Stuff You Should Know - How Rodney Dangerfield Worked, Live From LA

Episode Date: November 18, 2015

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, well hey, I guess. I wanna say hey and welcome to the podcast, but this is a little different

because this is the intro to the podcast. That's right, we recorded a live episode at the LA Podcast Festival. Right. And this is it. Yeah, this is it. We did one on Rodney Dangerfield. It was September 19th, 2015.

The Sophie Tell in Beverly Hills, very chic. Very chic. And it was a lot of fun. Agreed. So 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.

Here we go. How are you guys doing? Thank you very much for coming to our show. We do this normally, but it's usually just two of us and Jerry sitting here on Facebook while we record. Like eating miso soup. Yeah, she loves miso soup. 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 are right here. So we're watching YouTube, I guess, is what I'm seeing. She's got a one of her shirts. Nice. Nice shirt. And she's the only one. Oh, I like that.

Oh, there, of course there. Says, I listened to podcasts before Serial. Burned. And on the back, it says, but I love Serial, right? And we should also say hi to everybody in live. Oh, yeah. Streaming folks, hello. And of course, thanks to Audible and Squarespace.

And the rest of those people don't sponsor us. So I don't feel like they're mentioning anything. Does that count as a mid-roll ad? Sure. OK, cool. Check that out. There's a guy with a sack of money waiting outside the door right now.

Mr. Monopoly is just hanging out outside. OK, so you got anything to start with? I got nothing to start with. I usually don't drink this early in the day. But a couple of nerves, and I felt that it would be fitting as a tribute to our topic, which we're going to get into. So I decided to work up a heavy sweat.

Right? Because Rodney Dangerfield is known for drinking and sweating. Yeah, you're basically just missing the tie. It got everything else covered. Thanks. Are you guys familiar with one Mr. Rodney Dangerfield? Yeah. That's good.

I'm glad to hear that. He's an increasingly underappreciated comedian. Like, I've talked to at least a couple of people who have not seen Back to School. I know, right? Boo, his. 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 guy. And she said, why don't I remember that now? It's no respect. No respect. That's the cool thing about the guy. Like, that was his whole shtick. That was his whole hook, right?

Well, we need to start in the traditional way. Oh, OK. You ready? Very nice. Thank you. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuckers Bryant.

And we are here at LA Pop Fest. And all you lovely people, give yourselves a hand. Is that better? You feel a little more. You guys happy with that, too? OK. Well, now we have to start over. How many people have seen back to school?

Great start. So as we were saying, the weird thing about Rodney Dangerfield is that his whole shtick about no respect was actually really, really close to accurate, as a matter of fact. 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 after he blew up, he still,

people just kind of took what he was saying and ran with it. Like, he had this one story where he opened a club, which we'll talk about, called Dangerfields. So it's very obviously his club. And he was on his way up to the stage. He'd just been called up there. And on his way, some guy stops him and says, Rodney, can I have your autograph?

And can you also give me some more butter? And like, this happened to this guy quite a bit, actually. Yeah. Yeah. So it does turn out that you will see, even after death, the guy got no respect. But as Chuck will assert later, I predict, he's a comedian's comedian and very actually well respected

by the ones that count. Sure. And I don't know if you guys know this, but a lot of comedians have inner pain, 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. Inner pain is no secret to the comedy world.

But you'd be hard pressed to find someone who is legitimately depressed and sad is 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. With a capital H, even. Yeah, and if you ever want to go down a YouTube rat hole, just look up some interviews with the guy on YouTube from the 80s. And he does a lot of interviews with just local TV stations promoting movies and stuff.

And when he's out of his shtick element, it's one of the saddest things you've ever seen, man. It's really depressing. He just had this air about him. You could tell he had the weight of life on his shoulders. And it all pretty much stems from his awful, awful, awful childhood. His childhood.

Isn't this hilarious so far, everybody? So we should start at the beginning with him. He was born in 1921 on Long Island. Not in Long Island, Chuck tells me. And he was born to a vaudevillian father who took off with one of Rodney's brothers to go hit the circuit. And that was that.

I think he saw him once or twice a year for a half hour an hour or something like that. Yeah, he said he saw his dad literally twice a year growing up. And he was born Jacob Cohen. And his dad was a juggler and a comic who apparently hit the road because of his wife. Who was, you know, we were talking about what

an awful person she was when we were going over this stuff. And that she was. But the more I thought about it, she had a serious problem. It was back in the 1920s, you didn't diagnose things like they do today. Right, you just ran off to the vaudevillian circuit. Pretty much, but she was clearly depressed, like profoundly depressed.

