Hockey Pucker Up

Scott Dickensheets

Friday, Jan. 29, 1999 | 12:02 p.m.

STANDUP SIT DOWN

Let's begin with a few good shots at the master, shall we? Because we're talking about Don Rickles, "the king of zing," the man of a thousand barbed comments -- he dislikes the term "insults" -- and if you dish it out, mister, you'd better be able to take it. So here goes:

Hey, is that Don Rickles or did someone unwrap a mummy!

Ho HO! This is kinda fun. You can begin to see why Rickles has been working this shtick so long, mercilessly ribbing audience members, making ethnic jokes, calling people "hockey pucks" enough times to make it his trademark put-down. His is a humor difficult to characterize in a newspaper story, not in the least because standards of journalistic probity prevent us from telling you what Rickles says after he asks, for instance, "Did you hear about the Mexican who hung himself in the lobby?" But you get the idea.

I'm not saying you're old, Don, but I've seen fewer wattles in a flock of ducks!

Thank you, thank you, you've been a great audience. We'll be here all week (which is more than can be said for Rickles, who will only be in the Desert Inn Crystal Room through Saturday).

Pop quiz: Don Rickles is a.) one mean-spirited, sharp-tongued dude, or b.) not. Trick question! He's both -- a guy with a naturally biting sense of humor who isn't the man he appears to be onstage. It turns out that all this insult ... oops, all this sarcastic repartee at other people's expense, all this hockey puck and name-calling -- he's just kidding!

DON RICKLES GETS A PHONE CALL

You're Don Rickles. You're cozied up in your very nice home in the 310 area code, early afternoon, reading the paper, minding your own business. The phone rings. It's a reporter out of Vegas, some hockey puck with a weirdo name -- what is he, a hockey puck? -- and you know, you just know he's going to ask you the same questions every hockey-puck reporter has asked for the last 150 hockey-pucking years.

And despite all that, you, as Don Rickles, are exceedingly pleasant, passing up the opportunity to rip on the reporter's last name in patented Ricklesian fashion. Instead, you open with a high-speed, comma-spliced, entertaining little riff:

"So, anyway, Vegas, I love Vegas, it's very hot in the summer, very cold in the winter, it's a hundred and three in the summer, I almost died there once, yeah, Vegas, I worked in the lounge when I was 2, I've been working there for 40 years, I'm one funny sonuvabitch, I really am, I've worked in the Sahara, the Riviera, the Desert Inn, the joke is, if I work in one more hotel, I'll be working in the airport ..."

In his reporter's notebook, the hockey puck from Vegas scrawls, at this very juncture in the conversation: Breathe, Don!

"OK," you, as Don Rickles, say, drawing a breath, "so, what else do ya wanna know?"

A VELVET FIST IN AN IRON GLOVE

He is Rickles and because he is Rickles he must zing. He has always zinged. He zinged as a child, picking up his old man's sarcastic sense of humor; he's zinged for his zupper for 40-odd years; he's zinged everyone who came into his sights, be they big shots (Frank Sinatra, Ronald Reagan) or nobodies (the guy in the front row with ears like 747 wings); and when he croaks he'll be a dead zinger.

But look closely at that word, "zing." It sounds sharp, pointed, like something that might stick in your hide. But it also has a zany quality, an intimation of playfulness that takes the sting out of it. A zinger may jab, but it rarely breaks the skin. So it is with Rickles.

"Most people think the character I do onstage is the way I am offstage," he says. "When I meet people for the first time, I can see it in their faces. They kinda stand off -- 'what kinda guy is he?' " Nice to meetcha, you hockey puck! Where'd you get those ears, an airplane hanger? "My image carries over," he says. He regards that as a tribute to his craft, to the care and completeness with which he's assembled "Don Rickles," the act. Sure, he's got something of a caustic wit in real life -- his stage persona isn't complete fiction -- but, he says, he doesn't exist in a state of nonstop ... what, zinghood? Zingation? Zingatude? "I'm just a regular guy who likes the Dodgers, likes the Lakers ..."

"He makes a transition (from the stage to civilian life)," says Jack Eglash, who worked with Rickles as the musical director and entertainment director at the Sahara. "He's a nice, quiet guy -- when it's one on one, if you're at his house or having lunch. But when there's an audience, when someone walks in, he'll do a little bit of his act. A lot of performers do that. But no, he's not that caustic guy in person. He's a very funny guy. Always was."

So he's a tough cookie with a soft center, a velvet fist in an iron glove, a tiger on stage and a pussycat off --

"Well, I wouldn't say I'm a pussycat," Rickles objects. "I don't sit around the house with my wife stroking me or anything, putting blankets on my legs ..." Rickles is, in fact, just like the rest of us fellas: "I'm a guy who stays home and does what his wife tells him to."

DON RICKLES MEANS NO HARM

Mean humor? Don Rickles? Mr. Warmth?

Insulting humor? Don Rickles? The Merchant of Venom?

