Legendary Comedian Jonathan Winters 1925-2013

[Zoneboy]

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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 Monticello

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 andBob 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 ontoJack 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 toldJim Lehreron “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 bizarre secret compartment of 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 correspondentEd Bradleyon “60 Minutes,” “that the world is open for play, that everything and everybody is mockable, in a wonderful way.”

[Mr. Television]

I've been a fan of his since I was a kid. He was a true legend. Very sad. R.I.P. Mr. Winters.

[AB]

May he rest in peace.

[Zoneboy]

I have loved this man since I first saw him in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World over 40 years ago and his performance in The Twilight Zone episode "A Game of Pool" is one of the finest of the series.

Jonathan

[Janice]

He was great, very talented. Rest in peace, Jonathan Winters.

[DVDLover]

I never heard of him but rest in peace

[MrCleveland]

I hope Robin Williams will be doing a eulogy for him since he was his mentor and inspiration.

I'll miss Johnathan Winters to....

[Zoneboy]

[Zoneboy]

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Who in the world of comedy was not inspired by Jonathan Winters?

Judging by the outpouring of reactions to today's news that the pioneering improv comic had died last night at the age of 87, anybody who's at all funny today has a Jonathan Winters memory to share, be it a direct interaction with the rubber-faced entertainer or because he was their parents' all-time fave.


"Jonathan Winters was the king—a true genius. He was number one. There is no number two. #jonathanwinters," wrote another all-time king of comedy, Bob Newhart.

And these glowing words were just the beginning.

Jim Carrey: "Jonathan Winters was the worthy custodian of a sparkling and childish comedic genius. He did God's work. I was lucky 2 know him. =;o{|}"

Jimmy Kimmel: "I feel very lucky to have had the chance to know the great Jonathan Winters, who was funny from beginning to end."

Steve Carell: "Jonathan Winters was wildly funny."

Steve Martin: "Goodbye, Jonathon [sic] Winters. You were not only one of the greats, but one of the great greats."

Pee-wee Herman: "Comedy loses a KING! Jonathan Winters was an influence on so many and there was nobody like him. Loved you, Jonathan!"

John Stamos: "One of my all time fav's RIP Mr. Winters."

Michael Ian Black: "Jonathan Winters basically invented alternative comedy. RIP"


Joel McHale "R.I.P #JonathanWinters --One of the funniest & most unique to walk the land."

Doug Benson: "When I was a kid Jonathan Winters in IT'S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD was my most favorite thing. RIP"

Keith Olbermann: "My condolences to family, friends and fans of the immortal Jonathan Winters. The influence he had cannot be underestimated." "I think my friend @TheRichardLewis won't mind my RT of photo he sent last year: His 'comedy father' #JonathanWinters http://moby.to/q0e8xs."

Richard Lewis: "I just lost a best friend, Jonathan Winters. He meant the world to me. A genius and the greatest improvisational comedian of all time."

VIDEO: Watch the last footage of late singer Jenni Rivera on the upcoming final season of I Love Jenni

Jim Gaffigan: "RIP Jonathan Winters - one of the greats. Really. So funny."

Chelsea Peretti: "JONATHAN WINTERS WAS MY DAD'S FAVORITE HE CRANK CALLED HIM FOR ME &MY DAD GIGGLED LIKE A SCHOOLBOY NEVER HEARD HIM SO HAPPY IT WAS THE BEST."

Chris Hardwick: "RIP Jonathan Winters. Sad day for comedy fans. We were lucky to have had him at all."

Carl Reiner: [Jonathan] Winters was the comedian's comedian's comedian's [Chief Jester]!

Albert Brooks: "R.I.P Jonathan Winters. Beyond funny, He invented a new category of comedic genius."

Kevin Pollack: "Had a great run. Actual genius."

Joe Rogan: "RIP to Jonathan Winters. A truly hilarious and silly man. The world just got a little bit les [sic] funny."

[Mr. Television]

http://entertainment.time.com/2013/0...ers-1925-2013/

RIP Jonathan Winters, 1925–2013
By James Poniewozik

When I was first introduced to Jonathan Winters, as a kid watching The Hollywood Squares and Mork & Mindy, he was already a giant of American comedy. But when he appeared on the fourth season of Mork, I just knew him as a funny old man pretending to be a kid. The premise, introduced in the sitcom’s final season, was that space alien Mork (Robin Williams) laid an egg, out of which hatched a “baby,” Mearth, played by Winters. Orkans, we were told, aged backwards. I loved it–here was this old guy transforming himself into a bizarrely hilarious character, just like Robin Williams!

Befitting the sitcom’s aging-backwards premise, of course, I really was seeing things in reverse. Winters—who died yesterday at age 87—was really comedic father to Williams and many others, an inspiration for his comedy of improvised multiple personalities, and his creative DNA was in many of the comics who followed him for years.

Winters was a big, looming oval of a guy, yet he could transform himself at will. Decades before I discovered him, he was creating characters on comedy albums and late-night TV, characters like the sharply sweet old lady Maude Frickert, and going on legendary live-TV riffs with Jack Paar and Johnny Carson.

Winters was a funny, funny comedian, and the forebear of antic improv comics like Williams. But key to that was that he was also a funny, funny actor. (Actually, an actor, period; among his credits was a menacing turn in the 1961 Twilight Zone episode “A Game of Pool” with Jack Klugman.) He helped establish the idea, now common to comedy fans, that being a humorist was not just about telling jokes but inhabiting characters.

It was only later, after Mork went off the air and I got older, that I caught up with some of his past work, like his movie roles in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming. But even a young Mork & Mindy fan could see there was a magic to someone who could become a hunched, wide-eyed toddler in the hulking body of a man. Rubber-faced and endlessly expressive, Winters may not have been an actual alien, but he was a certified shape-shifter, and the egg from which a brood of comedians were born. RIP.

[robyrob]

he was a true icon

[Family Ties Forever!]

RIP

[80sTrivia]

So very sad to hear of Jonathan's passing. He was certainly a comedic legend who influenced so many of the comics of today. He will be missed...

[ThomasE]

Awww man. I was disappointed to hear about this when I saw it on TV today. We are losing a lot of good people this year.

[catlover79]

Most of his classic stuff was before my time, but I used to watch syndicated reruns of Mork & Mindy when I was a little kid way back in the mid/late 80s. Mearth gave me nightmares. Seeing a big middle-aged man dressed like a baby and jabbering in baby talk freaked me out big time. A few years later, I did watch him as the grandpa on the short-lived 90s sitcom Davis Rules (which also starred a then-unknown Bonnie Hunt) and liked him just fine on that.

Tonight, I was watching the evening news with my mom when they announced Mr. Winters' passing and they showed classic clips of him at his finest. My mom was just howling in laughter watching them, and remembering how much my grandma and especially my uncle (may they both rest in peace) loved him.

God rest him.