And sadly, completely abandoned emotionally and neglected little Rod, or I guess little Jacob. He was left on his own from the time he could remember his mom literally never hugged him once, never kissed him once. He swore up and down this. Yeah, never complimented him or tried to build him up. She was a bad lady.

And starting around probably around age eight or something like that, he realized that if he was going to eat dinner on a regular basis, he was going to have to go get a job and go grocery shopping himself. So he basically raised himself starting about age eight or so. And speaking of groceries, one of the great things that stuck out to him about his childhood,

he had to get a job. And after school job, he was still in school. And he lived in a fairly wealthy neighborhood, but he was not wealthy. So he used to deliver groceries to his classmates' home, which is kind of demoralizing when you're like 10. And while he was out there running around on the streets, he wrote an autobiography the year he died in 2004.

And he called this chapter male prostitute, because he was like 10. And he was so unsupervised that there 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 kissing everybody. Don't worry.

The child was just kissed by the grown man for a nickel. But it happened a lot. And he was doing it because he needed the money. So anyway, Rodney Dangerfield. Let's fast forward out of this horrible, horrible funk. And by the way, we're going to pepper in some of his bets. Jokes here and there. And I debated on whether or not to try and do it as him.

Because it's hard. I've already promised certain people here and 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 poll last night with some folks. And they were like, eh, you sort of have to. Yeah, I think so.

It's not like it's a good impression. 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 and that, of course, a lot of comics do is they turn that pain into funny. And he really relied on his jokes as a way to, 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, my mom never breastfed me. She told me she always thought of me as a friend. Which is a funny joke. But when you know the real pain behind it, it's just like the saddest thing you've ever heard.

It takes a tad bit of the funniness away from it. I've got a good parent one. You ready? Yeah. So I remember the time, and this is my rotting danger film. 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. But it gets the point across, you know? And plus, it's funny. And so if you're in. I've got one more parent joke. Oh, OK, sir. I tell you, my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio.

Funny. All right, that's going over better than I thought it would. So starting about age 15, he realizes he's actually kind of hilarious and that he has a talent for taking all of this horrible tragic stuff and turning it into funny stuff. And he started writing jokes. And he got good pretty quick.

He started selling jokes age 15 or 16 to establish comedians, right? Yeah, and he kept them. He had this duffel bag. He would write jokes by hand his entire career and put them in this duffel bag. So he literally had a duffel bag full of like thousands and thousands of jokes.

And apparently, I think you said that during a typical performance later, like once he hit the big time, he would tell like over 300 jokes in a set. Like 350. Yeah. Yeah, in an hour. And granted, they're quick jokes, but still, it's amazing. But he remembered them all.

And he knew which ones fit best. Like the guy was a comic genius. Hopefully, that's coming across here or will by the end of this, right? So he gets his big break at age 19. He's written jokes for a few years. And he's going to try this out. And he gets a job at a Catskills Resort for $12 a week,

10 weeks, including room and board. Yeah, I think dirty dancing, that kind of scene. Very much so, yeah. But he's like the up-and-coming comic on stage, right? Have you guys ever seen Iron Man Meets Dirty Dancing that match up? No? Go check it out, actually.

It is so bizarre. It's one of the better things you'll ever see. That has nothing to do with riding Dangerfield. That was just an add-on, basically. But so he's working. He's working hard. The stint in the Catskills, I don't think he gets really up. But he keeps going back to the Catskills.

It's one of his regular gigs. But on the side, while he's working, he's a singing waiter at the Polish Falcons Night Club, where Lenny Bruce's mom was the emcee. He was an acrobatic diver. Right. But I don't know what you're all thinking. Triple Indy.

No, he did not do the Triple Indy in the movie, obviously. For those of you who have not seen Back to School, that was an in-joke. Yeah. He was a diver in the movie, a competitive diver. Yeah, well, I was going to punish them for not having seen it. Oh, OK. Sorry.

I was trying to drive home a point. So in 1951, he gets married for the first time into a jazz singer named 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. But he didn't give up just yet.

He did for a minute, for sure. Yeah, not at that point, though. He was still trying to work. But when he turned 27, he quit comedy and literally did not perform from the age of 28 to 41. And at 41, 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 going to go try comedy again. And they actually got back together the next year and stayed married for another 10 years or something like that. But this time around, he was like, let me see if I can figure out how to balance home life with this trying to break into comedy, right? Yeah, and let me try and develop an act, I think,

the first time he floundered, because 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 how much his life sucked. Like, he used some of these same jokes his whole life.

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 41-ish, a little desperate, kind of sweaty. And these jokes about how bad his life was going really just kind of hit a lot more. He adopted a persona, basically.

