
to him about his childhood and stuff, and well, he
had just written his autobiography and really just laid it
all out there, like he'd alluded to the rough life
that he had had in interviews and stuff like that,
but he published this book right before he died, and
(46:31):
it was it was rough. Well. I think the saddest
thing to me about his mom was that despite being
completely neglected emotionally and getting no love at all as
a child, he still wanted to be like a good kid,
and he still worked to support her and like apparently
came home and showed her his report card. He worked
hard to get good grades. She wouldn't even look at it.
She just like signed it without looking. And Uh, that
(46:54):
was the saddest part is he he still sort of
defended her in that interview. Uh like right before he
was he was dying, and then he made up with
his dad before his dad died apparently, Um, even though
he never saw him, he said he forgave him for
all that stuff. Oh yeah, yeah, really sad stuff. Though.
You want to hear some more jokes? Uh, well, well, actually,
(47:15):
why don't you tell him how he died? Okay, Well
in this interview. In the same interview, he's telling Howard Stern.
Howard turns like he's about to go in for um
for the should I pretend there's not a siren in
the background. Um, he's going in for surgery, and Howard
Stern asks him, like, are you afraid you're gonna die?
And he goes, you know what, dying in surgery would
(47:37):
be the best way to go. Like I would go
to they drug me up, I go to sleep, and
then I just wouldn't wake up. That's like as good
as it gets, right, So he goes in for this
very surgery. He falls into a coma during surgery, almost there,
and then he wakes up. Then he has a heart attack,
then he dies. That's how Rodney danjer Phield went after
(47:59):
that life that he had. That's how he went. He
was so close to going the way that he wanted
to go. And no, no respect. You want to hear
no respect. A year after he died, CNN tried to
get in touch with him to get his reaction about
the passing of Johnny Carson and and and if you
read his obituaries, a lot of them, a shocking amount
(48:22):
mentioned that he was well known for his role in
The Scout. He wasn't in the Scout. I got to
the bottom of that. Oh oh late on me. He
was going to be in The Scout. The role was
originally intended for him and Sam Kennison, and he didn't
do it for unknown reasons, and it ended up going
to Albert Brooks and Brendan Fraser. But it was one
(48:43):
of those things. I think we're one of those internet
neat things on the Internet where someone prints something that
everyone else's copies and bays it. So I think one
person wrote that because everything else I saw was worded
the exact same way, like list his movies as The Scout,
which he was never in. No, he wasn't. No thanks
for looking into that, man. That's what you get when
you hang with Chuck. But he did find love again.
(49:07):
Um in a in a situation in everyone probably thought
was like a typical gold digger. He was sixty one
years old. Uh, and he married a thirty year old
woman who was really hot and blonde in l A.
But Um, by all accounts everything I looked into, it
was not that, Like she really really loved him and
(49:27):
was great for him and they were super happy together
um or as happy as he could be. And um,
it turns out that it wasn't that kind of a
deal after all, which made me feel good. Yeah. Like,
for example, when he died, she made sure that his
funeral wasn't until five or dusk because he always asked
her not to schedule any appointment for him before five pm,
so she made sure his funeral didn't come until after that. Uh.
(49:49):
And his funeral was a really big deal. Everyone basically
came out in droves. Um. His pallbearers included Jim Carrey,
who he took Jim Carrey on the road for two
years when he was a stroke glin comedian and he
opened for him in Vegas and Jim Carrey was getting
booed off the stage. Everyone hated him, and Rodney stuck
by him for like a full two years, and Jim
Carey never forgot that. Chris Rock, Tim Allen, Larry David,
(50:12):
George Carlin, Jay Leno, um Adam Sandler, and then your
boy Michael Bolton. Michael Bolton, he was supposed to sing,
wasn't He was, but he was too choked up to
sing at Rodney danger Field's funeral. Apparently they were really, really,
really tight friends because Michael Bolton's song Everybody's Crazy was
(50:32):
in Back to School, and I guess he parlayed that
into a trip to the set where you got to
meet Riding dajer Field and they became friends for the
rest of the life. So Michael Bolton was too sad
to sing at danger Field's funeral, and you know, everybody
was disappointed. I bet there were a couple of people
there that were like, Yeah, it's okay, Michael, we know
(50:55):
you're upset. You don't you don't have to do this
if you don't want it's everybody will understand. And that's
what they said to us before we went on. So
we're gonna close this with with a final nice little
cherry on top about um Rodney Dangerfield and sort of
his outlook on his lack of respect with when it
(51:16):
comes to the Academy of Motion Pictures motion Picture sciencests. Yes,
what it's called, as you guys call it in l A,
the Academy. Right. He applied for membership because he wanted
to be in the Academy and he had the credentials.
He was in movies, and uh, they said, no, no,
you you had to be in like at least three
major roles. He had thirteen under his belt by this time,
(51:37):
including Natural Born Killers, for which he received a lot
of critical praise. Right, and they turned him down like jerks. Right.
He even got a letter from Malcolm McDowell Roddy McDowell,
which one was Malcolm McDowell, he's the good one. Are
they brothers? I don't know, are they no relation? But
Roddy okay, was Roddy? Was Roddy with it was Malcolm McDowell.
(52:02):
Was Roddy McDowell and Clocker Gorings or Malcolm McDowell. That
was Malcolm McDowell. Oh well, okay, good, because I felt
a lot better about this than Ron McDowell. Wasn't Planet
of the Apes. Yeah, so okay, good. I'm glad that
those two were separating. My mind, because I was like,
I really liked him in Clockercorns. Good. Roddy McDowell, who
everybody hates, wrote a letter to Rodney Dangerfield, this rejection
(52:25):
letter that said that he um had not he had
not had enough of the kind of roles that allow
our performer to demonstrate a mastery of his craft. Basically,
you're just playing Rodney Dangerfield and we all know it,
even though he had all the credentials to get in right. So,
Rodney Jsfield, He's like, let's see what years it? What years?
(52:46):
What's new? What's on the horizon? Well, the internet. I
think I'll build the world's first ever entertainment website. And
he built his own website and realized that this would
be a great place for his fans come like vent
their anger. And it was, as a matter of fact,
like this guy like think about that, and um, his
(53:06):
bands came on and we're like, to heck with the
Academy that kind of stuff, and um, the Academy actually
relented and said you're in, man, You're in, Rodney, come
on in. That's right, And what do you say? Nope, yep,
he said, thanks, but no thanks. He still has a website. Uh,
(53:30):
Rodney dot com and if you go to that. I
just found this out earlier. There's a section called jokes
and had audio clips. I was like, oh, this is great,
but it's not him. It's some dude reading like as
bad as me, really just saying his little one liners
over and over and it's not in front of people.
It's like dead quiet and it's just some dude saying
(53:50):
his jokes. It's really weird. I can't tell you how
much I'd love the cover comedian idea. Just you know
how stealing for other comics is such a taboo. We
just need to just to get out in front of
the Yeah, mix up a little like Mitch Hedberg and
rich Little Little Mind do a little Stephen right there
in the middle. Yea perhaps, Yeah, I like so that's
(54:13):
Rodney Dangerfield everybody, that's our show. If you want it anymore,
you're s O l R. Yeah, you can clap if
you want it. Hey, that was fun, right, that was
(54:34):
a lot of one. Yeah, we had a great time
and big thanks to the l A Podcast Festival for
having us out and um, yeah please have us back.
