I concur
Millennials need Don Rickles. Everyone does. That man is hysterical.
3 Responses to “I concur”
Remember, I do this to entertain me, not you.
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October 27th, 2016 at 7:01 pm
Its funny that you bring him up. I’ve been enjoying his roasts on Youtube for the past several weeks. I think to myself how you’d never get away with that today.
October 28th, 2016 at 9:13 am
The point of Don Rickles is that he was that rude in an era of much more public politeness than exists now.
I think a resurrection of Rickle’s shtick at any intellectual level above that of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (literally a puppet, also very successful as an insulting comic) would not only play well today, but would be very useful in piercing the self-righteousness of the SJW crowd.
October 28th, 2016 at 4:02 pm
I met Don Rickles the best way: He pulled me up on stage.
1997, Reno, NV. I was doing a summer job at a gold mine before my senior year of college, and my father and I went to Reno for 4th of July weekend. Don was doing gigs at a casino. Frankly, I wasn’t really aware of who Don Rickles was, at that time. It wasn’t like he was a big name like Gary Gygax or Sid Meier.
At the door, the lady asked a simple question: “Do you want to sit down front or further back?”
I said we’d sit down front. The lady said, “You know he picks on the ones down front, right?”
Eh, I’d won $30 from a slot machine earlier, so I was feeling lucky. “We’ll be fine.”
And so we’re seating, and the how starts. Don’s doing his thing, a little singing, a little frantic movement that couldn’t be called dancing, a few zingers, some off-the-wall non sequiters, jokes about his wife, Frank Sinatra, “You, gal in the third row! What’re you, Chinese? Japanese? I spent six months in a jungle lookin’ for your father!”, et ceteras.
About twenty minutes into the show, he pointed right at me, “Hey you! Yeah, you, get on up here!”
So, a little stunned, I go up there, a skinny college student working towards a degree by working and an ROTC scholarship. I get up on stage and the first thing he says to me is, “There this new thing out, it’s called food.”
And so he picks on me for a little bit, getting into my personal space and acting creepy, all in good fun and the audience is enjoying it. He points at my dad and says, “That your father? What is he, Italian? He’s Sicilian, ain’t he?”
“He’s Peruvian.”
“Naw, he ain’t, he’s Italian! I can see him down there, peeling an apple with a switchblade and sayin’, ‘I’m gonna git that sunnuvabitch, yes I am!'” Dad’s laughing his head off.
Then he tells me to hang out right there and he points at someone else in the audience.
The new guy comes up, and his name is Manuel. Manuel is a delivery driver for Coors, so Don says, “You’re my new best friend!” And wraps him in a hug. Manuel awkwardly hugs him back, but Don doesn’t let go. The hug goes on, and on, and Don starts swaying gently, then he says quietly (into the microphone), “Manuel, you’re a pretty good dancer.”
Then he lets go of Manuel and he turns to me, “Kid, come on over here. Yeah, you too, Manuel, c’m’ere.” And he positions himself at the center of the stage, with Manuel at his right and me at his left, facing the audience.
“Here’s what we’re gonna do: we’re gonna do a little scene. Imagine that this is Japan in 1945, and I’m a general who is about to commit hari kari. You two are my aides.”
“So!” He turns to face me directly, speaking levelly and without any great inflection. “Your line is, ‘Oh, great general, you must not die. You must lead us to victor over the stupid Americans, banzai, banzai.'” The he winks at me with his left eye, where the audience can’t see, to let me know that he’s just pulling my leg. He proceeds to briskly but flatly add a few more phrases that I, the loyal and fanatical aide, would say to persuade this figment of his imagination Japanese general not to spill his guts out. It takes about another thirty seconds.
He turns to Manuel and says, “Manuel, your line is, ‘Right!'”
Audience laughs, and Don kneels down facing the audience and yanks on our arms to pull us down to join him. “Ya gotta look like this!” And he make an outrageous squinty-eyed, buck-tooth face. “You do it!” And so we both do, with Don approving of our efforts. And this is how there came to be a picture of Don, Manuel and I, with me making the squinty-faced, bucktooth face straight out of WW2 era propaganda cartoons.
“OK, now bow!” And so we do, from the kneeling position, head right down to the ground. Don turns his head away from the microphone he’s holding and says in a hoarse stage whisper, “Fake Japanese!” And then he sits up and says something like:
“Ching chong yow chow fang bung yip yong whang…” and it goes on for about fifteen seconds, the worst imitation of a generic asian language by someone who’d never heard Japanese in his life. So bad, it is obviously bad, and all the time he’s squinty eyes and bucktoothed.
Then he turns to Manuel, sticks the microphone in his face. Manuel, on the spot, says, “Ya?” So Don thumps him in the chest with the microphone. Then he turns back to me.
What do I have? I had three weeks of college Japanese, before I had to drop the class because they had run out of the books. I did high school drama, so I don’t have any stage fright. I had once had a roommate that took Japanese in high school and taught me phonetically some phrases of dubious translation. And I had been watching the miniseries Shogun with my dad after work because there’s not much else to do in the evenings in Winnemucca, NV except go to bars. So I said:
“[I do not understand] Rickles-[very honorable]. [Some more authentically faked Japanese phrases] [Something that sounds like ‘America’] [Profound apology] [Do you like to perform cunnilingus?] Hai! Banzai!!! Banzai!!! [More authoritative and forceful sounding Japanese phoneme, really working to a crescendo] [Are you going to eat that?]” And then I stiffly bowed.
Silence. I look up at Don, and he’s kneeling there with his mouth dropped open. He drops the mike to the ground from a limp hand and the audience roars.
Then he scoops up the microphone, levers himself to his feet and staggers over to the piano. He starts flipping pages in the sheet music, then dragging his index finger down the page like he’s looking something up. Flip, scan, flip, scan, flip, scan, stop, look surprised. He shouts, “He just said, ‘Kiss my ass!'”
And then he dismissed us both back to our tables, thanked us for being good sports and he sent a bottle of champagne over to our tables. He continued with his set.
On the way out or the theater, the house photographer gave us a quick-developed picture of us kneeling next to Don and doing racist-faces.
So, choosing to sit down front was a good gamble.