Arte Johnson, Master of Manic Characters on 'Laugh-In,' Dies at 90 [View all]
Source: HollywoodReporter.com
Arte Johnson, the comic best known for the hilarious characters he created for the 1960s NBC smash hit Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, has died. He was 90.
The 5-foot-4 Johnson, a master of ad libs, double-talk and dialects who was content to be a "second banana," died Wednesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of heart failure following a three-year battle with bladder and prostate cancer, his family announced.
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Johnson had a repertoire of more than 60 comic characters, including Piotr Rosmenko, an Eastern European song-and-dance man; Rabbi Shankar, an addled Indian guru; and a man in a yellow raincoat who could not help falling off his tricycle.
"Humor for me consists in incongruity," he said in 1974. "If I were doing a Hasidic rabbi, I'd have him speak with an Irish accent. … You take it out of reality and make it cartoon-esque without being denigrating. Because people today are so sensitive, it's the only way of creating humor without offending someone."
More at: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/arte-johnson-dead-laugh-in-star-905754
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