We'd love to. Yeah, it was really cool. We got
to see other shows and Uh, we did our own
and had a nice little crowd there, very supportive, nice
kind people all the way around. And look for the
next l A podcast best coming, I would imagine next September.
(54:57):
Hopefully we'll be there. Yeah, keep keep your ears out
for it. We'll mention it whether we are or not,
because we're that kind of guys. That's right. No listener
mail for me, buddy. No, but if you want to
get in touch with us, you can tweet to us
at s y s K podcast. You can join us
on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You
can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how
stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at
(55:17):
our super awesome home on the web, Stuff you Should
Know dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com? Mike, I,
(55:38):
my psychiatrist said, you're crazy. Oh, hold on, already mess
it up. No, no, no, that's right. My psychiatrist said
I'm crazy. I told him I wanted a second opinion.
He said, okay, you're ugly too. Yeah. He wrote that joke. Man,
everybody knows that joke. It's a good joke. Uh. When
my wife has sex, she screams, especially when I walk
(55:59):
in on her. Boy he wrote a lot of jokes
about his wife's cheating on him, like hundreds and hundreds
of boats because he wasn't married. Uh. If it wasn't
for pickpockets, I'd have no sex life at all. Gross.
The football team from my high school was tough. After
(56:20):
they sacked the quarterback, they went after his family. That's
a good, clean joke. That's good, it's nice. Uh what
else we got here? I solved my drinking problem. I
joined a A. I mean I still drink, I just
use a different name. I'm getting old at my age.
Shooting up means using an anema bag. I think there's
(56:44):
one more about a dog that I Oh, Yeah, what
a dog? I got? What a dog? His favorite bone
is in my arm. I think that's it for me. Yeah,
I'm pretty sure. I want to say that I have
another one hiding in here somewhere, but I can't find it. Yeah.
Go to the YouTube, folks. Yeah, make sure look up
Iron Man versus Dirty Dancing. You will love it. And
(57:10):
that's it all right, Thanks everybody, Thank you very much too.
Welcome to stuff you should know from house stuff works
dot com. Hey, and well, hey, I guess I want
to say hey and welcome to the podcast. But this
is a little different because this is a this is
the intro to the podcast. That's right. We recorded a
live episode at the l A Podcast Festival and uh,
(00:24):
this is it. Yeah, this is it. We did one
on Rodney Dangerfield. It was September nineteen fifteen. The Sophie
Tell and Beverly Hill. Very chic, very che and it
was a lot of fun. So greed. We hope you
guys have fun listening to it and stick around after
the credits roll, so to speak, because we have a
little bonus track at the end of this one. How
(00:51):
are you guys doing? Thank you very much for coming
to our show. We do this normally, but um, it's
usually just two of us and Jay are you sitting
here on Facebook while we record like eating me so soup?
She loves me so soup? Um, and then you know,
we do live shows too, but normally there's like a
gulf of a stage between us and like, you guys
(01:14):
are right here, so we're watching YouTube. I guess that's
what I'm saying. She's got one of our shirts. Nice,
nice shirt, and she's the only one. Oh I like that.
I oh there, of course they are, he says, I
listened to podcasts before Cereal burn. Yeah, and on the
(01:38):
back it says, but I love serially right we should.
We should also say hi to everybody in lives Oh yeah,
streaming folks Hello, and of course thanks to Audible and
square Space and the rest of those people don't sponsor us.
So I don't feel right then anything? Does that count
as a mid role land? Sure? Okay, check out with
(02:01):
a stack of money waiting outside, Mr Monopolies hanging out outside? Okay, So, um,
what do you got anything to start with? I've got
nothing to start with. I usually don't drink this early
in the day, but coming the nerves and is U
felt it would be fitting as a tribute to our
our topic, which we're gonna get into. So I decided
(02:22):
to work up a heavy sweat because Rodney Dangerfield is
known for drinking and sweating. Yeah, you're basically missing the tie.
Got everything else covered? Thanks you guys familiar with the
one Mr Rodney Dangerfield. Yeah that's good. I'm glad to
hear that he's a an increasingly underappreciated comedian. Like I've
talked to it at least a couple of people who
(02:44):
have not seen Back to School? I know boom And
I was actually talking to someone who works here at
the festival who said, is he dead? And I said, yeah,
that happens a lot to that, because she said, why
don't I remember that? Al it's no respect, no respect.
That's the cool thing about the guy like he that
(03:06):
was his whole stick, that was his whole um hook. Right, Well,
we need to start in the traditional way. Okay, you're ready,
very nice, hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W. Chuckers Bryant, and we are here at
l A Pop Fest and uh all you lovely people,
(03:26):
give yourselves a hand. Thank Is that better you feel
a little more? You guys happy with that too? Okay? Um, well,
now we have to start over people. How many people
have seen Back to School? Great start? So, as we
(03:51):
were saying, um, the weird thing about Rodney Dangerfield is that,
um he was his whole, his whole stick about um
no spect. It was actually really really close to accurate
as a matter of fact, and and not just while
he was growing up. He had a really tragic, terrible childhood,
but also as he got older and older, and even
(04:11):
after he blew up, um, he's still people just kind
of took what he was saying and ran with it.
Like he he had this one story where, um, he
opened a club which we'll talk about called Danger Fields,
so it's very obviously his club, and he was on
his way up to the stage. He'd just been like
called up there, and on his way some guy stops
(04:31):
him and says, Rodney, can I have your autograph? And
can you also give me some more butter? And like
this this happened to this guy quite a bit. Actually, Yeah,
so it does turn out that you will see even
after death, the guy got no respect. But um, as
Chuck will assert later, I predict um he he is.
(04:51):
He's a comedians comedian and very actually well respected by
the ones that count. And Uh, I don't know if
you guys know this, but a lot of can medians
have inner pain, uh, which is the reason a lot
of them get into comedy and a reason that many
of them drink until they black out on many nights. Uh.
(05:12):
Interer pain is no secret to the comedy world. But
you'd be hard pressed to find someone who was as
legitimately depressed and sad as Rodney Dangerfield. He was like
a crying clown for real. He was. He often talked
about the heaviness he felt every day when he woke up.
He said he would wake up in every day and
there it was, lingering above him, was his heaviness. Yeah.
(05:35):
And if you've ever if you ever want to go
down to YouTube rat hole, just look up some interviews
with the guy on YouTube from like the eighties, and
you know, he does a lot of interviews that just
like local TV stations promoting movies and stuff. And when
he's out of his stick element, it's one of the
saddest things you've ever seen. Man, it's really depressing. Uh.
(05:55):
He's he just had this air about him. You could
tell he had the weight of life on his shoulders
and at all. Pretty much stems from his awful, awful,
awful childhood. Childhood. It is hilarious so far, everybody. Uh,
so we should start at the beginning with him. Um
he was born in n on Long Island. Not in
(06:16):
Long Island, Chuck tells me. Um, And uh, he was
born to a Vauvilian father who took off with one
of Rodney's brothers to go hit the circuit. And that
was that. Like he I think he saw him like
once or twice a year for a half hour, an
hour or something like that. Yeah, he said he saw
his dad literally like twice a year growing up. And uh.
