The Full Biography
Rodney Dangerfield. Comedian. The Babylon, New York, kid who quit to sell aluminum siding, then spent a second life teaching the country how to get no respect on purpose.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a man in a white shirt and a red tie, mopping his neck, telling a room that he gets no respect, or a loud guest wrecking a country-club golf course in Caddyshack, or a millionaire sitting in a college lecture hall in Back to School. The years are 1967, 1980, 1986. What the still cannot show is Jacob Cohen of Long Island and Kew Gardens, a vaudevillian’s abandoned son, a singing waiter who was fired, a salesman who returned to the microphone in middle age, and a death in Los Angeles on October 5, 2004, after heart-valve surgery, with an epitaph that still gets a laugh in a cemetery.
He was born on November 22, 1921, in Babylon, New York, to Dorothy “Dotty” Teitelbaum, born in Hungary, and Phillip Cohen, a vaudevillian who worked as Phil Roy. The father was rarely home — twice a year, the son would say. Late in life Phillip asked for forgiveness and received it. The mother, by Rodney’s account, did not hug, did not kiss, showed no affection. Other children went to sleep on fairy tales; he went to sleep to a fight downstairs. He told Howard Stern, months before he died, that a man in the neighborhood had paid him a nickel and molested him. After the father left, Dotty moved the children to Kew Gardens, Queens. He delivered groceries, sold newspapers and ice cream at the beach, and graduated from Richmond Hill High School in 1939.
The door opened twice. The first time it did not hold.
At fifteen he was already writing jokes for comics and performing at the Nevele in Ellenville. At nineteen he legally became Jack Roy. Nine years of struggle followed: a singing-waiter job that ended in a firing, club dates that did not become a name. In the mid-1950s he quit to sell aluminum siding so his wife and children would eat. He said that when he left show business he was the only one who knew he had quit. In the early 1960s he came back, still selling by day, still playing Catskill rooms that did not want him. He estimated he was twenty thousand dollars in debt. He joked that he played a club so far out his act was reviewed in Field & Stream. What he lacked, he decided, was an image — a person the audience could recognize before the first joke landed. He built a man for whom nothing goes right.
At the Inwood Lounge in Manhattan he asked the owner, George McFadden, for a new name so old patrons would not remember Jack Roy. McFadden offered Rodney Dangerfield. The name had already walked through The Jack Benny Program in 1941. He took it. In March 1967 he reached The Ed Sullivan Show. Las Vegas followed. Sullivan again, seventeen times in all. The Dean Martin Show. The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, more than seventy appearances. The catchphrase hardened: I don’t get no respect. The one-liners arrived in volleys. The tie tug and the sweat were punctuation. In 1969 he and Anthony Bevacqua opened Dangerfield’s on First Avenue, a room he could work without living in airports. The club stayed open until 2020 and reopened in 2024 as Rodney’s. HBO used it. Jerry Seinfeld, Jim Carrey, Tim Allen, Roseanne Barr, Sam Kinison, Bill Hicks, Jeff Foxworthy, Rita Rudner, Andrew Dice Clay, Louie Anderson, Bob Saget — the list of people who worked that room is a history of American stand-up after he finally had a door of his own.
In 1978 Harvard asked him to be Class Day speaker, the day before commencement. The Crimson had already described a set at the club. In 1980 the album No Respect won the Grammy for Best Comedy Album. The same year Harold Ramis’s Caddyshack gave him Al Czervik, a nouveau-riche guest who treats a country club as a store he already owns. The part was smaller on the page. Dangerfield, Chevy Chase, and Bill Murray improvised until the movie belonged, in stretches, to the loudest guest. Reviews singled him out. Easy Money (1983), which he co-wrote, put him in the lead as a man who must reform to inherit. “Rappin’ Rodney,” a novelty single and an early MTV video, put the red tie on a new channel; Pat Benatar appeared as an executioner. Back to School (1986), again a co-write, made Thornton Melon a millionaire who enrolls in college with his son and hires Kurt Vonnegut to write a paper on Kurt Vonnegut. It was a hit. The movie Rodney was not the stage loser. He was loud, rich, and, inside the plot, loved. Miller Lite commercials, a cameo at the end of Billy Joel’s “Tell Her About It,” another in Lionel Richie’s “Dancing on the Ceiling” — the 1980s used him as a civic cartoon of the man who cannot catch a break and, on film, keeps winning anyway.
Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) asked for something else: Mallory’s father, abusive, a scene for which Dangerfield wrote or rewrote his own lines. It is the performance people name when they need to prove the loser was an actor. He hosted Saturday Night Live in 1980 and came back for cameos. He did a string of HBO specials from the club. Rover Dangerfield (1991) was an animated dog with his voice and his jokes, a project he wrote and produced because the town would not always give him the lead he wanted. Ladybugs (1992) was thinner. In 1995 the Motion Picture Academy’s actors branch, under Roddy McDowall, rejected his membership. Fans protested. The Academy offered to reconsider. He refused the membership. The same year he became one of the first celebrities to own and write a personal website, answering mail himself. Websight put him among the hundred most influential people on the web. He voiced Mr. Burns’s son on The Simpsons (“Burns, Baby Burns”). He played himself on Home Improvement. He played Lucifer in Adam Sandler’s Little Nicky (2000). The Smithsonian took a white shirt and a red tie; he told the curator they would probably use it to clean Lindbergh’s plane.