And that definitely helped. Yeah, I mean, 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. No. Like, that was the sort of the heyday with Andrew Dice Clay, and well, Ronnie Dangerfield, and Emo Phillips.

And it seemed like there were a lot of characters. But 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 see some good character comedians come back. I can't think of a story. Are there any out there? I guess Brent Weinbach.

That's kind of a character, right? What about Larry the Cable Guy? He's total, I assume he's a character, right? No, that is a character, because he started out as a completely different kind of comedian. Oh, yeah. And then adopted that persona. But I don't count him as a comedian, so.

He's not watching, don't worry. No, he's not. He's writing bad jokes. I'm going to start a flame war with Larry the Cable Guy. I'll totally take him up on that flame war. Although he'd squash me with his sacks of money. So he adopts his character. He changes his name legally at this point to Jack Roy, 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 until the day he died. And he was performing under that name for a while until he tried this second go and decided, I don't want anyone to remember Jack Roy. So he told this guy that was booking him at a club in Manhattan,

could you just make up a name for me and put that on the, well, I guess it wouldn't marquee, but on the Playbill. Yeah, or in any ad they took out. So the guy who ran this place, the Inwood Lounge, I think, came up with Rodney Dangerfield, right? But the weird thing is, he had actually lifted the name from a Jack Benny character. Like there was an original Rodney Dangerfield,

and there wasn't Rodney Dangerfield, right? And that's weird. The giant twist of the podcast. It's all downhill from here. So Jack Benny came up with this character, and I think the 40s, maybe, or something like that, of this grade Z Western hero named Rodney Dangerfield. And I guess the lounge owner remembered it

and came up with that. Rodney Dangerfield had no idea about this. So he's walking around using this name for years. And apparently he met Johnny Carson once at one of his shows. And Johnny Carson was like, you know where your name came from, right? And he said, no, I don't. What are you talking about?

Yeah, explain the whole Jack Benny thing. And later on, he saw Jack Benny. And Jack Benny wasn't, like, mad or anything. He 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 foul. Yeah. And they hugged it out very famously.

So on the second go round, he was making a living, doing OK. But he got his real big break in 1967 with Ed Sullivan. 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 booked on that. And apparently did so well in dress rehearsal

that Ed Sullivan, you know, took note on the side of the stage, which means he went like this. You know, you're funny. That's how you knew Ed Sullivan thought you were funny, because if he just told you that. Bring him to me. Hey, that's pretty good. Thanks, Kevin.

It works for Nixon, too. You can do that. Oh, yeah, it's great. Nixon. And actually, that was the result of a huge long shot. He told his agent, like, just get me on Ed Sullivan. And it played out, panned out very well. He ended up being on Ed Sullivan, like, 17 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. 70 times, something like that. Yeah. Merv Griffin, Dino, like, all the dudes who were running late night and basically were the taste makers for all

of the comedians were suddenly promoting the sweaty, weird, coped up, Pothead, Boothound. Huge Pothead, by the way. Rodney Dangerfield, right? And he took it and ran with it. Like, right when he hit in 1967, he got to work like that. He was such a big Pothead, actually. The original name 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 pot, he said, for 60-something years. But well, up until the day he died, literally. Yeah. I think from, like, 21 on. Like, he was smoking pot in ICU in the hospital.

Because he had an early medical marijuana exemption long before anyone even knew what that was. He just wrote his own. No one even knew what that was. But if he flashed it in your face, you didn't ask questions. So he got his big break. Actually, Carson had blackballed him 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 until they eventually met and worked it out. And then Johnny became, like, the biggest fan ever. And if you want to enjoy yourself at home on the YouTubes, just go look up Johnny Carson on Rodney Dangerfield on Carson.

There's a lot of clips where, I mean, Carson was just, like, the ultimate setup dude. It just let him do his thing. Yeah, and he would laugh until he was crying. Oh, yeah, it was great. Because he couldn't believe that Dangerfield was getting away with saying most of the stuff he was saying on TV, on Carson's own show.

It was good. So he's married. He's working a lot. And 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 going to do, even though no one's ever done this,

I'm going to borrow a bunch of money. Quarter of a million dollars. And I'm going to 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.

Yeah, he was doing OK. But he had to borrow all that. Yeah, not that OK, right? So everybody tries to talk him out of it. He goes ahead with it. And it's such a success. He has the loan paid off in, like, 18 months. Just a huge success.

And this club actually became venerable in its own right. Yeah, still there today, right, in Dangerfields in New York. And it had this HBO special that it broadcast out of. And a bunch of comedians got their big breaks on that show, like Seinfeld, Chris Rock, I think. Yeah, Jim Carrey. What's his face? Saggett.