He was born Jacob Cohen. Uh, and his dad was
(06:40):
a juggler and a comic who, um, apparently hit the
road because of his wife, Um, who was. You know,
we were talking about what an awful person she was,
and we were going over this stuff and that she was.
But the more I thought about it, Um, she she
had a serious problem. It was you know, back in
the nineteen twenties. He didn't diagnose things like they do today, right,
(07:00):
you just ran off to the vaudeville pretty much. But
she was clearly depressed, like profoundly depressed and uh sadly
completely abandoned emotionally and neglected a little rot or I guess,
a little Jacob. Uh he was. He was left on
his own from the time he could remember. His mom
(07:22):
literally never hugged him once, never kissed him once. He
swore up and down, Yeah, and never complimented him or
like tried to build him up. She Uh, she was
a bad lady. And Um. At starting probably around age
eight or something like that, he um realized that if
he was going to eat dinner on a regular basis,
he was gonna have to go get a job and
(07:43):
go grocery shopping himself. Right, So he basically raised himself
storrying about age eight or so. Um and uh, speaking
of grocer's one of the one of the great things
that stuck out to him about his childhood. He was, Um,
he had to get a job, and after after school job,
he was still in school. Um. And he lived in
a fairly wealthy neighborhood, but he was not wealthy, so
(08:04):
he used to deliver groceries to his classmates UM home,
which is kind of demoralizing when you're like ten, you know. Um.
And he also, while he was out there running around
on the streets, there's a he wrote an autobiography the
year he died in two thousand and four, and um
he called this chapter male Prostitute because he was like
(08:26):
ten and he was so unsupervised that they were apparently
at least one or two local molesters that were like Hey, Rodney,
come on up, I got a nickel for you. And
he swears up and down that it was just uh
that it was it was just kissing. Everybody, don't worry.
The child was just kissed by the grown man for
a nickel. Um. But he and it happened a lot,
(08:47):
and he was doing it because he needed the money.
So anyway, Rodney danger feel, let's fast forward out of
this horrible, horrible funk. And by the way, we're gonna
Pepper in some of his bets boakes here and there. Uh.
And I debated on whether or not to try and
do it as him, because it's I've already promised certain
(09:08):
people here there. It's hard to do that. It's hard
to tell a Rodney Dangerfield joke without kind of doing him.
And I took a little informal pole last night with
some folks and they're like, yeah, you sort of have to. Yeah,
I think that's not like it's a good impression. But
plus it makes me delivering it my flat weirdo affect
where I'm not even trying it all the weirder, So
prepare for that too. But one thing that he did,
(09:29):
and that, of course a lot of comics do is
They turned that pain into funny, and he really relied
on his uh. His jokes is a way to uh.
I mean the only time he was happy was when
he was on stage performing, and as soon as he left,
that heaviness would come back. But he often joked about
his mom. He would say, uh, my mom never breastfed me.
She told me she always thought of me as a friend,
(09:52):
which is a funny joke. But when you know the
real pain behind it, it's it's just like the saddest
thing you've ever heard. It takes a dead bit of
the funniness away from it. I've got a good parent one.
You're ready. So I remember the time, and this is
my writing danger, Phil. I remember the time I was kidnapped.
They sent a piece of my finger to my father.
He said he wanted more proof. That probably did not happen.
(10:16):
But it gets the point across, you know, And plus
it's funny, and so if you're a one more parent joke, Okay,
So I tell you my parents hated me. My bath
toys were a toaster in a radio funny. All right,
that's going over better than I thought it wouldn't. So so,
starting about age fifteen, he starts, he realizes he's actually
(10:38):
kind of hilarious and that he has a talent for
taking all of this horrible, tragic stuff and turning into
funny stuff. Um and uh, he started writing jokes and
he got good pretty quick. He started selling jokes age
fifteen or sixteen to establish comedians, right, yeah, and he
kept them. He had the stuffel bag. He would write
jokes by hand his entire career and put him in
the stuffel bag. So he literally had a suffel bag
(11:00):
full of like thousands and thousands of jokes. And apparently
I think, uh you said that. During a typical performance
later like once he hit the big time, he would
tell like over three hundred jokes in a set, like
three fifty Yeah, in an hour. He ran at their
quick jokes, but still, but he remembered them all and
he knew which one's fit best. Like the guy was
(11:22):
a comic genius. Hopefully that's coming across here or will
by the end of this, right. So he gets this
big break at age nineteen. He's written jokes for a
few years and he's gonna try this out, and he
gets a job at a cat skills resort for twelve
bucks a week, ten weeks, including room and board, thin
dirty dancing, that kind of scene very much. So. Yeah,
(11:43):
but he's like the up and coming comic on stage. Right.
Have you guys ever seen iron Man meets Dirty Dancing
that mash up? Now go check it out. Actually, it's
so bizarre. It's one of the better things you'll ever see.
That has nothing to do with the Rodney dangerfield. That
was just to add on basically. But um, so he's working.
He's working hard. Um the stint and the cats skills. Like,
(12:06):
I don't think he gets read up, but he he
keeps going back to the cat skills. It's one of
his regular gigs. But on the on the side, while
he's working, he's a singing waiter at the Polish Falcons
nightclub where, yeah, where Lenny Bruce's mom was the MC.
He was an acrobatic diver, right, Um, but I don't
know what you're all thinking, triple indy. No, he did
(12:29):
not do the triple indy in the movie obviously. Uh
for those of you who have not seen Back to School,
that was an in joke. He was a diver in
the movie, a competitive diver. Yeah, well, I was going
to punish them for not having seen it. Okay, sorry,
he's trying to drive him a point. Uh. So, in
nineteen fifty one, he gets married for the first time
(12:51):
to a jazz singer name Joyce Indig, and he had
a couple of kids and moved to New Jersey, which
we all know is the death knell for any comedian
trying to work in New York. Kind of means you've
given up. Um, But he didn't give up just yet.
He did for a minute, for sure. Yeah, not not
at that point though. He was still trying to work.
(13:12):
But when he turned twenty seven, he quit comedy and
literally did not perform from the age of forty one.
And at forty one he was like, let's try this again, right, Well,
he and his wife divorced, so he's like, I've got
a little more time. I think I'm gonna go try
comedy again. And they actually got back together like the
next year and stayed married for another ten years or
(13:33):
something like that. But this time around, um, he was like,
let me see if I can figure out how to
how to balance home life with this. I'm trying to
break into comedy, right yeah, and let me try and
develop an act. I think the first time, he flounder
because he didn't he didn't know what kind of comedian
he wanted to be. He tried singing, he tried impressions,
he even tried prop comedy for a little while. But
he also I mean, and he had these jokes about
(13:53):
how much his life sucked. Like he used some of
these same jokes his whole life, um, but they just
didn't hang on him quite right, because he had his
whole life ahead of him and he was young and
full of promise. That second time around, he was right
there in the sweet spot, like age forty one ish,
a little desperate, kind of sweaty, and uh, these jokes
about how bad is life, these jokes about how bad
(14:15):
his life where it was going, um like really just
kind of hit a lot more. He adopted a persona basically,
and uh, that definitely helped. Yeah, I mean it was
it was sort of him, but it was also a character.
And when I was researching this, I was like, I
was kind of thinking about the you don't see a
lot of character comedians anymore. Like that was the sort
(14:37):
of the Heyday with like Andrew Dice Clay and uh,
while Ronnie Dangerfield and Emo Phillips, and it seemed like
there were a lot of characters, but now no one.