I don’t get no respect.Rodney Dangerfield
He married the singer Joyce Indig on October 3, 1951, divorced in 1961, remarried her in 1963, divorced again in 1970, and lived largely apart even when the papers said married. Brian Roy was born in 1960. Melanie came after the remarriage. In 1993 he married Joan Child, whom he had met in 1983 in her Santa Monica flower shop. For decades his closest friend, the aluminum-siding salesman Joe Ancis — “the funniest man in the world,” Rodney called him, a man who had also marked Lenny Bruce — lived with him. Ancis died in 2001. Joan described her husband as classy, gentlemanly, sensitive, and intelligent. Strangers treated him like the act. The 2004 autobiography, It’s Not Easy Bein’ Me: A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs, was first going to be called My Love Affair with Marijuana. He told Stern he was a logical atheist: we’re gorillas, does a gorilla come back? He also said he had suffered for being a perfectionist.
The turn is the return. Plenty of comics quit. Few become a national catchphrase after selling siding. He built the persona, the club, the album, the movies, and a late fame that arrived because he had already lost once and could tell the truth about it in seven words.
Six things most people never knew
- Jack Roy was the name he quit under. Born Jacob Cohen, legal change at nineteen, years as Jack Roy, then a lounge owner’s suggestion that became the act.
- He was the only person who knew he had quit. Aluminum siding, a family, no headline. The comeback had to invent an image first.
- Dangerfield’s launched a generation. The 1969 club was a room of his own and a farm system: Carrey, Kinison, Roseanne, Seinfeld, Hicks.
- He opened for, and then was thanked by, Jim Carrey. Years on the Las Vegas road. On Rodney’s eightieth birthday, Carrey walked onto Leno’s stage to say it in public.
- He refused the Academy after it refused him. Rejected in 1995, offered a second thought after the noise, he declined the card.
- He answered the website himself. 1995, among the first star-owned sites, an “E-mail me” link that sometimes produced Rodney in the inbox.
He left the grind of being only a talk-show guest. The movies, the club, and a body that had begun to fail became the remaining work.
The later years
Home, in the last marriage, was Los Angeles with Joan, and still the club in New York when he wanted the old room. He kept taking parts that used the brand and a few that did not: Ladybugs (1992), Meet Wally Sparks (1997), which he produced and co-wrote, My 5 Wives (2000), The 4th Tenor (2002). Some of those pictures are thin. He knew it. The living was the living, and the act still killed in the places that had always paid him. On November 22, 2001, his eightieth birthday, he suffered a mild stroke while doing stand-up on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Leno saw the movement go wrong and had the producer call paramedics. In the hospital he smoked marijuana in the room, which did not delight the staff. A year later he came back and did the show on his eighty-first birthday. Carrey’s surprise visit belongs to that season: the student thanking the man who had put him on a Vegas bill when the town did not yet know the face.
On April 8, 2003, he had brain surgery to improve blood flow so that a heart-valve replacement could be attempted. The heart operation came on August 24, 2004, at UCLA. Asked how long he would be in the hospital, he said: if all goes well, about a week; if not, about an hour and a half. He died on October 5, 2004. He was eighty-two. He is at Westwood Village Memorial Park. The Joke of the Day on his website that morning, selected at random, was the cemetery-plot line: there goes the neighborhood. Joan put the sentence on the stone. It has since turned up as a crossword clue. She held a memorial with the word RESPECT written in the sky and a butterfly release Farrah Fawcett helped lead. UCLA’s neurosurgery division named operating rooms for him and created the Rodney Respect Award, which Joan presented first to Leno. The list of people who have taken that award since is a roll of comics who understood the debt.
The last public Rodney was not only the tie tug. He was an old craftsman who had already had a stroke on camera, who still wanted the valve fixed, who still made the nurse’s question into a joke, and who had, after a lifetime of claiming he got no respect, received a Smithsonian shirt, a Walk of Fame star in 2002, a club with his name on the awning, and a wife who described the man the act had hidden. The autobiography was on the table. The website was still his. The heart was not.
After he was gone
Saturday Night Live ran a short piece of him at the gates of heaven, wanting the jokes one more time. Comedy Central mounted a Legends hour. Leno said on the air that the “how bad was it” rhythm he used with Kevin Eubanks was Dangerfield’s popularization. Joan relaunched the site on what would have been his ninety-second birthday; it took Webby nominations. Manhattanville College gave a posthumous honorary doctorate. Los Angeles City College began a Rodney Dangerfield Institute of Comedy class. Kew Gardens put up a plaque. Hebrew University added Joan and Rodney to a wall. The club’s second life as Rodney’s keeps the art-deco joke going. He did not have a quiet old age. He had a second act that lasted from a lounge owner’s whim until a valve, and a stone that still gets the last word. If you only remember the tie, you have the bit. If you remember the siding and the club and the stroke on Leno, you have him.
If all goes well, about a week. If not, about an hour and a half.Rodney Dangerfield, arriving for heart surgery, 2004
The still of the neck mop will last. It should. But the life behind it was a cold house in Queens, a firing, a sales route, a name borrowed from Jack Benny’s writers, a room on First Avenue, and a man who made self-pity into a precise American form. He came out of Babylon, lost the first career, invented a loser the country loved, and then, when the heart failed, left a joke on the stone. That is the arc. That is the story.
Portrait: Jim Accordino · CC BY 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons