Comic great Jonathan Winters was struggling to make a name for himself in the early 1950s when a man at the nightclub where he was performing offered some life-changing advice.
Winters had a talent for channeling the voices of celebrities like Gary Cooper and Boris Karloff but, the man observed, "All you're doing is shining their shoes. You'd best think up your own characters."
That, Winters told TV Guide many years later, was "the best hunk of criticism I ever got."
With his rubbery, moon-shaped face and pitch-perfect ear for speech patterns, Winters began to unleash a cavalcade of charmingly twisted characters, including a redneck ballplayer, a lisping child and a prissy schoolmarm. He gave many of them names — Elwood P. Suggins, Chester Honeyhugger and, perhaps most beloved, Maude Frickert the swinging granny he performed in drag and described as a cross between Whistler's and Norman Bates' mothers.
"If you ask me who are the 25 most funny people I know," Jack Paar would later quip on the "Tonight" show, "I would say, 'Here they are: Jonathan Winters.'"
Winters, whose talent for mimicry, sound effects and improvisation made him a comic original and creative godfather to later generations of comedians like Lily Tomlin and Robin Williams, died Thursday at his longtime home in Montecito. He was 87.
"He was one of the great comedy talents in the history of the United States, just brilliant. He could play any character in the world," said Gary Owens, his close friend who was the announcer on TV's "Laugh In."
Tributes flowed from the younger comics he influenced. "First he was my idol, then he was my mentor and amazing friend," Williams said in a statement Friday. "I'll miss him huge. He was my Comedy Buddha. Long live the Buddha."
Jim Carrey said on Twitter that Winters "was the worthy custodian of a sparkling and childish comedic genius. He did God's work. I was lucky 2 know him."
Audiences never knew what to expect from Winters, who once walked onto the Paar show wearing a goat-horned wig and clutching a small branch while announcing he was the Voice of Spring. Another time, Paar handed him a stick and away Winters went on a madcap stream of impressions, from a fisherman to a lion tamer to Bing Crosby wielding a golf club.
He punctuated his comedy vignettes with realistically accurate sound effects — a rotary phone being dialed, raindrops, a rushing subway. As he explained, "I try to paint verbal pictures."
What he didn't do, he once said, was tell jokes. "The characters," he explained, "are my jokes."
His comedy defied categorization.
"Jonathan Winters was probably the most admired — and the most inimitable — of all the comedians of his time," Gerald Nachman wrote in his 2003 book "Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s"
"While he calls himself a satirist, it isn't traditional satire," Nachman wrote. "Most satirists mock institutions or events or politicians; Winters mocked the yokels next door with a home (though bizarre) brand of cartoon commentary, sketching and sculpting characters with droll comments that work like balloons above their heads."
During his more than half-century career, Winters appeared only occasionally in movies, most notably in the 1960s in "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," "The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming," "The Loved One" and, more recently, "The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle."
TV gave him his greatest exposure and opportunity to "wing it."
He hosted his own comedy-variety TV shows in the '50s, '60s and '70s. He also starred in numerous specials.
In the 1981-82 TV season, Winters surfaced — or, more accurately, hatched out of a giant egg — on the sitcom "Mork & Mindy" starring Robin Williams and Pam Dawber.
As Mearth, Mork and Mindy's middle-aged "infant" offspring, Winters inspired Williams to even greater improvisational heights.
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