Buddy Hackett, who broke into comedy as a young waiter-performer in New York’s Catskill Mountains and went on to achieve iconic status as a raunchy nightclub performer and rubber-faced clown in movies including The Music Man and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, died Monday at his home in Malibu. He was 78.
The cause of death was not immediately clear. Mr. Hackett had been suffering from a chest cold, although he had been in “robust good health” until a few days ago, according to a family spokesperson.
Mr. Hackett hadn’t worked professionally since 1996, when he stopped performing after experiencing dizziness and shortness of breath onstage.
Increasingly reclusive, he nevertheless managed to keep telling jokes. Dick Martin, who with comedy partner Dan Rowan hosted the seminal TV series Laugh-In, was among those who still received calls from Mr. Hackett regularly.
Mr. Hackett wouldn’t identify himself, Martin told the Los Angeles Times on Monday, he would just launch into the bit.
“About every afternoon he [called] with a joke,” Martin said. “His mind was quite good. He had a few people he called. [Comedian] Louis Nye, I guess Jan Murray.” Asked what sort of jokes Mr. Hackett told, Martin said: “It’s like the old joke, ‘Two guys and a duck walk into a bar.’ He’d go from there. It made him feel very happy to make me laugh.”
Like Milton Berle or Henny Youngman or Red Buttons, Mr. Hackett is among the pantheon of Jewish comedians forever associated with the rise of the stand-up comic on stage, radio and, eventually, television.
Mr. Hackett was born Leonard Hacker in 1924 in the middle-class Borough Park section of Brooklyn, N.Y., the son of an upholsterer. It was during the summers that a teen-age Mr. Hackett first went to work as a waiter and bellhop in the Catskills, the resort breeding ground for countless “Borscht circuit” comedians, some with more staying power than others.
The show-business bug stayed with him through a three-year stint in the Army, and Mr. Hackett spent the late ’40s and 1950s coming up as a comedian in cabarets and small clubs in New York, and later expanding his reach as an entertainer by appearing on Broadway in the 1954 Sydney Kingsley musical farce Lunatics and Lovers.
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Like many other big-name nightclub comedians, Hackett made the transition to movies, but the results were hit-or-miss. Some said he was a Lou Costello without a Bud Abbott. Mr. Hackett appeared in a number of comedies, including the Navy farce All Hands on Deck, in which he played a Chickasaw Indian sailor who mates a turkey with a pelican. There were also dramatic roles, including 1958’s God’s Little Acre.
In 1962 Mr. Hackett gained more attention as a second fiddle, co-starring as Marcellus Washburn in The Music Man, helping out Robert Preston’s confidence man Harold Hill. But those who saw him perform live remember Mr. Hackett most vividly. He held court onstage from Atlantic City to Las Vegas, where he performed regularly for decades, most notably at the Sahara Hotel, but in many other casinos on The Strip, including the El Rancho and Caesars Palace. Like his friend and contemporary Shecky Greene, Mr. Hackett seemed to be made for the Vegas stage. His act was salty, not for the easily offended, Mr. Hackett skating on the thin ice of ethnic humor and sex jokes.
But his wacky, tour de force delivery and no-holds-barred routines (as a surly Chinese waiter misunderstanding his table’s order, for instance) made him a beloved live act.
Mr. Hackett also was also a master on the dais of the Friars Club, where he was a member and a frequent — and potent — messenger of insults during the club’s infamous celebrity roasts.
“Buddy was an innovator. In his time, he was the most creative comic that I’ve ever seen,” said singer Steve Lawrence, who with Eydie Gorme traces his association with Mr. Hackett back to 1950s New York.
Lawrence told The Times on Monday that, through his nightclub act, Mr. Hackett was “also a groundbreaker with a lot of taboos we grew up with. But he always did it in a way that was hysterical.”
Hackett’s edgy routines endeared him to a younger generation of comics who payed homage. Hackett, for instance, appeared in the 1999 Fox series Action with Jay Mohr.
In later years, as Mr. Hackett grew more reclusive, he battled more with weight troubles and other health problems. He was an avid gun collector but had sold off his collection, Martin said. And after quitting the stage, the only time he performed was at the annual fund-raiser for the Singita Animal Sanctuary, a dog and cat rescue organization begun by Mr. Hackett and his wife, Sherry.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Hackett is survived by his son, Sandy; two daughters, Lisa and Ivy; and two grandchildren.
Paul Brownfield writes for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Co. newspaper.