Now it's just like, look at this thing that happened
in my life, and how funny it is. Look at
all these witty observations about my life. I'd like to
(14:57):
see some good character comedians come. I can't think of it.
There any out there. I guess Brent Winback. That's kind
of a wait. Wait, what about like Larry the Cable Guy.
He's total I assume a character because he started out
as as a completely different kind of comedian and then
adopted that persona. But I don't count him as a comedian.
So yeah, he's not watching. Don't worry, he's not. He's
(15:23):
writing bad jokes and start a flame war with Larry
the Cable Guy. I'll totally take him up on that
flame war. Uh, although kids squashed me with his sacks
of money. Um, so he adopts his character. Uh. He
changes his name legally at this point to Jack Roy,
(15:44):
which was that his father's name. His father's stage name
was Phil Roy. Yeah, and so he changed his name
legally to Jack Roy and that was his real name
till the day he died. Uh. And he was performing
under that name for a while until he tried this
second go and decide, I don't want anyone to remember
Jack Roy. So um, he told this guy that was
(16:05):
booking him at a club in Manhattan, could you just
make up a name for me and put that on
the on the I guess it would a marquee, but yeah,
or you know, in any ad they took out. So
the guy who ran this place, the Inwood Lounge, I
think um came up the Rodney danger Field, right. But
the weird thing is um he had actually lifted the
name from a Jack Benny character, Like there was an
(16:26):
original Rodney Dangerfield and it wasn't Rodney Dangerfield, right, were
the giant twist of of the podcast. It's all downhill
from here. So the the Jack Benny came up with
his character and I think the forties maybe or something
like that, Um of this grade Z Western hero named
Rodney Dangerfield, and um, I guess the the lounge owner
(16:50):
remembered it and came up with that Rodney Dangerfield had
no idea about this. So he's walking around like using
this name for years And apparently he met Johnny Carson
once that one of his shows and Johnny Carson was like,
you know where your name came from? Right, and he said,
what are you talking about? Yeah, he explained that the
whole Jack Benny thing, and later on he uh saw
(17:11):
Jack Benny, and Jack Benny wasn't like Matt or anything.
Actually said I really love what you did with the character,
and you really you know, you did it just right.
So no harm, no felt, and they hugged it out
from that very famously. So on the second go round
he was he was making a living doing okay. But
(17:31):
he got his real big break in nineteen six seven
with Ed Sullivan. He was, um, he couldn't get booked
on Ed Sullivan, but at the time they would book
other comedians for the run throughs as like just placeholders
for dress rehearsal basically, And so he got a spot
booked on that and apparently did so well and dress
rehearsal that Ed Sullivan, you know, took note on the
(17:53):
side of the stage, which means he went like this,
you know you're funny. That's how you knew Sullivan thought
you were funny. It works for Nixon to do that.
Nixon actually that was the result of a huge long shot.
He told his agent like, just get me on Ed
(18:15):
Sullivan and it it played out, panned out very well.
He ended up being on Ed Sullivan like seventeen times
or something like that, and it led to all these
other late night appearances. He was on Carson, like I
think a record. He holds the record for being on
Carson the most seventy times something like that. Merv Griffin, Dino,
like all the dudes who are running late night and
(18:35):
basically where the taste makers for all of the comedians
were suddenly promoting the sweaty, weird, coked up uh pothead,
booze hound, huge potha Rodney dangerfield, right, and he took
it and ran with it, like right when he hit
the nineteen sixty seven he got to work like that.
He was such a big pothead. Actually, the original name
(18:58):
of his biography was going to be My Love Affair
with Marijuana, and he was serious he wanted to call
it that because he smoked potty, said for you know,
sixty something years. Uh, but well up until the day
he died. Really, I think from on like he was
smoking pot in I see you in the hospital. Because
he had an early medical marijuana exemption long before anyone
(19:21):
even knew it that way. I don't even knew what
that was. But if he flashed it in your face,
you didn't ask questions. So, uh, he got his big break. Actually,
Carson had blackballed them for a while because he accused
Carson in a letter of stealing or one of his
writers of stealing one of his jokes. So Carson famously
wouldn't have him on the show for a long time
(19:43):
until they eventually right, until they eventually met um and
worked it out, and then Johnny became like the biggest
fan ever. And if you want to enjoy yourself at
home on the YouTube's just go look up Johnny Carson
on Rodney or Rodney Danger Build on Carson. There's a
lot of clips where I mean Carson was just like
the ultimate set up dude. It just let him do
(20:04):
his thing. Yeah, and he would laugh until he was
crying because he couldn't believe that Danger Fields Getting Away
was saying most of the stuff he was saying on
TV on Carson's own show, it was good. So he's
he's married, he's working a lot, and uh, he decides
that he doesn't want to happen to his own kids.
What happened to him, which was to be neglected. So
he said, you know what I'm gonna do, Um, even
(20:25):
though no one's ever done this. I'm gonna borrow a
bunch of money of a million dollars and I'm gonna
open my own comedy club in New York City so
I can stay home with my children, Brian and Melanie.
I think, right. And it's not like he had any money,
right then, you know, like this is a huge, huge risk.
He's doing okay, but he had to borrow off not
that okay, right, so um, everybody tries to talk him
(20:46):
out of it. He goes ahead with it, and it's
such a success. He has a loan paid off in
like eighteen months. Just a huge success. And this this
club actually became venerable in its own right. Yeah, still
there today, run the Danger Fields in New York And um,
it had this HBO special that broadcast out of in
A bunch of comedians got their big breaks on that show,
like Seinfeld, Um, Chris Rock I think, yeah, Jim Carey, Uh,
(21:10):
what's his face, saggot, Jeff Foxworthy, Yeah, Jeff Foxworthy, fans
in the room, Rita Rudner of course, Sam Kennison completely
made Sam Kennison's career and that was what he uh,
and that's why comedians love him so much, because it
meant more to him to play father to these young
comics and to give them their start than almost anything else.
He really that was sort of his life's goal, was
(21:32):
to seek out talent that he thought was original and
really kind of boost them up. He was a huge Freudian. Yeah, yeah,
the whole father son thing. And I wonder why, so, Chuck,
where were you at? Uh? We are at danger Fields.
It is nineteen eighty and he decides that, you know what,
(21:55):
I should start making movies because well he may a
few movies before that, but nothing that anyone would know.
He's actually cast first by Stanley Kubrick in nineteen fifty
six for the movie Uh, the Killer, The Killing, The Killing,
great movie. Who said, yeah, wow, yeah, great movie. So
(22:17):
he plays onlooker, um, big part. Uh. And then he
was in another movie what was that up on? Called
The Projectionist. Yeah, it was a big part in a
very small movie. He said that it was the type
of movie where they went to go shoot on location
by taking the subway. Um, it's probably true. Yeah, I
think it was. But he played this movie projectionist boss
(22:39):
and the projectionists had quite an imagination and he was
a superhero, and um, Dangerfield was this arch villain nemesis.
Didn't it didn't go very far. But he learned almost
nothing about how to shoot a movie because this was
seventy seven and apparently his huge, huge breakthrough came in Caddyshack. Right,
he was already very much a well respe the comedian.
(23:01):
But um, when he when he shot Keddy shacked Harold Ramos, right, yeah,
when he directed it, he said later on that, Um,
clearly Dangerfield didn't know what he was doing. He was
a live performer. So when when Harold Ramos said action,
Rodney Dajerfield was just stand there and be like, you
want me to do my bit? Now, Like that's what
action means, right, do your bit? And uh So then
(23:23):
Rodney would just turn to the camera and like do
his whole bit into the camera. He's like, hold on,
we gotta we gotta get this right here, so pretend
the camera's not there one and um, he finally got
to do it because that was the thing that just
broke him out. Yeah, and he hated making movies. Um,
Like you said, he loved performing live in front of
people and that's where he got his his rush. And
(23:44):
he once compared making movies to um. He said, like
you know when you make a kid write something a
hundred times on the chalkboard and they've done something wrong,
He's like, that's what making the movies like, he hated
doing all these takes. He hated standing around and waiting. Uh,
that's why he didn't make a ton of him. And
he felt like the live audience is like he compared
it to a heroin attic, like shooting up. You know,
(24:04):
like he just loved that rush. And uh, he definitely
didn't get that from movies, which I mean you got
like the crew standing around looking at you, waiting for lunch.
You know, it wasn't his bag at all. It was
not his bag. Uh. You found this um description from
Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong Torres, which I think describes
him like to a t. Do you want to read that?
(24:27):
S okay? So Ben Fong Torres, who was in almost
famous Uh he Uh, he had a quote he says, Uh,
Rodney Deserfield looks like a midlife crisis. There's a surface
orderliness he's groomed, and he's dressed like a businessman at
a convention. Gray hair slicked back over a haggard shades
of mayor daily face. Dark suit, white shirt, bright red tie, silk,
(24:51):
silk stockings, shiny shoes. But the neatness gives way to
what he calls the heaviness that looms over him. Life
gives Rodney Dangerfield the He's in a constant sweat. He
wipes his brow incessantly, tugs at his tie, herky jerky
as he recounts the horrors of his daily life. He
shifts his shoulders uncomfortably, and his eyes bug out of
their bags. He moves the floor, mic around as he
(25:14):
roams the comedy store stage looking for sympathy, but all
he gets their laughs. I just think that's fantastic man.
He nailed Rodney dangerfielding absolutely and his shirt and tie
that came about because well, he hated clothes in fashion. Yeah,
let's just go ahead and say that. I think it's
time he was a slab. He was a slab, he
(25:35):
said in interviews how much he hated clothes, so he
never cared about clothes and fashion and was comfortable in
a robe. Basically and uh. But for one of his
first acts, he put on the red tie in the
black suit and like dressed all dapper, and when it
came for the second performance, he was like, well, they
liked me in that, so I'm just gonna wear that.
And that became his stick. Was you know, this very
(25:57):
dapper looking guy who's always a very will put together.
In fact, I just saw earlier today, um, when he
gave out a Best Makeup award at the think eight
seven Academy Awards. Yeah, and he and he walked up
and he said, hey, nice tuxed to everybody, right, and
he went underneath torn under shorts. You get this feeling
(26:17):
that like that was the dead truth. Yeah, probably had
like holy underwear. You should look at it too. Man.
That's great because he basically does five minutes of stand
up at the Academy Awards and it gives out an award.
So iron Man versus dirty dancing. Yeah, take some notes
and then some danger fields stuff. Um, should we take
(26:38):
a break here, Chuck, take an ad break? Yeah, yeah,
and we'll be right back after this big announcement folks.
It's called a podcast event. All the message that's right,
(27:00):
thanks to ge podcast Theater and Panoply. There is an
eight part series out right now called The Message, and
you can get it wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah,
and you know what, it's gonna blow your collective scientific
minds because it's currently rocking our worlds. So The Message
follows the story of Nicki Tomlin, who is a PhD
in linguistics, right, that's right at the University of Chicago,
(27:22):
if I'm not mistaken, that's right. And she's following a
team of cryptologists, which, really, if you say cryptology, you've
really got me hooked already. Their research thank tank called Cipher,
and they're trying to dacode a message received from outer
space from seventy years ago. Yeah, it's from outer space,
we think. And if you're not familiar with the story,
well then I guess you better go listen to the Message.
You can get it on iTunes, you can get it
(27:44):
on any of your podcast apps. Just go search for
the Message and subscribe today. Yeah, so thanks to the
podcast Theater and Panopoly for pushing the boundaries of the medium.
You guys are doing a great job. Subscribe to The
Message and listen today, and we're back, all right. I
(28:10):
told you that would work. So he makes Caddy Shack huge,
huge hit. Um, he's allowed to kind of just do
his thing in that movie. And I'm sure most people
have seen that classic comedy, which Josh said would stink
if it weren't for Rodney Dangerfield and m Bill Murray.
The rest of it. It's like a tepid coming of
age dramedy sucks. Ted Knight he was fine, but I mean,
(28:36):
you can watch too close for Comfort and get just
as much as you want. You know, I just don't
think it needs to be in the movie. I think
it was Bill Murray and Rodney Dangerfield That's what made
Caddy Shack a classic. Chevy Chase tada. You know how
I feel about Chevy Chase. My father raised me to
hate Chevy Chase. Did he really? He really did? Your
(28:57):
dad didn't like him? Oh man, still does not like
Chevy Chase. Why. I just didn't think he's funny or
he thought, yeah yeah, something about Chevy Chase sticks in
my dad's crawl and he passed it on me. Isn't
that weird? It is totally weird. That's what you get
when your dad's not a vaudevillian. They pass on weird
(29:17):
stuff like that to you, you know. So, Uh, he
makes Caddyshack. It was a huge hit. Now he was
a legitimate Uh, he was sought after for movies. Uh.
And then a nineteen three he wrote a movie called
Easy Money. Uh. Where's anybody seen that? Anyway, it's actually
pretty cool movie. It's not bad. It's a little weird structurally,
which kind of makes sense that he wrote it, because
(29:38):
he clearly did not how to write it right a scratch,
you know, how to write a bunch of good jokes though.
So he played Monty Capelletti, an Italian American drunk pothead,
uh baby photographer because because this is back in the
early eighties when anyone of any ethnicity could play any
one of another ethnicity, right, because he was Hungarian born,
(29:59):
but hey, play an Italian guy. It's cool. Uh. So
in the movie, his mother in law was the inspiration
for twin beds and uh hated her son in law.
And when she died, she said, all right, you can
have all this money, Um if for one year, I
think like ten million bucks, if for one year you
quit gambling and boozing and smoking and uh and doing drugs.
(30:21):
So easy money was you know I had Joe Pesci
it was it was okay, right, Like the first half
of this movie is just a series of vignettes to
where he just completely screws everything up and like that
your stomachs all upset and everything, and like you're really emotional,
and then nothing comes of it whatsoever. Right, and then
(30:41):
finally halfway through the plot arrives and then it gets
kind of good. Actually, yeah, I agreed. Yeah, a lot
of build up, not a lot of payoff in that one.
But one Roger Ebert uh like the movie, even though
it was a little weird, and said, uh, basically the
movie was about watching Ronney danger beale. He said, Rodney
Dangerfield gloriously playing himself as the nearest thing we were
(31:04):
likely to get to W. C. Fields in this lifetime. Uh.
