To the end, comedian Don Rickles savored his reputation as an equal-opportunity skewerer.
“I thought, ‘I made it. I’m in Hollywood. Rickles insulted me,’” said Academy Award-winning actress Marisa Tomei.
Sportscaster Rich Eisen quipped: “The fact he actually insulted my sweater is something I’ll never forget.”
Even Rickles’s wife was a target.
“The reason my mother always said, “Marry a Jewish girl’ is because life and love is tough enough. She always said, ‘When you marry [in] the same faith, it makes life a little easier.’ And then I’ve been married to my wife for 51 years, and [my mother] was so wrong. So wrong,” said Rickles.
The hits taken by Tomei, Eisen and Barbara Rickles occurred during a 13-episode YouTube series, Dinner with Don, consisting of Rickles chatting one-on-one (in the case of director Martin Scorcese and actor Robert DeNiro, one-on-two) in Los Angeles-area restaurants with entertainment-industry figures.
Rickles also had a heart and he appreciated others’ humor.
In an interview for this article, his longtime manager, Tony Oppedisano, told of a homeless man approaching Rickles for a handout as the latter arrived in a limousine at a Manhattan restaurant. Oppedisano prepared to shoo away the man, but Rickles said, “I’m not Frank Sinatra. I need my fans.”
Rickles handed the man three $100 bills and told him, “Here, go buy a ranch.”
When Rickles returned to the car after dinner, the man was prepared.
“Now that I have a ranch, I could use some cattle,” he said.
Rickles laughed “and peeled off another two $100 bills,” Oppedisano said.
There you have it: the man entertainer Dean Martin called “The Master of Malice” and “The Merchant of Venom” and legendary talk-show host Johnny Carson nicknamed “Mr. Warmth.”
The Manhattan encounter occurred in late 2015 or early 2016, when Oppedisano accompanied Rickles on a tour involving six performances and several talk-show appearances in the New York City area.
The Dinner with Don conversations all were filmed in December 2016 and January 2017. A few months later, on April 6, Rickles died of kidney failure at age 91.
On April 6, 2026, I wrote this article, just ahead of what would have been the centennial of Rickles’s birth on May 8, 1926.
I never met Rickles or saw him perform in person, but he’s captivated me ever since my father related, when I was a child, how he attended Congregation Tifereth Israel, in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens, New York, where got to know Rickles as a boy, five years older, whom he described as a smart aleck. I learned only recently that Rickles’s parents, Max and Etta, are buried in the same cemetery as my father’s parents.
In April 1994, I visited the synagogue for the first time to host a kiddush for the aged congregants on the 50th anniversary of Dad’s bar mitzvah. (He’d passed away a year and a half before.) Along the sanctuary’s back wall, I spotted a stained-glass window whose notation read something like, “In memory of Max Rickles, from your loving son Don.”
In the Dinner with Don series, Rickles estimated having appeared 100 times as a guest on Carson’s The Tonight Show. I’d watched and enjoyed scores of those spots, and many of his visits to David Letterman’s late-night shows, too. Rickles came across as brash, sharp and witty, and I could lay a slight claim to this huge star who also hailed from Queens.
Rickles studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in midtown Manhattan and would appear as an actor on television series and movies; he might be best known by younger fans for late-career roles as the voice of Mr. Potato Head in the Toy Story animated films. But he attained fame and fortune as a stand-up comic, first in New York and later in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, who riffed, unrehearsed, with his subjects often being the shows’ attendees themselves. Whether the target was a celebrity or Mr. Average, Rickles did it with an edge, a dagger poked verbally, yet somehow affectionately, into someone’s ribs rather than the heart.
Take this, at a tribute to Bob Hope, who entertained American soldiers at far-flung bases over many decades: “Bob, I’m so happy for you. Really. But do us a favor: Get off the air. The soldiers, the navy — they’re getting tired. Every time there’s a war, you’re right there. They’re fed up; they’re fighting,” Rickles said, speaking over incessant laughter, including Hope’s. “Sit in a steam room. Don’t bother people. Everybody made a fuss over you tonight. I’m fed up. I swear. It’s all over, Bob.”
“A classic ball-buster, yet charming and a class act,” someone commented online under a video montage that included the Hope appearance.
Aiming, as Rickles did, at someone’s attractiveness, weight, race or ethnicity would be problematic in today’s politically-correct era.
“He could make fun of everyone and everything, including himself,” said Oppedisano. “People knew Don’s heart, that he was basically a warm and caring individual.”
“You could always depend on him to be so funny, so off-the-cuff,” said Manuel Basanese, an associate professor at Emerson College’s School of Film, Television, and Media Arts. “His genius was that he could get away with so much. … They were savage jokes, they were rough, but he was a lovable person.”
Mindy Rickles remembered her father being “definitely funny at home” and “very family-oriented,” regularly bringing her, her late brother Larry and Barbara on road trips when he performed in Reno, Nevada, and Lake Tahoe, on the Nevada-California border, where the children frolicked in the snow and enjoyed a duck pond near the house where they stayed.
“If I was sitting in the audience, he liked to introduce me. I would get up and wave. It was kind of fun,” she said. Back in Beverly Hills, Don often spent his leisure time watching sports on television. He and his family always attended services at Sinai Temple on the High Holy Days. “His identity as a Jew was a huge part of who he was. When we went to temple, he knew the prayers,” Mindy Rickles said.
In 1977, Rickles organized an event in Los Angeles to raise funds to build a gymnasium in the shul. The evening, marketed as “Rickles and His Friends,” featured performances by actors, singers and comedians. Sinatra, a close friend and among America’s greatest-ever entertainers, cancelled at the last minute. Years earlier, soon after they met, Rickles went to a restaurant and noticed Sinatra dining there, too. Rickles privately asked Sinatra to stop by to say hello, so as to impress Rickles’s date. Sinatra did just that. “Can’t you see I’m eating, Frank?” Rickles snapped at him.
That was Rickles.
Fifty years after its construction, the Rickles Gymnasium continues to be used almost every day by children attending the synagogue’s schools. The gym was so popular as a venue for men’s basketball leagues that Howard Lesner, Sinai Temple’s executive director until 2021, said he had to restrict players to the synagogue’s members.
Rickles “was not a shul-goer,” said Lesner. “But his father’s and mother’s yahrzeits were extremely important to him. He’d always send a check for their yahrzeits.”
Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler can be reached at [email protected].