Jeff Boxworthy. Yeah. A lot of Jeff Boxworthy fans in the room. Rita Rudner. Of course, Sam Kinnison, he completely made Sam Kinnison's career. 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 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 are we at? We are at Dangerfields. It is 1980. And he decides that, you know what? I should start making movies. Because, well, he made a few movies before that, but nothing that anyone would know.

He was actually cast first by Stanley Kubrick in 1956 for the movie The Killer. Yeah, The Killing. The Killing. Great movie. Who said yeah? I'll say wow. Wow.

Wow. Yeah, great movie. So he plays Onlooker, big part. And then he was in another movie. What was that I'm going to call 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.

Which is probably true. Yeah, I think it was. But he played this movie projectionist boss. And the projectionist had quite an imagination. And he was a superhero. And Dangerfield was this arch-villain nemesis. It didn't go very far. But he learned almost nothing about how to shoot a movie.

Because this was a 77. And apparently his huge, huge breakthrough came in Caddyshack, right? He was already very much a well-respected comedian. But when he shot Caddyshack, Harold Ramis, right? Yeah. When he directed it, he said later on that clearly Dangerfield didn't know what he was doing.

He was a live performer. So when Harold Ramis said action, Rodney Dangerfield would just stand there and be like, you want me to do my bit now? That's what action means, right? Do your bit. And so then Rodney would just turn to the camera and do his whole bit into the camera.

He's like, hold on. We've got to get this right here. So pretend the camera's not there, one. And he finally got to do it. Because that was the thing that just broke him out. Yeah, and he hated making movies. Like you said, he loved performing live in front of people.

And that's where he got his rush. And he once compared making movies to, he said, when you make a kid write something 100 times on the chalk board and they've done something wrong, he's like, that's what making a movie is like. He hated doing all these takes. He hated standing around and waiting, which is why he didn't make a ton of movies.

He felt like the live audience is like, he compared it to a heroin addict, like shooting up. He just loved that rush. And he definitely didn't get that from movies, which I mean, you got the crew standing around looking at you, waiting for lunch, you know, it wasn't his bag at all. It was not his bag. You found this description from Rolling Stone editor

Ben Fong Torres, which I think describes him like to a T. Do you want to read that, sir? OK, so Ben Fong Torres, who is in Almost Famous, he had a quote. He says, Rodney Dangerfield looks like a midlife crisis. There's a surface orderedliness. He's groomed and he's dressed like a businessman at a convention.

Gray hair, slick back over a haggard, shades of mere daily face. Dark suit, white shirt, bright red tie, silk stockings, shiny shoes. But the neatness gives way to what he calls the heaviness that looms over him. Life gives Rodney Dangerfield the jitters. 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 roams the comedy store stage, looking for sympathy. But all he gets are laughs.

I just think that's fantastic, man. He nailed Rodney Dangerfield in that. Absolutely. And his shirt and tie that came about because, well, he hated clothes and fashion. Yeah, let's just go ahead and say that. I think it's time. He was a slob.

He was a slob. He said in interviews how much he hated clothes, how he never cared about clothes and fashion. And was comfortable in a robe, basically. But for one of his first acts, he put on the red tie in the black suit and dressed all dapper. And when it came for the second performance, he was like, well, they liked me in that.

So I'm just going to wear that. And that became his shtick, was this very dapper looking guy who's always very well put together. In fact, I just saw earlier today when he gave out a Best Makeup Award at the, I think, 87 Academy Awards. Really? Yeah, and he walked up and he said, hey, nice tuxedo

everybody, right? And he went, underneath torn undershorts. And he could get this feeling that that was the dead truth. Yeah, I'm sure. He probably had, like, wholly underwear on underneath that tux. I'm quite sure, yeah. You should look that up, too, man. That's great.

I will. Because he basically does five minutes of stand-up at the Academy Awards and then gives out an award. So Iron Man versus Dirty Dancing. Yeah, take some notes. And then some Danger Field stuff. Should we take 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 called The Message. That's right. 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 going to blow your collective scientific minds because it's currently rocking our world. Yeah, so The Message follows the story of Nicky Tomlin, who is a PhD in linguistics, right? That's right. At the University of Chicago, 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. Sure. There are a research think tank called Cypher. And they're trying to decode a message received from outer space from 70 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 on any of your podcast apps. Just go search for The Message and subscribe today. Yeah, so thanks to GE Podcast Theater and Panoply for pushing the boundaries of the medium. You guys are doing a great job. Go subscribe to The Message and listen today.

And we're back. All right. Told you that would work. So he makes a caddy shack, huge, huge hit. He's allowed to kind of just do his thing in that movie. I'm sure most people have seen that classic comedy, which Josh said would stink if it weren't for Rodney Dangerfield. And Bill Murray.

