Zach Galifianakis Loved to Be Ridiculed by Don Rickles, ‘The Guy Who Invented It’
Want an example of how to set a tone for an interview? Take a page from the Don Rickles playbook. When he sat down with Zach Galifianakis a few years back for his “Dinner With Don” series of conversations for AARP, Galifianakis got things started with, “What would you like me to call you, Mr. Rickles?”
Without missing a beat, Rickles shot back a reply:
“God.”
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It’s strange to see Galifianakis, resident a-hole of Between Two Ferns, take a deferential role in a conversation. But the comic clearly worships Rickles (“If you're a comedian and you don't appreciate Don Rickles,” he says, “then you're probably not a comedian.”) and happily relinquishes the bully club to the elder statesman.
“I have a curiosity about how you got started,” Galifianakis begins. “Do you mind if I ask you about that?”
“No, I don't mind anything as long as I don't get the check,” cracks Rickles before telling the story of his relatively late-blooming career. “I must have been about in my late 20s. My mother, she pushed me to get up and kid around. Then all of a sudden they were laughing, so I kept doing it.”
Rickles admits that being an insult comic wasn’t always easy, especially before he was well known. “It was a big struggle when I first started,” he confesses. “Guy said, ‘Hey, I came in to see this guy and he called my wife a moose. I don't need that, you know.’”
The art of insult comedy? “There's a way of saying things to different people,” says Rickles. Galifianakis agreed although he noted that a lot of comics these days don't understand how that works. “Yeah, well, I know how far to go and when to pull back,” Rickles explains. “It's a matter of judgment. Every time I perform I always try to make it like conversation, like we're talking now, with some humor in there, you know. I leave it up to the audience and I'm kind of proud of that.”
Despite his best efforts to be polite, a little bit of the Between Two Ferns Zach peeks out from time to time. “Back in those days,” he asks, “how did you magnify your voice, you know, before electricity?”
A hint of a smile passes over Rickles. “You got off a good one,” he admits. “And it's pissing me off.”
So what does a pissed-off Rickles do? Fire back. When asked what he thinks of Galifianakis’s work, Rickles deadpans: “Every night I go to bed and I think of your work.” When asked for an opinion on Corky Romano, in which Galifianakis has a small part, Rickles spat, “Go to the psychiatrist. You got some problems.”
Of course, the more Rickles laid into the younger comic, the more Galifianakis ate it up. “This is a really amazing experience,” he says over the end credits, “to be ridiculed by the guy that invented it.”