[Vision2020] Jonathan Winters, comic genius of improvisation, dies at 87

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times at:

http://tinyurl.com/cwu7e4c

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Jonathan Winters, comic genius of improvisation, dies at 87


Jonathan Winters was admired by a generation of comedians for his brilliant wit, gift of mimicry and a boundless imagination. 'The characters are my jokes,' he explained.

By Dennis McLellan, Special to The Times

12:40 PM PDT, April 12, 2013

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Jonathan Winters, whose talent for mimicry, sound effects and improvisation, combined with an antic, fertile imagination and an uncanny ability to conjure up more characters than Central Casting, made him a comic original, has died. He was 87.

Winters, who had been in declining health, died Thursday at his longtime home in Montecito, said Gary Owens, a close friend.

"He was one of the great comedy talents in the history of the United States, just brilliant. He could play any character in the world," said Owens, a radio personality who was the announcer on TV's "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In."

Jack Paar, who helped propel Winters into the national consciousness with his appearances on the "Tonight" show in the late 1950s, once introduced the freewheeling comedian by saying, "Well, if you ask me who are the 25 most funny people I know, I would say, 'Here they are: Jonathan Winters.'"

With his rubbery, moon-shaped face and pitch-perfect ear for speech patterns, Winters could slip into the character of a redneck ballplayer, a lisping child, a prissy schoolmarm and others.

Winters punctuated his comedy vignettes with realistically accurate sound effects —a rotary phone being dialed, raindrops, a rushing subway. As he explained, "I try to paint verbal pictures."

Audiences never knew what to expect from Winters, who once walked out onto the Paar show wearing a goat-horned wig and clutching a small branch while announcing he was the Voice of Spring.

"I don't do jokes," Winters once said. "The characters are my jokes."

His most famous recurring character in a colorful stable that included redneck Elwood P. Suggins and big kid Chester Honneyhugger, was gray-haired Maude Frickert the swinging granny.

Winters, who performed Maude in drag, described her as a cross between Whistler's and Norman Bates' mothers.

As a comedian, Winters defied categorization.

"Jonathan Winters was probably the most admired — and the most inimitable — of all the comedians of his time," Gerald Nachman wrote in his 2003 book "Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s"

"While he calls himself a satirist, it isn't traditional satire," Nachman wrote. "Most satirists mock institutions or events or politicians; Winters mocked the yokels next door with a home (though bizarre) brand of cartoon commentary, sketching and sculpting characters with droll comments that work like balloons above their heads."

During his more than half-century career, Winters appeared only occasionally in movies, most notably in "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," "The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming," "The Loved One" and "The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle."

TV gave him his greatest exposure and opportunity to "wing it."

He hosted his own comedy-variety TV shows in the '50s, '60s and '70s. He also starred in numerous specials.

In the 1981-82 TV season, Winters surfaced — or more accurately hatched out of a giant egg — on the sitcom "Mork & Mindy" starring Robin Williams and Pam Dawber.

As Mearth, Mork and Mindy's middle-aged "infant" offspring, Winters inspired Williams to even greater improvisational heights.

Williams later acknowledged to TV Guide that "Jonathan's the source for me, the guy that made it all possible. He's the Smithsonian, all these riffs he stores up. He's a force of energy. Comedy would be more closed off without him."

In the short-lived 1991-92 situation comedy "Davis Rules," Winters played Gunny Davis, an eccentric, retired Marine gunnery officer who moves in with his widowed son (played by Randy Quaid) to help raise the son's three boys.

To Winters' delight, he was encouraged to improvise in the supporting role that earned him an Emmy Award.

Over the years, Winters provided voices for a number of cartoons, including "The Smurfs" and "The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley."

He also did commercials, most memorably those as the urbane, white-clad spokesperson for Hefty trash bags, who famously pronounced garbage "gar-bahj"; and a string of completely improvised commercials for the California Egg Commission.