The rest of it, it's like a tepid coming of age dramedy. Sucks. Ted Knight? He was fine. But I mean, you can watch too close for comfort and get just as much as you want, you know? I just don't think it needed to be in the movie. I think it was Bill Murray and Rodney Dangerfield.

That's what made Caddy Shack a classic. Will Chevy Chase? A tad. A tad. You know how I feel about Chevy Chase. My father raised me to hate Chevy Chase. Did he really? Yeah, he really did.

Your dad didn't like him? Oh, man, still does not like Chevy Chase. Why? Just didn't think he's funny or he thought he was a pompous ass. Yeah, yeah. Something about Chevy Chase sticks in my dad's craw. And he passed it on to 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 stuff like that to you, you know? So he makes Caddy Shack. It was a huge hit. Now he was a legitimate. He was sought after for movies. And then in 1983, he wrote a movie called Easy Money.

Has anybody seen that? Anyone? It's actually a pretty cool movie. It's not bad. It's a little weird structurally, which kind of makes sense that he wrote it because he clearly did not write a script. He knew how to write a bunch of good jokes, though.

So he played Monty Capuletti, an Italian-American drunk pothead, baby photographer. Because this is back in the early 80s when any one of any ethnicity could play any one of another ethnicity. Because he was Hungarian born. But hey, play an Italian guy. It's cool. So in the movie, his mother-in-law was the

inspiration for twin beds and hated her son-in-law. And when she died, she said, all right, you can have all this money if for one year, I think like 10 million bucks, if for one year you quit gambling and boozing and smoking and doing drugs. So easy money was, you know, had Joe Pesci. It was OK. Right.

Like the first half of this movie is just a series of vignettes to where he just completely screws everything up and that your stomach's all upset and everything. And like you're really emotional and then nothing comes of it whatsoever. And then finally, halfway through, the plot arrives. And then it gets kind of good, actually. Yeah, agreed.

Yeah. A lot of build-up, not a lot of payoff in that one. But one Roger Ebert liked the movie, even though it was a little weird, and said basically the movie was about watching Rodney Dangerfield. He said, Rodney Dangerfield, gloriously playing himself as the nearest thing we are likely to get to WC fields in this lifetime.

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 was a baby photographer.

So 1986 is when he finally makes back to school, which was his biggest hit. I think it costs like $13 million to make. $11 million. $11 million. It grossed well over $100 million, which in 1986, I mean today, that's still good money. Yeah, and today dollars, that's $150 billion.

It's inflation for you, right? And this one he played, he had the idea, I think he got a story creditor, a guy, a father that goes back to school who was a big loser in life. So he goes back to school with his son to get his degree. And he told that idea to Harold Ramis. 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 Rodney was like, OK, that's the movie. Yeah. 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 1986. It was behind Top Gun, Platoon, Karate Kid 2, Star Trek 4.

And there's one other one that's written down somewhere in here. But they're big movies. And it was like the sixth 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 in the biggest comic. I think they did a survey in the late 70s right before his

movies with college students that said that Rodney Dangerfield was their favorite comic. Yeah. And he was 61 years old? 58. 58 years old. Same thing, basically. Was when he hit it big as a comedian.

58 years old. Right. And college kids are into this guy. And actually, if all you've seen back to school, if that's all you've seen of Rodney Dangerfield, you don't quite have the understanding of what he was actually like. He was pretty edgy comic, actually, and pretty hilarious. And college kids loved him in the 70s.

He hosted Serenity Live in 1980, when he was, I think, like 60 or something, 59. And he started to blow up at about age 60. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Should we tell a few more of his favorite jokes? I think it's high time that you guys. We'll go over a few of these.

He has a great joke about his psychiatrist. I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. And he said, I was being ridiculous. Everyone hasn't met me yet. Classic. Yeah? Let's see. I like this one.

It's a little brow, but I like it. You know what class is? When you're alone, you fart. You say, excuse me. That's class. Isn't 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 was stupid. And even when 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 at night. 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 your impression is getting better as we go along. Well, I'm drinking whiskey, so I'm not saying that I'm thinking of doing it. It brings up the danger field in all of us. Let's see.

I've got one. So like I said, it's a little weird. And I like that in the comic. Just bizarre stuff. He was talking about the bar that he was doing stand-up in that night. He says, what a joint. I asked the bartender for a double, and he brought out a

guy who looks like me. I missed those days, man, where comedians just wrote great jokes. Set-up punchline, set-up punchline, over and over. I tell you, I drink too much. The last time I went to the doctor, I gave him a urine sample. I had an olive in it.

