On Friday night, Don Rickles used a term normally reserved for Halloween to describe an audience member. The term is usually in there with ghosts and goblins -- boo! -- but last night wasn’t Halloween. It was a Friday night in Vegas, at The Orleans Showroom, and Rickles used that word on a guy he’d been battering all night, a guy up front, in the first row. You can guess the person’s ethnicity.
“Your name must be Leroy!” Rickles said, peering down from the stage and eyeing the audience member like an eagle homing in on a trout. “Nice seats, huh. Leroy? You get a president, you think you can sit anywhere you want!” Later, Rickles dropped the Halloween-ish boomlet, following up with, “That means, ‘Great black man!’ ”
Oof!
Who uses that sort of epithet in 2009, onstage, in front a showroom of people (many of whom played dodge-it with the ushers so they could record the show on handhelds) and gets away with it? Rickles. You sort of shake your head, yeah, while laughing, at the barrage of references to Polish people, Italians, anyone of Jewish descent, anyone Asian, homosexuals, even to those confined to wheelchairs. The act he trotted out at the Sahara’s Casbar Lounge in 1963, when he was opening for Louis Prima, is largely unchanged. In spirit and in fact, Rickles has never budged from his winning formula. He plowed into a woman who identified herself as Korean: “Nice country -- you must be very proud of your homeland (eye roll).”
I wonder how it would be for Don Rickles if he were not the comic icon who has lit up audiences for 50 years. What if he were an unknown who had to take this act to an actual audition?
Casino executive: “I understand your act is interactive. Is that correct?”
Don Rickles: “Yeah, that’s correct. Quite a mind you’ve got going there, Chief. Tell me your name, kid. You’ll think of it -- I think your mom stenciled it on your underwear for when you were at summer camp.”
Executive: “Do you talk to all casino executives this way?”
Don Rickles: “No, just you, Hot Shot. You just get promoted from housekeeping? You might find this interesting: There’s a big crowd at The Rio tonight: They hung a Mexican in the lobby.”
Rickles, at age 82, refers to his male member generally as his “fly” and, specifically, as “Spider.” He jokes about a member of his band looking like “the head guard at Auschwitz.” He spots an Asian person in the audience and says, “The Chinese guy is telling me, ‘Your shirts are done!’ ” In March of 2009, he makes a joke about Peter O’Toole trudging through the desert in “Lawrence of Arabia” (the epic was released in 1962). He summons a guy with short, black hair and glasses onstage to join him in a daffy World War II movie scene, the end of which has Rickles reciting Japanese-style gibberish with his hands folded tightly in front of his face. The guy invited to the stage is wearing designer jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with a shiny gold pattern. Rickles looks him up and down and says, “You look like a (gay) Clark Kent.”
Impressions? Rickles does a mean Jimmy Cagney, singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” even though maybe half of the audience last night -- and it was a packed house -- had no idea who Jimmy Cagney is or was. Choreography? Rickles does a little tap number, after first shouting to “Leroy” to watch his nifty footwork. Wardrobe changes? There are three: Rickles shows up in a tux. Then he sheds the jacket. Then he unties the bow tie. He never leaves the stage upon arrival, lurching about, hunched over seeming to wince from his many aches -- or are those smirks? Hard to tell, but they punctuate his delivery, the winces, the eye rolls, when he says, “I’m really proud to be here. I’ve always wanted to play The Orleans (eye roll). When I first started playing Vegas, this place was a garage.” (Rickles is back tonight; click here for information.)
The man in the wheelchair, stationed just feet from the stage, is a frequent target. “One of Jerry’s kids left over from the telethon” is how Rickles addresses the fan. “You notice how, when Jerry hits the high notes, all of his kids get up and go home?” When it becomes apparent that the kid is not a kid but a grown man, Rickles sort of apologizes. “Geez, I’ve been calling you ‘kid’ the whole time, but you’re a grown man!” At which the foil calls out, “To you, everyone is a kid.”
“You got in a good one,” Rickles says, chuckling. “Now shut up.”
But at the end of the onslaught, having fired off his last insult, Rickles evokes the warmth with thoughts of Mom.
“Never forget your mother,” he says, “because she’ll never forget you.” And he stands center stage, bathed in the cheers of another standing ovation as the curtains draw closed. It wasn’t a final bow, but each performance is a way for him to say goodbye and letting us know we will never see the likes of Don Rickles again. That’s a promise, hockey pucks.
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