Newswise — Maryland's Director of the Art Gliner Humor Center, Associate Professor Larry Mintz, remembers Rodney Dangerfield as a "hugely entertaining" comic whose humor in movies like Caddyshack, and stand-up comedy, harkened back to the days of the "little man" who always had a ready quip or one-liner for any situation. Dangerfield died Tuesday from complications after heart surgery in Los Angeles. He was 82.
Mintz is available to talk about Rodney Dangerfield and his comedic legacy.
Larry Mintz - associate professor and director, Art Gliner Center for Humor Studies, University of Maryland.
Expertise - American popular culture and American humor with an emphasis on television, standup comedy, popular literature and theater.
Mintz says -
Rodney Dangerfield comes out of the traditions of the "little man" persona and the traditional one-liner, quip and structured joke comedian. The "little man" goes back to the 20's and the literary personae of Thurber, Benchely, Perelman, and White, among others. It is also expressed in comic strips in the persons of Charlie Brown and Dagwood Bumstead among others, and elsewhere in the popular culture. Audiences laugh at the "poor soul" (Jackie Gleason's character, see also Woody Allen) as exaggerated images of their own vulnerability, anti-hero status, and necessary humility. But the "little man" (Chaplin's Tramp, Keaton, Langon and Lloyd) also has a tricky, sneaky, sly, side of his personality. He strikes back, rarely directly but through ironic victories achieved in spite of the odds against him. He survives.
In his film roles, Dangerfield played another important character, the self-made, commonsensical, boor - rich, arrogant, obnoxious, but an effective foil for snobs, equally arrogant, but less down-to-earth elites. This aspect of the "wise fool" persona makes formal education, social status, and polite manners less important than commonsense and hard work, or at least doggedness. His comedic work was hugely entertaining, and it represents a contemporary expression of important uses of humor to examine aspects of the "national character" as it is perceived by American audiences.
Credentials: director of the Art Gliner Humor Center; former editor of Humor, International Journal of Humor. Mintz has published a number of articles about humor and popular culture.
Web Page: http://amst.umd.edu/People/mintz.html
The release is on the web at: http://www.urhome.umd.edu/newsdesk/culture/release.cfm?ArticleID=970
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