Winters, who won a Grammy for his 1995 comedy album "Crank Calls," also wrote a bestselling book, "Winters' Tales: Stories and Observations for the Unusual" (1987), as well as producing pen and ink drawings and what have been called "surrealist-impressionist-primitive" paintings.

In 1999 he received the Kennedy Center's second annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

Winters once said that he never grew older; he just became an older child.

But he was a wounded "child" — an adult who used to carry in his wallet the Emerson quotation, "Humor is the mistress of sorrow."

He was born in Dayton, Ohio, on Nov. 11, 1925. His banker father was a heavy drinker who would leave his young son locked in the car while he got drunk in a bar.

Both of his parents have been characterized as being chilly disciplinarians who put their own needs first and provided no encouragement for their only child.

Winters continued to harbor animosity toward both parents, particularly his father.

The heavy discipline, he told Newsweek in 1991, filled his childhood with "insecurity, shyness, neuroses and paranoia."

After his parents divorced when he was 7, Winters lived with his mother and grandmother in Springfield, Ohio, where his quick-witted mother hosted a radio talk show for women.

Winters learned early on to entertain himself.

His mother and other people would stop by his bedroom, he told the Palm Beach Post in 2000, "and say, 'What are you doing in there? Who are you talking to?' I'd say, 'I'm talking to Lord Telfin. Lord Telfin Salo. He just came in on British Airwaves. Please say hello. We're having a little tea and biscuits.'"

Sent to boarding school when he got older, he would amuse his friends at the local tavern with his impressions of movie stars. But he remained a loner.

He enlisted in the Marines at 17, in 1943. "I wanted to fight," he told AARP magazine in 2003. "But mostly, I think, I wanted to get away from my parents."

After serving in the South Pacific, Winters briefly attended Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. But dreaming of becoming a cartoonist, he transferred to the Dayton Art Institute.

There, he met his future wife, Eileen, who once said, "The first time I heard him talk, my jaw began hanging open. Did he make up all those things all by himself?"

In 1949, she encouraged him to enter an amateur talent show, which was offering the winner a new watch.

Winters did his impression of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, featuring the voices of Gary Cooper, Boris Karloff and others. He not only won the watch but was offered a $65-a-week job as the morning disc jockey at Dayton radio station WING.

In 1950, he moved to Columbus, where he hosted various local TV shows. When he was denied a $5 raise in 1953, he quit and moved to New York City, with only $56.46.

After one of his early nightclub performances, he received what he later called "the best hunk of criticism I ever got."

One night, he told TV Guide in 2000, "this man said to me, 'You got a lot of talent. But the characters you're playing, movie stars, they've already made it. All you're doing is shining their shoes. You'd best think up your own characters."

Thus was born feisty granny Maude Frickert, whom he based on his mother and his aunt; and other reality-based characters.

It paid off, with Winters becoming a favorite at the Blue Angel and other nightclubs, where his reputation as a unique comic spread via TV appearances on Steve Allen's "Tonight" show and other programs.

But Winters' growing success came with a price.

He reportedly was drinking up to two quarts of liquor a day before he stopped drinking in his early 30s. He also suffered two nervous breakdowns, the first in 1959 and the second in 1961. The latter episode kept him in a hospital for eight months.

Comedian Shelley Berman once described Winters as "the most 'on' comedian I know."

On movie sets, he was known to ad-lib 30 minutes for the crew at lunch. The ever-playful Winters once turned to fellow comic Pat McCormick in a crowded elevator and said, "You don't think we tied him up too tight?"

He had a pacemaker implanted in 1988. After collapsing earlier that year, he was given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation by a male paramedic. The first thing Winters said when he came to was, "You're a very attractive man."

His wife died in 2009. He is survived by two children, Jay and Lucinda, and five grandchildren.

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Seeya round town, Moscow, because . . .

"Moscow Cares" (the most fun you can have with your pants on)
http://www.MoscowCares.com
  
Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"There's room at the top they are telling you still 
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill 
If you want to be like the folks on the hill."

- John Lennon
 
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