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(“My mother couldn’t stand me – she breast-fed me through a straw”. “When I was seven, I told Mom, ‘I’m gonna run away from home.’ She said, ‘On your mark. He had a miserable childhood; his absentee father was a womanising vaudeville performer and his mother was bitter and undemonstrative. “Now I’m gonna read anudder one.”Rodney Dangerfield was born Jacob Cohen in Babylon, Long Island, in 1921. Only this year, his autobiography, It’s Not Easy Bein’ Me (subtitled “A Lifetime of No Respect But Plenty of Sex and Drugs”), was published “I just finished my first book,” he said.

In great demand as a stand-up for four decades, the lugubrious Dangerfield also made half a dozen films, successful comedy albums and television specials, and helped to launch the careers of his fellow comedians Jerry Seinfeld, Jim Carrey, Tim Allen and Roseanne Barr. “I don’t get no respect” was the familiar catchphrase of Rodney Dangerfield, the pop-eyed, self-deprecating Jewish comedian whose incongruous Wasp stage name adorns a star on Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame. “I just finished m

Jacob Cohen (Rodney Dangerfield), comedian, actor and writer: born Babylon, New York 22 November 1921; married 1949, 1963 Joyce Indig (one son, one daughter; marriages dissolved 1962, 1970), 1993 Joan Child; died Los Angeles 5 October 2004. The show was hampered by a weak script and by then the humour had been overtaken by shows themselves influenced by the Goons, such as Monty Python’s Flying Circus.The actor Graham Stark, who frequently appeared on The Goon Show, knew Geldray well and says, Max and Susan stayed with me when he made The Last Goon Show of All. He knew I loved jazz and we would sit listening to those wonderful Toots Thielemans records.

It is said that Max never became a legendary player because he was so associated with the comedy but I don’t think that’s true. It was more that he didn’t want to do anything that was populist, as he had very high standards.Geldray later moved to Palm Springs to look after his wife’s father and played jazz in a local bar He continued to play his harmonica until 2002.Spencer Leigh. He worked with Sarah Vaughan and Billy Daniels and often played casinos in Reno, Nevada. In 1962 he met a divorcee, Susan, and after their marriage sold clothes in a department store, then worked as the regional sales supervisor for the Christian Science Monitor.Geldray returned to the UK in 1972 to take part in The Last Goon Show of All, a televised radio broadcast to celebrate the BBC’s 50th anniversary. Impressed by Los Angeles and following the collapse of his first marriage, he decided to emigrate. Geldray appeared in three of their 1956 programmes The Idiot Weekly Price 2d, A Show Called Fred and Son of Fred.In 1961 he was offered cruise work on the liner Queen Elizabeth sailing to the United States. Although Geldray was given the occasional line, he was no actor.

He did represent the Goons’ team at a tiddlywinks championship in Cambridge in 1959.The attempts to transfer the Goons’ anarchic humour to television were never satisfactory. There’s no danger, mind you, but there is a fire drill next door.”The Goons were loyal to Geldray and, in 1958, when the BBC proposed to drop him from the next series, Sellers said he would not participate if they did He won the day. The musical interludes in the programmes came from Geldray and the Ray Ellington Quartet, and in 1957 Geldray made an EP of jazz standards, Goon With the Wind (in 1989 he published an autobiography with the same title).He found that working with the three manic comedians (Bentine left early on in the series’ run) had its drawbacks. One night, on tour at the Hippodrome in Wolverhampton, Sellers interrupted Geldray’s performance with the words, “Sorry, sir, but I have to tell you something important. Much of the humour came out of Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Michael Bentine and Harry Secombe’s wartime service. In one episode, Milligan says that Geldray can only play the harmonica if he is torpedoed, naturally a cue for sound effects.