There's a secret to the success of 81-year-old insult comedian and beloved American institution Don Rickles: He cannot tell a joke.
He's a comedian famed for telling off all and sundry -- calling everyone a "hockey puck," from his wife to a mercurial Frank Sinatra, whose old blue eyes would give no hint of whether he was going to laugh or hit. Talk about flirting with danger.
Over a Bloody Mary, Rickles tried to explain his style, how he came to insult anyone who wandered across his path.
"I just can't tell jokes. It wasn't that someone gave me a hard time and I insulted him back. It's just that I tell jokes badly, and as a young man I had a personality that I could rib somebody and get away with it. My father was the same way. My mother was a Jewish Gen. Patton."
In his just-published autobiography, "Rickles' Book," the man nicknamed "Mr. Warmth" recounts his finest "hits," or insults, especially his assaults on Sinatra.
The singer's mother was a friend of Rickles' mother, and because of entreaties from "Gen. Patton," Dolly Sinatra forced her son to go see Rickles at a club. Sinatra walked in with a coterie of tough guys, and Rickles looked at him and said: "Frank, make yourself at home. Hit somebody."
"Sinatra paused and then smiled. No one ever talked to him like that before," Rickles said, fondly recalling that Sinatra "liked to call me 'bullet-head.' "
Then there was the time that he privately asked Sinatra to join his table to impress a girl he dated. As Sinatra went over, Rickles said: "Not now, Frank. Can't you see that I am with someone?"
"He laughed like crazy, and he signaled to his security men to carry me out of the casino. The whole place laughed," said Rickles, whose show business career was filled with famous friendships and unexpected collaborations.
"Sinatra had a lot of mood swings, but he was wonderful to my wife, Barbara, and to me. He made no bones about who he liked and who he loved, and he had this great charisma. When he walked into a room, it stopped. I've only seen that happen with Ronald Reagan."
That never stopped him from throwing in the zingers when he performed in front of Reagan. "Is this too fast for you, Ronnie?" As he speaks, a fan materializes out of nowhere with a napkin to be autographed. "You're the greatest, the funniest," he tells Rickles, the man who can't tell a joke.
