RODNEY DANGERFIELD

Men who do things without being told draw the most wages.

Even as a kid, Rodney Dangerfield didn't get any respect. Moving around the dingy neighborhoods of New York's five boroughs, the only stability in Dangerfield's life was his domineering mother, a woman whom he claims never showed him any affection and treated him as an unwanted burden (which he must have been to a woman whose only advice to her son was to "never eat a frankfurter from the man on the corner with the orange umbrella. Those hot dogs are made of snakes.") For Dangerfield comedy was the only escape from this incredibly fractured childhood. 

It's pretty clear from the first page of Dangerfield's autobiography, It's Not Easy Bein' Me, just where the self-deprecating humor and inferiority complex that have made his act famous developed. Though Dangerfield still harbors ill feelings toward his mother, her coldness acted as a catalyst for his career, helping to create his act as the unwanted, unloved, yet affable loser. It's almost surprising to find out that Dangerfield's hard luck personae has any basis in reality at all. "Could anybody really have had it that bad?" you might ask when listening to Dangerfield's act. Well, Rodney apparently did, and much of his autobiography is spent in his childhood, where Rodney talks about the lack of an attentive adult in his life and how that led him to associate with the life's losers.

It's no surprise that Dangerfield's most successful film roles (Al Czervik in Caddyshack and Thornton Mellon in Back to School) have been as average Joes who find monetary success, but never lose touch with his roots. That's Rodney's story. Dangerfield certainly wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth and much of the book deals with the odd jobs that he's performed throughout life just to get by, beginning with a series of delivery jobs he held as a young boy. Even into his forties, Dangerfield was still selling aluminum siding as he tried to break his way into show business! 

Dangerfield's story is a testament to underdogs who no matter what they have working against them have continued to fight for what they're after. Nobody ever handed Rodney a job. He worked for every inch he got as he describes in his various attempted entries into show business doing everything from working as a barker at a club, to waiting tables, to doing his act for free, just so long as someone was there to listen. All of this leading up to his big break, a bit part on The Ed Sullivan Show that blossomed into a regular appearance and eventually the role as everyone's favorite schmo.

What's most inspiring about Rodney's journey into show business is that when he finally got to the point where his name was as asset, where people knew his act and knew who he was, he used that fame to catapult other young comedians by opening his Dangerfield's comedy club in New York as well as through a series of HBO young comedians specials which staged the first acts by the likes of Jim Carrey, Sam Kinison and Roseanne Barr.

Dangerfield's biography is a veritable journey through American comedy of the last century (insert your favorite "I'm so old" Rodney joke here). With anecdotes on everyone from Jack Benny, Jackie Gleason, Joe Ancis, and Al Jolson to Lenny Bruce, Redd Foxx, and Andy Kauffman to the numerous comics who graced the stage at Dangerfield's, Rodney seems to have been part of nearly every major comic movement of the last eighty years. 

It's Not Easy Bein' Me threads these anecdotes with a rich collection of some of Dangerfield's best material on everything from sex: "People think I get plenty of girls. I go to a drive-in movies and o push-ups in the backseat of my car"; to marriage: "I remember before we were married, I told my wife, 'Honey, I love you. Will you marry me?' She said, 'If you really loved me, you wouldn't ask me to do that"; to, his favorite, disrespect: "I went to the store to buy some rat poison and the clerk said, 'Shall I wrap it, or do you want to eat it here?"

Even if you don't know much about stand up comedy, Dangerfield's life is interesting as a chronicle of the American entertainment industry, from the very bottom to the top. As the subtitle (A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs) describes, along the way Dangerfield encounters lots of sex (I don't think he wanted to leave out a single tryst) and lots of drugs, but it's his initiative and unwillingness to give up and especially his ability to find humor in even the most difficult situations is the real juicy part here, and one that should inspire even the most defeated of aspiring stars to give it another try.