And Rodney himself said that it was that was pretty
much me on screen. That's as close as you can
come to my real life in Easy Money. Yeah right, Yeah,
he's a maybe photographer. So nineteen six is when he
finally makes back to school, which was his biggest hit.
(31:24):
I think it costs like million to eleven million a
gross swell over a hundred million um, which in nineteen
eighties six. I mean today that's still good money. And
today dollars, that's a hundred fifty billion dollars. It's inflation
for you, right. Uh. And uh, this one he played,
he he had the idea. I think he got a
(31:46):
story credit of a guy, a father that goes back
to school. He was a big loser in life, so
he goes back to school with his son to get
his degree. And he and he told that idea to
Harold Ramos and he was like, that's good. But what
if he was rich. What if he was wealthy and
had it all and still goes back to school like
knowing what he knows now with a lot of money,
And and Riney was like, Okay, that's the movie. Yeah,
(32:07):
it's a good idea, and it actually, I mean that
was a huge movie when it came out. It was
the sixth biggest movie of n six. That was behind
Top Gun, Platoon, Karate Kid, to Star Trek four, and
there's one other one that's written down somewhere and here,
but they were big movies. And it was like the
(32:27):
six highest grossing movie of the year. And it's Rodney Dangerfield,
right yeah, And so he has hit it big at
this time and is a huge, huge movie star and
in the in the biggest comic. I think they did
a survey in the late seventies right before his movies
with college students that said that they were Rodney Dangerfield
was their favorite comic and he was sixty one years old,
(32:53):
fifty eight years old. Same thing basically was when he
hit it big as a comedian. Fifty eight years old, right,
and like, college kids are like into this guy. And actually,
if you've seen if all you've seen back to school,
if that's all you've seen of Rodney danger Phil, you
don't quite have the the understanding of what he was
actually like. He was pretty edgy comic actually, and pretty hilarious,
(33:13):
and college kids loved him. In the seventies, he hosted
Sarah Live in when when he was I think like
sixty or something fifty nine, um, and he started to
blow up like at about age sixty. Isn't that crazy? Uh?
Should we tell a few more of his favorite jokes?
I think it's high time now to you guys. We'll
go over a few of these. Uh. He has a
(33:33):
great joke about his psychiatrists. I told my psychiatrist that
everyone hates me. And he said, I was being ridiculous.
Everyone hasn't met me yet. Classic. Uh, let's see. Uh,
I like this one. It's a little brow, but I
like it. You know what classes when you were alone,
(33:54):
you far you say, excuse me, that's class. That weird.
So if you haven't noticed, a lot of his jokes
were they were self deprecating for himself, but also about
his family. He talked about his wife was dumb and fat,
and his son it was stupid. Uh. And even when
(34:14):
he wasn't I mean, it was all a character. So
even when he wasn't married, he was telling jokes about
his wife, which must have made it a lot easier
when he went home. And I probably so. But one
of my favorite wife jokes was, I tell you my
wife can't cook at all? How can toast have bones?
And and your impression is getting better as well. I'm
(34:36):
drinking whiskey, so I'm not saying that all of us.
Let's see, I've got one. Um. So this is so
like I said, it's a little weird, and I like
that in a comic, just just bizarre stuff. Um. He
was talking about the bar that he was doing stand
up in that night. Says what did joint. I asked
the bartender for a double and he brought out a
(34:57):
guy who looks like me. And those days, man, where
comedians just wrote great jokes, set up punchlines, set up
punchline over and over. Yeah, I'll tell you a drink
too much. The last time I went to the doctor,
I gave him a yurine sample. I had an olive
in it. Classic. And then another thing I've learned about
(35:20):
Rodney Danger Hilman. You go back and listen to his stuff.
He wasn't like mean, He was self deprecating. Even when
he was targeting like his family, mostly non existent family,
all of it reflected back on him and basically what
a loser he was, right, um, And he didn't have
very many mean jokes. He didn't tell like many gay jokes.
He he didn't tell racist jokes anything like that. Which
(35:41):
and this is like in the seventies when like everybody
was telling jokes like that, Right, But he did have
this bat joke that stuck out to me. Are you fat?
Do you look at the menu and say, okay, I
(36:03):
love love getting laughs from Ronnie Daserfields chocks we should
just do this was about to say, I think we
have a new act. You should know one day talk
about a rush. I got one more. I'll tell you
I was dating a woman. She called and said, come
on over. Nobody's home. I went over and nobody was home.
(36:25):
Good stuff. I have a new career reading Rodney Dangerfield chokes.
That's the whole. No one's done that cover comedians, Oh Man, Sharknado,
and now this you're all aware of? Chuck predicted Sharknado.
Right he did. You're welcome. Okay, no more, you got
(36:51):
any more? You like the one about his dog, tell
that one? Okay, all right? My dog is lazy. He's
so lazy. He doesn't chase cars. He just lays in
the driveway taking own license plates. All right, So now
we're in Uh, it's a nut stop last. In the
early nineteen eighties, he's making these movies. He won Best
(37:13):
Comedy Album Grammy for the album No Respect, beating out
Richard Pryor, Monty Python, Gilda Radner, and father Guido Sarducci. Uh.
And in nineteen eighty two, the Smithsonian Institution put his
red tie and his shirt uh in the Smithsonian Uh,
the American History National Museum of American History. Uh. Right,
(37:34):
along with Jimmy Dranny's hat, Archie Bunker's recliner, and Charles
Lindbergh's plane. But the joke Bridden, he said, was he
got a feeling after they left they were just gonna
use the shirt to wipe down the plane. Always self deprecating. Yeah, Andy,
And when he handed him the shirt, he said, this
is a big, big deal. I only have two shirts,
(37:55):
which may have been true. Uh. And also in the
nineteen eighties, Um, who remembers the Miller Lete commercials from
the nineteen eighties tastes great less spelling. That man back
there has his hand up the best, right. They were
great commercials. They were named it was like named the
eight best advertising campaign in history. Uh, from McCann ericson
(38:15):
the ad agency. And uh I went and watched a
ton of them earlier today, and uh I remember them
all from being a little kid, and it was weird.
They were. Um, for those of you who haven't seen them,
the premise was you would get a bunch of ex
athletes and then Mickey Spillane and Rodney Dangerfield and some
(38:35):
other random pop cultural icons at the time and to
sell Miller Lite and you know, getting a big argument
about tastes great and less felling. At the end. Rodney
would usually come in as the ship who does something
wrong to spoil everything. It was just such a weird
like Bubba Smith and Dick Buckus and baseball players. I
(38:56):
don't know, it was so strange, but they were huge
and they he was the one who could score the
weed for everybody else. They him. They led him on
uh January. Um, if anyone remembers his hit rap single
rapping Rodney, have you guys heard this? Really? It's something
(39:17):
else it is And it was a big hit. Actually
it was a top sixty hit, just pretty big, top
top fifty nine, Chuck, give it its du That means
it was number fifty nine. Yeah, yeah. So um it
was right behind Uptown Girl. And it was Rodney Dangerfield
rapping about being old, which sounds really bizarre now, but
(39:40):
like legitimate rappers at the time, like say the sugar
Hill Gang, we're rapping about like having dinner at your
friend's mom's house. So it wasn't that far off the
mark for the time. You know, it's like being nice
to your family. That's what raps were about. It the
good old days. Uh. He was on the Simpsons, I
think a couple of times. Whitney, Um, yeah, I don't
(40:02):
know if he was on more than once. I think
he's on twice. But in he played Mr Burns, illegitimate
sun herb who got no regard, no regard at all.