So great. Classic. And then another thing I've learned about Rodney Dangerfield when you go back and listen to his stuff, he wasn't 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?

And he didn't have very many mean jokes. He didn't tell many gay jokes. He didn't tell racist jokes, anything like that, which in this is like in the 70s when everybody was telling horrific jokes like that. But he did have this fat joke that stuck out to me. Are you fat? Do you look at a menu and say, OK, I love, love getting

laughs from Rodney Dangerfield's jokes. We should just do this all the time. I was about to say, I think we have a new act after stuff you should know one day. Talk about a rush. I got one more. I tell you, I was dating a woman. She called and said, come on over.

Nobody's home. I went over. Nobody was home. Good stuff. I have a new career. Reading Rodney Dangerfield jokes. That's a whole no one's done that. Cover comedians.

Oh, man, dude. Sharknado and now this. You're all aware Chuck predicted Sharknado, right? He did. You're welcome. OK. No more. You got any more?

You'd like the one about its dog. Tell that one. OK, all right. My dog is lazy. He's so lazy he doesn't chase cars. He just lays in the driveway taking down license plates. All right, so now we're in the. That's enough.

Stop laughing. In the early 1980s, he's making these movies. He won best comedy album Grammy for the album No Respect, beating out Richard Pryor, Monty Python, Gilda Radner, and Father Guido Sarducci. And in 1982, the Smithsonian Institution put his red tie and his shirt in the Smithsonian, the American History National Museum of American History.

Right along with Jimmy Durrani's hat, Archie Bunker's recliner and Charles Lindbergh's plane. But the joke Rodney said was he got a feeling after they left they were just going to use a shirt to wipe down the plane, always self-deprecating. Yeah, Andy. And when he handed him the shirt, he said this is a big deal.

I only have two shirts, which may have been true. And also in the 1980s, who remembers the Miller Light commercials from the 1980s? Tastes great, less filling. That man back there has his hand up all right. The best, right? And the fist pump. He really liked it.

They were great commercials. They were named the eighth best advertising campaign in history from McCann Erickson, the ad agency. And I went and watched a ton of them earlier today. And I remember them all from being a little kid. And it was weird. For those of you who haven't seen them, the premise was you would get a bunch of ex-athletes

and then Mickey Spelane and Rodney Dangerfield and some other random pop cultural icons at the time. And to sell Miller Light and get in a big argument about tastes great and less filling at the end, Rodney would usually come in as the shimp who does something wrong to spoil everything. Screw everything up for everybody. But it was just such a weird like Bubba Smith and Dick

Buckus and baseball players. I get all that, but Mickey Spelane. I don't know. It was so strange. But they were huge. And they really increased the profile. He was the one who could score the weed for everybody else. They let him on.

January 1984, if anyone remembers, his hit rap single, rap and Rodney. Have you guys heard this, really? It's something else. It is. And it was a big hit, actually. It was a top 60 hit, which is pretty big. Top 59, Chuck.

Give it its due. That means it was number 59. Yeah, yeah. So it was right behind Uptown Girl. And it was Rodney Dangerfield rapping about being old, which sounds really bizarre now. But like legitimate rappers at the time, like say, the Sugar Hill gang, were rapping about 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, be nice to your family. That's what raps were about it pretty much. The good old days. He was on The Simpsons, I think, a couple of times, wouldn't he? Yeah?

I don't know if he was on more than once. I think he's on twice. But in 1996, he played Mr. Burns, illegitimate son, Herb, who got no regard, no regard at all. I wonder why they didn't say respect. Could they not? I think they were just a joke. Messing around.

Yeah, the man himself was there. I would have been surprised if he was like, look, guys, there's one thing I don't want to say respect. Maybe not. Can we just avoid that? I'm trying new things here, trying to branch out. Which actually, he did branch out. He was actually a really creative guy.

He had a live Broadway show that ran for a couple of weeks in 1988 called, appropriately, Rodney Dangerfield, live on Broadway, Exclamation Point. For a couple of weeks. He wrote a romance novel called La Contessa. And if you googled the image for this. It's disturbing. Yeah, it's basically like your typical,

it was like it's Fabio, basically, with a woman, except it's got Rodney Dangerfield's face on it. And it's available on Audible. Oh, is it really? Yes, it is. With Rodney Dangerfield reading it. No way. I kid you not.

Would I joke about what's on Audible? Well, I looked up earlier to see if his autobiography was on there. It's the only Rodney Dangerfield thing on there. It's awesome. Because it has the album art, too. So you get that for free with the audiobook. He wrote, and I guess he didn't direct it,

but he produced and wrote the movie Rover Dangerfield, the animated classic about a dog who gets no respect. And then Mr. Oliver Stone called him up one day and said, I have this role for you in a movie called Natural Born Killers. And it's about this sadistic father who was 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, why do you want me for this kind of role? He's like, you'll see. Yeah. And did you guys see that, Natural Born Killers? You can get this scene on YouTube. It's when Oliver Stone did the phony sitcom. It's how they portrayed that part of the movie.

