Jonathan Winters, comedy legend was 87

Jonathan Winters had one of those long, varied entertainment industry careers after working New York comedy clubs and moving to early television in the 1950s. He became a regular on "The Tonight Show" when it was hosted in New York by Jack Paar. He has done standup, comedy record albums (with 11 Grammy nominations), TV, movies, cartoons, commercials, voice work and more. He played Fats Brown, a dead pool legend, in a memorable 1961 episode of “The Twilight Zone” opposite Jack Klugman. In the early 1980s, he recurred alongside Robin Williams on TV's "Mork and Mindy." "Jonathan’s the source for me, the guy that made it all possible,” Williams once said. “He’s the Smithsonian, all these riffs he stores up. Just sit back and watch him. He’s a force of energy. Comedy would be more closed off without him.” The Los Angeles Times obit posted today calls Winters "one of the great comedians of the 20th century." He died Thursday night at home in Montecito, his website announced.

From the New York Times obit by William Grimes:

Mr. Winters, a rotund man whose face had a melancholy basset-hound expression in repose, burst onto the comedy scene in the late 1950s and instantly made his mark as one of the funniest, least definable comics in a rising generation that included Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart.

Mr. Winters was at his best when winging it, confounding television hosts and luckless straight men with his rapid-fire delivery of bizarre observations uttered by characters like Elwood P. Suggins, a Midwestern Everyman, or one-off creations like the woodland sprite who bounded onto Jack Paar’s late-night show and simperingly proclaimed: “I’m the voice of spring. I bring you little goodies from the forest.”

A one-man sketch factory, Mr. Winters could re-enact Hollywood movies, complete with sound effects, or create sublime comic nonsense with simple props like a pen-and-pencil set.

The unpredictable, often surreal quality of his humor had a powerful influence on later comedians like Robin Williams but made him hard to package as an entertainer. His brilliant turns as a guest on programs like “The Steve Allen Show” and “The Tonight Show” — in both the Jack Paar and Johnny Carson eras — kept him in constant demand. But a successful television series eluded him, as did a Hollywood career, despite memorable performances in films like “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” “The Loved One” and “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.”

As early as the 1950s, Winters suffered a nervous breakdown and later felt that being public about his battles with bipolar disease affected his career. "There are bigger stars than me with all kinds of coke problems, sauce problems, guys that are married four, five times," he once said. "Then they put them in picture after picture. Why should I have to go through my life auditioning and proving I’m sane?”

A friend, Jim B. Smith, saved more than 3,000 phone messages from Winters through the years and published a selection in the 1989 book “Jonathan Winters… After the Beep.” Winters won an acting Emmy in 1991 for a guest spot on "Davis Rules."

Winters' first film was "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad Mad World," which he talks about here: