Youngman Was Never Without a Joke

In his later years, at Friars Club roasts and memorial services, Henny Youngman would get up and deliver jokes--one-liner after corny one-liner--sometimes not bothering to eulogize the deceased or refer to the person being roasted.

Once, after playing to 6,500 people at the Waldolf-Astoria Hotel in New York, Youngman accidentally took the elevator to the second floor, where he saw a sign for “Levi Bar Mitzvah, Room 240.” He found the bar mitzvah boy’s father and asked if he could go on for 10 minutes. “I made an extra $150,” he remembered. “Ah, what a night!”

On visits to Los Angeles to see family, he would look up old friends Milton Berle and Jan Murray to finagle free lunches at the Hillcrest Country Club or the Friars.

One day after the 91-year-old Youngman died Tuesday in New York, following a bout with pneumonia, longtime show business friends were moved mostly to repeat his jokes, which in the end would have pleased him most.

“Whenever he saw you, he immediately had a couple of jokes,” said comedian Red Buttons, who first met Youngman some 60 years ago. “He’d say, ‘Would you like a diamond pin?’ and then he’d give you a pin with a dime on it.”

“You want to know my favorite joke of his?” said Rodney Dangerfield, another king of the one-liners. “It goes: I told the airline, ‘I want to go to Chicago, but send my luggage to Toronto.’ They said, ‘We can’t do that.’ I said, ‘Why not, you did it before?’ ”

If there was a darker side to Youngman, it never revealed itself--at least not according to those who spent endless nights hanging out with him in New York institutions like Lindy’s and the Carnegie Deli in the old days. Generous with his time around young comics like Buttons, Murray and Jack Carter, Youngman wasn’t afraid to joke about this failures, once quipping: “A fellow called me up and said, ‘What time is the next show?’ I said, ‘What time can you make it?’ ”

While other comedians like Berle, Jack Benny and Danny Thomas made the jump to radio and later television, Youngman over the decades stayed the quintessential nightclub comic--a performer always with 10 minutes at the ready, who didn’t leave the business until last December, when he caught a cold on a two-show-a-night trip to San Francisco.

“The day his wife [Sadie] died he called me,” remembered comedian Carter. “He said, ‘Sadie died, you wanna do a club date for me?’ He didn’t even give me a chance to say, ‘I’m sorry your wife died.’ ”

By the 1960s, Youngman had become something of an anachronism--his rapid-fire one-liners supplanted in the stand-up comedy zeitgeist by political comics such as Lenny Bruce and storytellers like Bill Cosby.

But in the 1970s he enjoyed a resurgence in popularity, thanks in part to regular appearances on “Laugh-In,” where he was offered up as a kind of camp figure and caught on with a new generation of fans.

“Henny used to call me every week, collect,” said “Laugh-In” producer George Schlatter. “It got to the point where I was telling Henny his own jokes, and he liked them so much he’d say, ‘Let me write that down.’ ”

Youngman also appeared in movies, from “A Wave and a WAC and a Marine” in 1941 with Abbott and Costello to two Mel Brooks films, “Silent Movie” (1976) and “History of the World Part I” (1981).

And then there was his memorable cameo in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 film, “GoodFellas,” in which he played a stand-up comic entertaining a roomful of gangsters at the Copacabana.

“Henny Youngman was one of the last surviving members of the golden age of American stand-up comedy,” Scorsese said in a statement through his publicist. “It’s hard to imagine the world without him.”

To a younger generation of comics, Youngman served as a model of longevity. The marquee at the Laugh Factory, in tribute, reads: “Henny Youngman, rest in peace. Make God laugh.”

“Dear God, take Henny--please,” comedian and actor Billy Crystal said affectionately.

Crystal, who hosts the Academy Awards March 23, said he did not know Youngman well, but admired him and his longevity.

“He was funny until he was 91,” he said.

Until he was hospitalized three weeks before his death, Youngman had lunch at the Friars Club every day, eating beneath a Leroy Neiman portrait of the comedian with his trusty violin. There, he kibitzed with old-time press agents and comics.

Comedian Murray saw Youngman last June, when he came to Los Angeles for Youngman’s grandson’s bar mitzvah.

“He was in a wheelchair, and he was really just a shadow of his former self,” Murray said. “He’d fade in and out, which broke my heart. But even then, he’d come out of his reverie and say something hysterical.”

Added Buttons: “I’m sure he was funny right up to the end. Even in the hospital, he would’ve said: ‘I was all right, and then I took a turn for the nurse.’ ”