So they have a laugh track, and it's really disturbing. It's like at least three layers of bizarre, right? So it's like Rodney Dangerfield is a sadistic, incestuous molester. But it's Rodney Dangerfield. 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. It's very jarring. It was pretty well done. But the notable thing about that is that Oliver Stone let Rodney Dangerfield rewrite all of his lines. And he got a lot of critical acclaim for it. But it was like, Rodney Dangerfield, we had no idea. And he's like, seriously?

If you go today and just Google the Rodney 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, Petite Zara is the Rodney Dangerfield of California Wines. Or the Memphis Tennessee City Council is the Rodney Dangerfield of local government.

Seriously, that's a thing. Avan Saw, a guitar preamp, was known as the Rodney Dangerfield of guitar preamp. Yes. My favorite is a palladium is the Rodney Dangerfield of precious metals. Isn't that stupid? What am I going to make this up?

So Chuck, right about now, let's step back a second. Press pause on this. And have a beautiful little message break. Agreed. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing.

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And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart

radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So here's some more examples of the lack of respect. And here's sort of the thing. The irony is he got nothing but respect from his peers throughout his career. But outside of that, there was still just doses of pepper throughout his life and examples of times where he didn't get any respect, like when

he sued Star Magazine, they published a story about him being in Las Vegas and said he would drink like Tumblr fulls of vodka and smoked pot all day long in Duco Cane, which was all completely true. Probably dead 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 $1 for damage to his reputation and $1 for personal distress. Yeah. And then the judge went, sorry, live streamed people. I didn't realize it's archive. He did get awarded $45,000 for presumed damages. And I did a little more research today on that.

He blew it all in Coke and weed. Apparently, Star Magazine showed that they didn't turn a profit, so he couldn't appeal for more money. Right. So he tried to go after their parent company. And it went all the way to the Supreme Court, and they said, you didn't start the suit that way, so you can't change it now, basically.

Right, yeah. No respect. 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 Stern the year he died.

And somebody. Did you watch that interview? Yeah, I did. Oh, man, that's depressing. He's 81. He's clearly at death's door. But he still has his sense of humor about him. But somebody called in to Howard Stern and said,

hey, Rodney, it's Bob Hope. I'll see you in 15 minutes. And Howard Stern is like, well, that's not funny. Bob Hope is dead. So they were saying that Bob Hope was calling from behind the grave and would see Rodney Dangerfield in 15 minutes. And if you can't get respect from a caller on the Howard Stern show, where can you get respect?

So it's actually in that interview, which I said, it's like 45 minutes long, and it's completely depressing. I said, don't go watch it. And not just because he was old, but Howard's trying to talk to him about his childhood and stuff. 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'd had in

interviews and stuff like that. But he published this book right before he died. And 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 a good kid. And he still worked to support her.

And 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 signed it without looking. And that was the saddest part is he still sort of defended her in that interview right before he was dying. And he made up with his dad before his dad died, apparently, 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? Well, actually, why don't you tell him how he died? OK. Well, in this interview, in this same interview, he's telling Howard Stern.

Howard Stern's like he's about to go in for the should I pretend there's not a siren in the background? He's going in for surgery. And Howard Stern asks him, are you afraid you're going to die? And he goes, you know what? Dying in surgery would be the best way to go. They drug me up, I'd go to sleep, and then I just

wouldn't wake up. That's like as good as it gets, right? Yeah. 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 Dangerfield went.

After 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 him, a shocking amount, 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, lay it on me. He was going to be in the scout. The role was originally intended for him in Sam Tennyson, and he didn't do it for unknown reasons, and it ended up going to Albert Brooks and Brendan Frazier.

But it was one of those things, I think, where one of those internet neat things on the internet where someone prints something, then everyone else just copies and base it. So I think one person wrote that. Because everything else I saw was worded the exact same way, like lists his movies as the scout, which he was never in. No, he wasn't. No.

Thanks for looking into that, man. Sure. That's what you get when you hang with Chuck. But he did find love again in a situation in 1993 that everyone probably thought was like a typical gold digger. He was 61 years old, and he married a 30-year-old woman who was really hot and blond in LA. But by all accounts, everything I looked into, it was not

that. No. Like, she really, really loved him and was great for him, and they were super happy together, or as happy as he could be. And 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 dusk, because he always asked her not to schedule any appointment for him before 5 PM. So she made sure his funeral didn't come until after that. And his funeral was a really big deal. Everyone basically came out in droves. His pallbearers included Jim Carrey, who he took Jim Carrey on the road for two years when he was a struggling comedian in the open forum 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 Carrey never forgot that. Chris Rock, Tim Allen, Larry David, George Carlin, Jay Leno, Adam Sandler, and then your boy, Michael Bolton. Michael Bolton. He was supposed to sing, wasn't he?

