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Jonathan Winters in his prime:
xhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwWDa1xPTPA
NY Times April 12, 2013
Jonathan Winters, Funny Man and Comedic Inspiration, Dies at 87
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Jonathan Winters, the rubber-faced comedian whose unscripted flights of
fancy inspired a generation of improvisational comics, and who kept
television audiences in stitches with Main Street characters like Maude
Frickert, a sweet-seeming grandmother with a barbed tongue and a roving
eye, died on Thursday at his home in Montecito, Calif. He was 87.
His death was announced on his Web site, JonathanWinters.com.
Mr. Winters, a rotund man whose face had a melancholy basset-hound
expression in repose, burst onto the comedy scene in the late 1950s and
instantly made his mark as one of the funniest, least definable comics
in a rising generation that included Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman and Bob
Newhart.
Mr. Winters was at his best when winging it, confounding television
hosts and luckless straight men with his rapid-fire delivery of bizarre
observations uttered by characters like Elwood P. Suggins, a Midwestern
Everyman, or one-off creations like the woodland sprite who bounded onto
Jack Paar’s late-night show and simperingly proclaimed: “I’m the voice
of spring. I bring you little goodies from the forest.”
A one-man sketch factory, Mr. Winters could re-enact Hollywood movies,
complete with sound effects, or create sublime comic nonsense with
simple props like a pen-and-pencil set.
The unpredictable, often surreal quality of his humor had a powerful
influence on later comedians like Robin Williams but made him hard to
package as an entertainer. His brilliant turns as a guest on programs
like “The Steve Allen Show” and “The Tonight Show” — in both the Jack
Paar and Johnny Carson eras — kept him in constant demand. But a
successful television series eluded him, as did a Hollywood career,
despite memorable performances in films like “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad
World,” “The Loved One” and “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are
Coming.”
Jonathan Harshman Winters was born on Nov. 11, 1925, in Dayton, Ohio,
where his alcoholic father (“a hip Willy Loman,” according to Mr.
Winters) worked as an investment broker and his grandfather, a
frustrated comedian, owned the Winters National Bank.
“Mother and dad didn’t understand me; I didn’t understand them,” he told
Jim Lehrer on “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” in 1999. “So consequently
it was a strange kind of arrangement.” Alone in his room, he would
create characters and interview himself.
The family’s fortunes collapsed with the Depression. The Winters
National Bank failed, and Jonathan’s parents divorced. His mother took
him to Springfield, where she did factory work but eventually became the
host of a women’s program on a local radio station. Her son continued
talking to himself and developed a repertory of strange sound effects.
He often entertained his high school friends by imitating a race at the
Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
A poor student, Mr. Winters enlisted in the Marines before finishing
high school and during World War II served as a gunner on the aircraft
carrier Bon Homme Richard in the Pacific.
After the war he completed high school and, hoping to become a political
cartoonist, studied art at Kenyon College and the Dayton Art Institute.
In 1948 he married Eileen Schauder, a Dayton native who was studying art
at Ohio State. She died in 2009. Mr. Winters’s survivors include two
children, Jonathan Winters IV, known as Jay, of Camarillo, Calif., and
Lucinda, of Santa Barbara, Calif., and five grandchildren.
At the urging of his wife, Mr. Winters, whose art career seemed to be
going nowhere, entered a talent contest in Dayton with his eye on the
grand prize, a wristwatch, which he needed. He won, and he was hired as
a morning disc jockey at WING, where he made up for his inability to
attract guests by inventing them. “I’d make up people like Dr. Hardbody
of the Atomic Energy Commission, or an Englishman whose blimp had
crash-landed in Dayton,” he told U.S. News and World Report in 1988.
After two years at a Columbus television station, he left for New York
in 1953 to break into network radio. Instead he landed bit parts on
television and, with surprising ease, found work as a nightclub comic.
A guest spot on Arthur Godfrey’s “Talent Scouts” led to frequent
appearances with Jack Paar and Steve Allen, both of them staunch
supporters willing to give Mr. Winters free rein. Alistair Cooke, after
seeing Mr. Winters at the New York nightclub Le Ruban Bleu, booked him
as the first comedian ever to appear on his arts program “Omnibus.”