I wonder why they didn't say respect to day Not.
I think there was just a joke, messing around. Okay, yeah,
the man himself was there. I would have been surprised
if he was like, look, guys, just one thing, I
(40:23):
don't want to say respect? Maybe not? Can we just
avoid on trying new things here? Trying to branch out,
which actually he did branch out. He was actually a
really creative guy. Um. He had a live Broadway show
that ran for a couple of weeks in called appropriately
Um Rodney Daingerfield Live on Broadway exclamation point. For a
couple of weeks. He wrote a romance novel, uh called
(40:47):
La Contessa. And if you google the image for this, um,
it's it's disturbing. Yeah, it's basically like uh, your typical.
It was like it's fabio basically with a woman, except
it's got Rodney Dangerfield's face on it. Uh. And and
it's available on Audible. Oh is it really Yes, it
is with Rodney Dangerfield reading it. No way, I I
(41:08):
kid you not what I joke about. What's on Audible?
Well his I looked up earlier to see if his
autoback autobiography was on there. It is not. It's the
only Rodney Dangerfield thing on there. It's awesome because it
has the album mark too, so you get that for
free with the audiobook he wrote. Uh, and I guess
(41:31):
he didn't direct it, but he produced and wrote the
movie Rover danger Field, the animated UM classic about a
dog who gets no respect. And then, uh, Mr Oliver
Stone called him up one day and said, I had
this role for you in a movie UM called Natural
Born Killers, and it's about this sadistic father who was
(41:51):
molesting his daughter raping his daughter, and I think he'd
be perfect for it. And Rodney didn't get it at first.
He was like, do you want me for for this
kind of role? He's like you'll see yeah, And uh,
did you guys see that Natural Born Killers? You can
get the scene on YouTube. It's when Oliver Stone did
the phony sitcom. That's how they portrayed that that part
(42:13):
of the movie. Uh. So they have a laugh track,
and it's it's really disturbing. It's like three layers of bizarre, right,
So there's so it's like Rodney Dangerville is a sadistic,
ancestuous molester um, but it's Rodney danger Fields. That's the
weird part. And then there's a laugh track to just
throw you off that little extra bit. You know, it is.
(42:34):
It's very jarring. It was pretty well done. But the um.
The notable thing about that is that Oliver Stone let
Rodney Dangerfield rewrite all of his lines and he got
a lot of critical acclaimed for it, but he was like,
Rodney Dangerfield, we had no idea And he's like, seriously, Uh,
if you go today and just google um the Rodney
(42:56):
Dangerfield of you can find a whole list of things.
He's such a cultural icon that phrase itself has become
a thing now, like Petit Sara is the Rodney danger
Field of California wines, or the Memphis, Tennessee City Council
is the Rodney danger Field of local government. Seriously, that's
the thing. Evan saw. A guitar pre amp was known
(43:20):
as the Rodney danger Field of guitar preamps. My favorite
is a palladium is the Rodney danger field of precious metals.
That's stupid. We're not making this up, so chuck right
about now, let's uh, let's step back a second, press
pause on this and have a beautiful little message break.
(44:02):
Uh So, here's some more examples of the lack of
respect and and here's sort of the thing. The irony is,
he got nothing but respect from his peers throughout his career. Um,
but outside of that that was still just Doses Pepper
throughout his life. And examples of times where he didn't
get any respect, like when he sued Star magazine. They
(44:23):
published a story about him being in Las Vegas and
said he would drink like tumblerfuls of vodka and smoke
pot all day long in duke cocaine, which was all
completely true on but he knew that they couldn't prove it,
so he sued them for libel and the court ruled
in his favor. Right, Yeah, so that's respect. Right, So
they awarded him one dollar for his damage to his
(44:45):
reputation and one dollar for personal distresss Yeah, and then
the judge went, yeah, sorry, live stream people, he did uh,
he did get awarded forty five tho dollars for presumed
damages and uh, I did a little more research today
on that he um. Apparently he blew it all on
(45:06):
cocon weed. Apparently Star Magazine showed that they didn't turn
a profit, so he couldn't go after him for uh.
He couldn't appeal for more money, so he tried to
go after their parent company and it went all the
way to the Supreme Court and they said you you
didn't start the suit that way. They were no respect. Uh.
(45:27):
And even in death, as we mentioned earlier, Rodney Dangerfield
is dead. Why didn't I know that? Oh? I have
an example for you, hold on before he dies. He
was on Howard's during the year he died, and somebody
watched that interview. Yeah, man, that's depressing. He's eighty one.
He's clearly like at death store, but he still has
this his sense of humor about him. Um. But somebody
(45:47):
called in to Howard Stern and said, hey, Rodney, it's
Bob Hope. I'll see you in fifteen minutes. And Howard
Stern is like, well, that's not funny. Bob Hope is dead.
So they were saying like that Bob Hope was calling
from behind the grade even with see Rodney Dangerfield in
fifteen minutes and if you can't get respect from a
caller on the Howard Stern Show, where can you get respect?
(46:10):
So it's actually in that interview, which I said, is
it's like forty five minutes long and it's completely depressing,
so don't go watch it. Um but uh, and not
just because he was old, but Howards trying to talk
to him about his childhood and stuff, and well, he
had just written his autobiography and really just laid it
all out there, like he'd alluded to the rough life
that he had had in interviews and stuff like that,
but he published this book right before he died, and
(46:31):
it was it was rough. Well. I think the saddest
thing to me about his mom was that despite being
completely neglected emotionally and getting no love at all as
a child, he still wanted to be like a good kid,
and he still worked to support her and like apparently
came home and showed her his report card. He worked
hard to get good grades. She wouldn't even look at it.
She just like signed it without looking. And Uh, that
(46:54):
was the saddest part is he he still sort of
defended her in that interview. Uh like right before he
was he was dying, and then he made up with
his dad before his dad died apparently, Um, even though
he never saw him, he said he forgave him for
all that stuff. Oh yeah, yeah, really sad stuff. Though.
You want to hear some more jokes? Uh, well, well, actually,
(47:15):
why don't you tell him how he died? Okay, Well
in this interview. In the same interview, he's telling Howard Stern.
Howard turns like he's about to go in for um
for the should I pretend there's not a siren in
the background. Um, he's going in for surgery, and Howard
Stern asks him, like, are you afraid you're gonna die?
And he goes, you know what, dying in surgery would
(47:37):
be the best way to go. Like I would go
to they drug me up, I go to sleep, and
then I just wouldn't wake up. That's like as good
as it gets, right, So he goes in for this
very surgery. He falls into a coma during surgery, almost there,
and then he wakes up. Then he has a heart attack,
then he dies. That's how Rodney danjer Phield went after
(47:59):
that life that he had. That's how he went. He
was so close to going the way that he wanted
to go. And no, no respect. You want to hear
no respect. A year after he died, CNN tried to
get in touch with him to get his reaction about
the passing of Johnny Carson and and and if you
read his obituaries, a lot of them, a shocking amount
(48:22):
mentioned that he was well known for his role in
The Scout. He wasn't in the Scout. I got to
the bottom of that. Oh oh late on me. He
was going to be in The Scout. The role was
originally intended for him and Sam Kennison, and he didn't
do it for unknown reasons, and it ended up going
to Albert Brooks and Brendan Fraser. But it was one
(48:43):
of those things. I think we're one of those internet
neat things on the Internet where someone prints something that
everyone else's copies and bays it. So I think one
person wrote that because everything else I saw was worded
the exact same way, like list his movies as The Scout,
which he was never in. No, he wasn't. No thanks
for looking into that, man. That's what you get when
you hang with Chuck. But he did find love again.