He was, but he was too choked up to sing at Rodney Dangerfield's funeral. Apparently, they were really, really, really tight friends. Because Michael Bolton's song, Everybody's Crazy, was in back to school. And I guess he parlayed that into a trip to the set where he got to meet Rodney Dangerfield, and they became friends for the rest of their life.

So Michael Bolton was too sad to sing at Dangerfield's funeral. And you know everybody was disappointed. I bet there were a couple of people there that were like, whew, yeah. It's OK, Michael. We know you're upset. You don't have to say anything.

You don't have to do this if you don't want to. Everybody will understand. That's what they said to us before we went on. So we're going to close this with a final nice little cherry on top about Rodney Dangerfield and sort of his outlook on his lack of respect when it comes to the Academy of Motion Pictures. Motion Picture Sciences?

Yes. Is that what it's called? Yeah. As you guys call it in LA, 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 they said no. No, you had to be in at least three major roles. He had 13 under his belt by this time, 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.

Rodney McDowell. Rodney McDowell. Which one's Malcolm McDowell? He's the good one. Are they brothers? I don't know. Are they? No relation?

But Rodney, OK, was Rodney, it was Malcolm McDowell. Stop saying it. Was Rodney McDowell in Clockwork Orange or Malcolm McDowell? That was Malcolm McDowell. Oh, OK, good. Because I felt a lot better about this then. Rodney McDowell was.

He was in Planet of the Apes. Yeah. So OK, good. I'm glad that those two were separating my mind, because I was like, I really liked them in Clockwork Orange. Yeah. Good. Rodney McDowell, who everybody hates, wrote a letter to

Rodney Dangerfield, this rejection letter that said that he had not had enough of the kind of roles that allow a 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 Dangerfield, he's like, let's see. What year is it?

What year is it? 1995. 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 to come vent their anger. And it was, as a matter of fact, this guy, think about that. This is 1995. And his fans came on and were like, to heck with the Academy, that kind of stuff. And 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, rodney.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. Oh, 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 his jokes. It's really weird. I can't tell you how much. I'd love the cover comedian idea. You know how stealing from other comics is such a taboo. We just need to get out in front of that. Just own it.

Yeah. Mix up a little, like, Mitch Hedberg and Rich Little. Yeah. Blow people's minds. Do a little Steven Wright there in the middle. Yeah. Perhaps. Yeah.

I like it. So that's Rodney Dangerfield, everybody. That's our show. If you want it anymore, you're S.O.L. That's right. Yeah, you can clap if you want it. It's cool. Hey, that was fun, right?

That was a lot of fun. Yeah, we had a great time. And a big thanks to the LA Podcast Festival for having us out. And yeah, please have us back. We'd love to. Yeah, it was really cool. We got to see other shows. And 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 LA Podcast Festival coming, I would imagine, next September, 2016. Hopefully we'll be there. Yeah, keep your ears up 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.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and, as always, join us at our super awesome home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,

visit howstuffworks.com. My psychiatrist said, you're crazy. Oh, wait, hold on, I already messed it up. No, no, no, that's right. My psychiatrist said, I'm crazy. I told him I wanted a second opinion. He said, OK, you're ugly, too. Yeah, he wrote that joke, man.

Everybody knows that joke. It's a good joke. When my wife has sex, she screams, especially when I walk in on her. Boy, he wrote a lot of jokes about his wife cheating on him, like hundreds and hundreds of jokes. Because he wasn't married. 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 they sacked the quarterback. They went after his family. That's a good clean joke. That's good. It's nice. What else we got here?

I solved my drinking problem. I joined AA. I mean, I still drink. I just use a different name. I'm getting old. At my age, shooting up means using an enema bag. I think there's one more about a dog that I like. 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. All right.

Yeah. Go to the YouTube, folks. Yeah, make sure to look up Iron Man versus Dirty Dancing. I'm not sure. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. You will love it. Any doubts? No, that's it. All right.

Thanks everybody. Thank you very much. See you soon. See you. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks everybody.

Thank you very much. See you soon. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90's called. David Lacher and Christine Taylor. Stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude. Bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use a dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to hey dude, the 90s called on the I heart radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I heart podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself? What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to do that. To say bye, bye, bye. Listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.