‘Mr. Warmth’ gets HBO profile

The John Landis film looks at the life and career of insult comic Don Rickles.

By DIANE WERTS

NEWSDAY

It’s not every comedian who can bark “Go home and die!” at an elderly audience member, or mock a random Asian patron by grousing he spent “three years in the jungle, looking for your father.”

In fact, it’s only one.

“Everybody wants to get [blanked] on by Don Rickles,” says stand-up Sarah Silverman. Two generations on, it’s no wonder the proudly impertinent Silverman admires this legendary 81-year-old insult comic.

HBO’s new documentary “Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project” (8 tonight) admires him, too, perhaps a bit too much, but not without justification. Seen in vintage clips from the 1970s Johnny Carson “Tonight Show” and Dean Martin celebrity roasts, as well as in Las Vegas stints last year (closing the Stardust) and this (moved to the Golden Nugget), the six-decade headliner is forever, convulsively, undeniably funny. And that’s really rare: undeniably. He mocks his friends, his fans, even the dead, in an offstage dead/almost-dead litany of the breathing status of cronies on a photo wall at home.

Rickles’ uncanny ability to elicit laughs even from the targets of his abusive rants is not only demonstrated early on in director John Landis’ 90-minute profile, but is promptly explained. Of all people (or maybe not), it’s Chris Rock who nails it. “Some guys just have that thing,” he ventures in one of the film’s own litany of comments from Rickles contemporaries as well as comics who could be his grandkids.

“Being funny is like being a pretty girl,” says Rock, “you just get away with a lot of [stuff]. ... It’s like he can do no wrong.”

Certainly Landis and this film don’t think so, and that’s personal as well as professional. Rickles comes off as practically a saint. That shouldn’t be a surprise considering that his son, Larry Rickles, is one of the profile’s producers. And of course, Rickles is equally legendarily good-natured when his stage persona is “off.” He’s also keenly, almost heroically positioned here as the last of a breed, the sole remaining archetype of that Vegas “rat pack” era so beloved of Rickles-age nostalgics and boomer/Gen X’ers hiply wistful they missed the fun.

That 1960s era is richly, if excessively, evoked here in the second half of “Mr. Warmth,” which is practically a separate documentary waxing over how great things were when the mob ran the town. Vegas regulars like Jack Carter effuse alongside longtime Rickles entourage members, all unwittingly auditioning for the next “Godfather” flick. (Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro get interviewed, too.)

The only problem with this ultra-focus on subtext is the main text can thus get haphazardly depicted. The film’s early attention to illustrating Rickles’ gift, for the uninitiated (and for history), rewardingly delivers great stage clips of his act, smartly intercut with telling observations by Robin Williams, Bob Newhart, Roseanne, Christopher Guest, Billy Crystal and such co-stars from Rickles acting stints as Clint Eastwood (“Kelly’s Heroes”) and Debbie Reynolds (“The Rat Race”). Quick-cut movie clips join “Tonight” excerpts and other video gems to sketch a textured portrait of Rickles at his zenith.

The rest of his career/life isn’t quite so lucky, getting shoehorned in later merely for comprehensiveness. Here’s a ’60s beach movie, there’s a “Toy Story” voice session, then home videos from trips with Bob Newhart, then a Dean Martin roast, and oh by the way his two-season NBC Navy sitcom “CPO Sharkey,” which shows up only in a famous “Tonight Show” set-crashing incident.

These shortcomings of “Mr. Warmth” are so annoying only because Landis’ film gets so much else gloriously right. From strange yet suiting interludes of pal Harry Dean Stanton on harmonica, to vintage “This Is Your Life” bio clips of Rickles’ beloved mom, the film radiates, yes, warmth, while piecing together a place-and-time puzzle of surprising breadth.