(49:07):
Um in a in a situation in everyone probably thought
was like a typical gold digger. He was sixty one
years old. Uh, and he married a thirty year old
woman who was really hot and blonde in l A.
But Um, by all accounts everything I looked into, it
was not that, Like she really really loved him and
(49:27):
was great for him and they were super happy together
um or as happy as he could be. And um,
it turns out that it wasn't that kind of a
deal after all, which made me feel good. Yeah. Like,
for example, when he died, she made sure that his
funeral wasn't until five or dusk because he always asked
her not to schedule any appointment for him before five pm,
so she made sure his funeral didn't come until after that. Uh.
(49:49):
And his funeral was a really big deal. Everyone basically
came out in droves. Um. His pallbearers included Jim Carrey,
who he took Jim Carrey on the road for two
years when he was a stroke glin comedian and he
opened for him in Vegas and Jim Carrey was getting
booed off the stage. Everyone hated him, and Rodney stuck
by him for like a full two years, and Jim
Carey never forgot that. Chris Rock, Tim Allen, Larry David,
(50:12):
George Carlin, Jay Leno, um Adam Sandler, and then your
boy Michael Bolton. Michael Bolton, he was supposed to sing,
wasn't He was, but he was too choked up to
sing at Rodney danger Field's funeral. Apparently they were really, really,
really tight friends because Michael Bolton's song Everybody's Crazy was
(50:32):
in Back to School, and I guess he parlayed that
into a trip to the set where you got to
meet Riding dajer Field and they became friends for the
rest of the life. So Michael Bolton was too sad
to sing at danger Field's funeral, and you know, everybody
was disappointed. I bet there were a couple of people
there that were like, Yeah, it's okay, Michael, we know
(50:55):
you're upset. You don't you don't have to do this
if you don't want it's everybody will understand. And that's
what they said to us before we went on. So
we're gonna close this with with a final nice little
cherry on top about um Rodney Dangerfield and sort of
his outlook on his lack of respect with when it
(51:16):
comes to the Academy of Motion Pictures motion Picture sciencests. Yes,
what it's called, as you guys call it in l A,
the Academy. Right. He applied for membership because he wanted
to be in the Academy and he had the credentials.
He was in movies, and uh, they said, no, no,
you you had to be in like at least three
major roles. He had thirteen under his belt by this time,
(51:37):
including Natural Born Killers, for which he received a lot
of critical praise. Right, and they turned him down like jerks. Right.
He even got a letter from Malcolm McDowell Roddy McDowell,
which one was Malcolm McDowell, he's the good one. Are
they brothers? I don't know, are they no relation? But
Roddy okay, was Roddy? Was Roddy with it was Malcolm McDowell.
(52:02):
Was Roddy McDowell and Clocker Gorings or Malcolm McDowell. That
was Malcolm McDowell. Oh well, okay, good, because I felt
a lot better about this than Ron McDowell. Wasn't Planet
of the Apes. Yeah, so okay, good. I'm glad that
those two were separating. My mind, because I was like,
I really liked him in Clockercorns. Good. Roddy McDowell, who
everybody hates, wrote a letter to Rodney Dangerfield, this rejection
(52:25):
letter that said that he um had not he had
not had enough of the kind of roles that allow
our performer to demonstrate a mastery of his craft. Basically,
you're just playing Rodney Dangerfield and we all know it,
even though he had all the credentials to get in right. So,
Rodney Jsfield, He's like, let's see what years it? What years?
(52:46):
What's new? What's on the horizon? Well, the internet. I
think I'll build the world's first ever entertainment website. And
he built his own website and realized that this would
be a great place for his fans come like vent
their anger. And it was, as a matter of fact,
like this guy like think about that, and um, his
(53:06):
bands came on and we're like, to heck with the
Academy that kind of stuff, and um, the Academy actually
relented and said you're in, man, You're in, Rodney, come
on in. That's right, And what do you say? Nope, yep,
he said, thanks, but no thanks. He still has a website. Uh,
(53:30):
Rodney dot com and if you go to that. I
just found this out earlier. There's a section called jokes
and had audio clips. I was like, oh, this is great,
but it's not him. It's some dude reading like as
bad as me, really just saying his little one liners
over and over and it's not in front of people.
It's like dead quiet and it's just some dude saying
(53:50):
his jokes. It's really weird. I can't tell you how
much I'd love the cover comedian idea. Just you know
how stealing for other comics is such a taboo. We
just need to just to get out in front of
the Yeah, mix up a little like Mitch Hedberg and
rich Little Little Mind do a little Stephen right there
in the middle. Yea perhaps, Yeah, I like so that's
(54:13):
Rodney Dangerfield everybody, that's our show. If you want it anymore,
you're s O l R. Yeah, you can clap if
you want it. Hey, that was fun, right, that was
(54:34):
a lot of one. Yeah, we had a great time
and big thanks to the l A Podcast Festival for
having us out and um, yeah please have us back.
We'd love to. Yeah, it was really cool. We got
to see other shows and Uh, we did our own
and had a nice little crowd there, very supportive, nice
kind people all the way around. And look for the
next l A podcast best coming, I would imagine next September.
(54:57):
Hopefully we'll be there. Yeah, keep keep your ears out
for it. We'll mention it whether we are or not,
because we're that kind of guys. That's right. No listener
mail for me, buddy. No, but if you want to
get in touch with us, you can tweet to us
at s y s K podcast. You can join us
on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You
can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how
stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at
(55:17):
our super awesome home on the web, Stuff you Should
Know dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com? Mike, I,
(55:38):
my psychiatrist said, you're crazy. Oh, hold on, already mess
it up. No, no, no, that's right. My psychiatrist said
I'm crazy. I told him I wanted a second opinion.
He said, okay, you're ugly too. Yeah. He wrote that joke. Man,
everybody knows that joke. It's a good joke. Uh. When
my wife has sex, she screams, especially when I walk
(55:59):
in on her. Boy he wrote a lot of jokes
about his wife's cheating on him, like hundreds and hundreds
of boats because he wasn't married. Uh. If it wasn't
for pickpockets, I'd have no sex life at all. Gross.
The football team from my high school was tough. After
(56:20):
they sacked the quarterback, they went after his family. That's
a good, clean joke. That's good, it's nice. Uh what
else we got here? I solved my drinking problem. I
joined a A. I mean I still drink, I just
use a different name. I'm getting old at my age.
Shooting up means using an anema bag. I think there's
(56:44):
one more about a dog that I Oh, Yeah, what
a dog? I got? What a dog? His favorite bone
is in my arm. I think that's it for me. Yeah,
I'm pretty sure. I want to say that I have
another one hiding in here somewhere, but I can't find it. Yeah.
Go to the YouTube, folks. Yeah, make sure look up
Iron Man versus Dirty Dancing. You will love it. And
(57:10):
that's it all right, Thanks everybody, Thank you very much too.
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Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.