"I make fun of people and I exaggerate," he explains. He doesn't set out to insult, because nothing he says is meant to be taken personally. "Now, exaggeration becomes an insult to some people, but it never becomes mean. If I was mean, people wouldn't still be coming to see me after 40 years."

Rickles is, like most in-your-face comedians, actually a facsimile of political incorrectness. He's like the term "broad" -- throwbacky, a little risque, comically out of sync with these PC times, but in the end not especially threatening. Which is just the way he likes it. "I certainly know I'm not mean, because if I was, we wouldn't be talking right now. I'd be working in Tahiti as a lifeguard."

He grants himself immunity from charges of offensiveness by being an equal-opportunity exaggerator -- no hockey puck spared! -- and doing it with a broad wink. "This ain't Billy Graham," he'll say. Somewhere in his act he usually sings, "I'm a Nice Guy" (written for him by Eglash). Of course, sometimes people still don't get it, or don't like it, or do walk out, or do slip the maitre'd an extra bill for a seat away from the stage. Well, that's comedy. "What I do, I believe in," he says. "Everything I say, I have no regrets about. If you don't enjoy me, I'm sorry to hear it. But in comedy, you're not going to please everybody."

"I'm not sure if the audiences do or don't 'get it,' " Eglash says. "The public is not the brightest group. But he entertains them. He's always in demand."

Although it may look as if his act is impromptu, Rickles in fact scripts almost all of his material. "About 5 percent each night is different," he says. "But the audience makes it for me, they make each show different. If you saw my show on three or four occasions, you'd say you saw a somewhat different show each time."

"I booked him a lot," Eglash recalls. "He always filled the room up. He held his own; there was never a question that he would do business. He was a major attraction."

HE WASN'T ALWAYS A MAJOR ATTRACTION

"In the early days," Rickles says, "I was open for a great deal of criticism, because I'm not a joke-teller. I perform my stuff." Rickles sharpened his shtick cracking wise between acts in strip joints. "Tough crowds," he recalls. They toughened him up. The sailors would heckle him and he would heckle back. An act was born.

And woe to the visiting dignitary! "His act really came to life when Sinatra, or other stars, came into the room," Eglash says. Legendary story: Rickles was working the Slate Brothers club in L.A. -- this was way back, late '50s sometime -- when Sinatra wandered in. "Make yourself at home, Frank," Rickles ribbed from the stage. "Hit somebody." Sinatra became a fan and supporter and Mr. Warmth was on his way.

He's made intermittent appearances on TV, popping up as Bald Eagle on "F Troop," starring in "The Don Rickles Show" (CBS, 1972-1972) and shipping out to TV obscurity in the naval sitcom "CP0 Sharkey" (NBC, 1976-1978). Earlier this decade, he starred in a short-lived Fox series with Richard Lewis, the name of which no one around here can remember.

Perhaps the least-known facet of Rickles' career is his film work. You remember "Casino," of course -- he was De Niro's pal. "The one everyone remembers is 'Kelly's Heroes,' " he says of the "Dirty Dozen" knockoff and cable TV staple.

But you can assemble the rest of your Don Rickles film festival from the markdown table at the video store: "Beach Blanket Bingo," "Bikini Beach," "Muscle Beach Party," "The Rabbit Trap," "The Rat Race." Check him out as the lawyer-turned-vampire (there's a difference?) in the cult film "Innocent Blood," if only for the funny-creepy sight of Rickles with all-black eyes.

These days, Rickles is not a man without projects, without gigs, without lucrative voice-over work in sequels to wildly popular animated movies about talking toys. "My dance card is as full as it's ever been," he says.

He's currently at work on "Toy Story 2," reprising his Mr. Potato Head, a role that, in the absence of a talking hockey puck, seems oddly right for him. Meanwhile, he's got performances lined up in Tahoe and Las Vegas: Should you miss him this time, he'll be back at the Desert Inn in April, July and October.

He explains being in demand thusly: "I'm different. And when you're different, you always have a better chance." That's also his explanation for the empty wake behind him; you'll notice hardly any comic does what he does. "I don't think it's something you can plan on, something you can rehearse," he says. "It's just the way I am. I was always ribbing people, I always made fun of people, and everybody laughed."

MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE DRESSING ROOM WALL, WHO'S THE BEST SLINGER OF UNMEAN, EXAGGERATION-BASED HUMOR OF THEM ALL?

You are Don Rickles. It's 30 minutes to stage and you're in your dressing room, looking into the mirror, swinging your shtick.

Zing: Did you hear about the Mexican who hung himself in the lobby ... ha, ha, ha!

Zing: You hockey puck! Ha, ha, ha!

And so it goes, you flinging practice zingers into the mirror ... at least that's what you want us to think, you kidder! "My joke is, everything I did onstage I did for myself in my dressing room mirror and I was laughing my ass off," he says. "So I know it's funny!" Even if some stiff in the audience doesn't get it, you know the truth.

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