Dick Cavett remembers Johnathan Winters

I'm just antique enough to remember when Jonathan first hit. Or at least for me. It was the Jack Paar "Tonight Show" and no one had ever seen anything remotely like it.

A slightly chubby, amiable, Midwesternly looking man who could have been an accountant or a bus driver, nicely dressed in dark suit and tie, stepped out, a bit timorously, from behind the curtain and, on the spot and before our eyes, created a whole mad little world.

There were sudden, instant changes of character, gender and manner, each with a new face, a different voice, even different physique, it seemed.

Make that lightning character changes, switching in less than an eye wink from an old person to a juvenile, from tough drill sergeant to mincing hairdresser, from adult human to feisty feline, from bumpkin to society type to rube to sophisticate; from iron-jawed right winger to gelatinous liberal, from adult to child to repellently cute baby; each change so fast and total it was as if frames had been cut from a film.

Here was originality personified. And unprecedented.

Never had a comic done anything remotely like this. Jonathan was born full-blown from the head of no one. He was in no known comic tradition. No familiar style. No pre-existing category of humor. He stood on no predecessors' shoulders.

Here, suddenly, was a comedian who never told a joke.

Into the world of humor a new planet had been born.


full @ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/26/with-winters-gone-can-we-be-far-behind