In his stand-up act, Mr. Winters initially relied heavily on sound
effects — a cracking whip, a creaking door, a hovering U.F.O. — which he
used to spice up his re-enactments of horror films, war films and
westerns. Gradually he developed a gallery of characters, which expanded
when he had his own television shows, beginning with the 15-minute
“Jonathan Winters Show,” which ran from 1956 to 1957. He was later seen
in a series of specials for NBC in the early 1960s; on an hourlong CBS
variety series, “The Jonathan Winters Show,” from 1967 to 1969; and on
“The Wacky World of Jonathan Winters,” in syndication, from 1972 to 1974.
Many of Mr. Winters’s characters — among them B. B. Bindlestiff, a
small-town tycoon, and Piggy Bladder, football coach for the State
Teachers’ Animal Husbandry Institute for the Blind — were based on
people he grew up with. Maude Frickert, for example, whom he played
wearing a white wig and a Victorian granny dress, was inspired by an
elderly aunt who let him drink wine and taught him to play poker when he
was 9 years old.
Other characters, like the couturier Lance Loveguard and Princess
Leilani-nani, the world’s oldest hula dancer, sprang from a secret
compartment deep within Mr. Winters’s inventive brain.
As channeled by Mr. Winters, Maude Frickert was a wild card. Reminiscing
about her late husband, Pop Frickert, she told a stupefied interviewer:
“He was a Spanish dancer in a massage parlor. If somebody came in with a
crick in their neck he’d do an orthopedic flamenco all over them. He was
tall, dark and out of it.”
One of Mr. Winters’s most popular characters, she appeared in a series
of commercials for Hefty garbage bags, which also featured Mr. Winters
as a garbage man dressed in a spotless white uniform and referring, in
an upper-class British accent, to gar-BAZH. Mr. Carson kidnapped Maude
Frickert and simply changed the name to Aunt Blabby, one of his stock
characters. Mr. Winters said that the blatant theft did not bother him.
Although Mr. Winters often called himself a satirist, the term does not
really apply. In “Seriously Funny,” his history of 1950s and 1960s
comedians, Gerald Nachman described him, a little floridly, as “part
circus clown and part social observer, Red Skelton possessed by the
spirit of Daumier.”
He was hard to define. “I don’t do jokes,” he once said. “The characters
are my jokes.” At the same time, unlike many comedians reacting to the
Eisenhower era, he found his source material in human behavior rather
than politics or current events, but in him the spectacle of human folly
provoked glee rather than righteous anger.
In 1961 Variety wrote, “His humor is more universally acceptable than
any of the current New Comics, with the possible exception of Bob
Newhart, because he covers the mass experiences of the U.S. common man —
the Army, the gas station, the airport.”
Mr. Winters did much of his best work in nightclubs, but he hated life
on the road. In 1959 he suffered a nervous breakdown onstage at the
Hungry I in San Francisco and briefly spent time in a mental hospital.
Two years later he suffered another collapse, and soon after that he
quit nightclubs for good. Between 1960 and 1964 he recorded his
most-requested monologues for Verve on a series of albums, notably “The
Wonderful World of Jonathan Winters,” “Here’s Jonathan” and “Jonathan
Winters: Down to Earth.”
The conventional television variety show did not suit Mr. Winters, but
film did not seem the right medium for him either. Scripts stifled him.
“Jonny works best out of instant panic,” one of his television writers
in the 1960s said. He thrived when he could ad-lib, fielding unexpected
questions or pursuing spontaneous flights of fancy. In other words, he
made a brilliant guest, firing comedy in short bursts, but a problematic
host or actor.
In the ‘70s and ‘80s, Mr. Winters was a frequent guest on “The Andy
Williams Show,” “The Tonight Show” and “Hollywood Squares.” He played
Robin Williams’s extraterrestrial baby son, Mearth, on the final season
of “Mork & Mindy,” and he kept busy with voice-over work in animated
television series and films. He also published a book of his cartoons,
“Mouse Breath, Conformity, and Other Social Ills,” and a collection of
whimsical stories, “Winters’ Tales.”
More influential than successful, Mr. Winters circled the comic heavens
tracing his own strange orbit, an object of wonder and admiration to his
peers. “Jonathan taught me,” Mr. Williams told the correspondent Ed
Bradley on “60 Minutes,” “that the world is open for play, that
everything and everybody is mockable, in a wonderful way.”
This a
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