Manhattanville’s Rodney Dangerfield Institute treads new ground

Joan Dangerfield, Rodney Dangerfield”™s wife, stood backstage during one of his many Las Vegas performances and watched not her husband”™s standup but the audience”™s reaction. They laughed every few seconds, nodded along and rocked in their seats rhythmically as if the jokes were musical.

Rodney Dangerfield”™s “I get no respect” routine was to his wife a work of art, a masterpiece filled with self-deprecating one-liners perfected after 40 years of disciplined practice, research and intense labor.

“Someday, it will be studied in college, like Plato”™s Socratic dialogues,” she told him after he came off stage.

He thought she was kidding.

Manhattanville College in Purchase is establishing The Rodney Dangerfield Institute for the Study of Comedy and will house the archives of the comedian, who died in 2004 just shy of his 83rd birthday. When administrators first approached Joan Dangerfield about the partnership, she hadn”™t heard much of the college, but she visited last winter and said she was taken in by the scenic campus and its historical Reid Castle. In researching Manhattanville”™s history, she found out the college ”“ now coed ”“ used to be an all-girls school.

“I just knew that was something Rodney would be tickled by,” she told the Business Journal in a recent phone interview from California.

The idea for the institute was hatched by James Ram, a college trustee and member of the 1987 graduating class, who found a willing partner in Joan Dangerfield. She has been a dedicated curator of her late husband”™s work since he died and has staunchly sought to solidify his legacy by keeping his presence alive with younger audiences through efforts such as the extensive website Rodney.com. She not only is keeping his memory alive, but is also famously keeping some of his bodily fluids around the house.

Joan Dangerfield has a vial of Rodney”™s blood and a container of his sweat handy, news that has made the rounds in Hollywood tabloids. In context, it”™s not as weird as it sounds, she said. A nurse gave her the blood, which was drawn in 1989 after Rodney had a stroke. The nurse gave her the blood when Rodney Dangerfield met with a company that said it was on its way to being able to clone people. “Rodney thought it would be funny to have a clone of himself to help him write jokes,” she said.

As for the sweat, that started as a joke after she heard about Elvis Presley”™s sweaty handkerchief selling for thousands of dollars. Her husband would often give away his sweaty neckties in exchange for a kiss from a beautiful female audience member and she joked he might be giving away a proverbial cash cow in those sopping, knotted red ties. The couple got the idea to sell for a few cents perfume-like bottles of Rodney”™s sweat at his performances. “The thing is I had to collect the sweat, not the easiest thing to do,” she said.

Sponges weren”™t entirely effective, so she had to spoon it off of him. Due to venue insurance policies, they were never allowed to sell the sweat, and even though it was a “silly” joke, she later found herself with some of her late husband”™s sweat in the refrigerator. “What am I supposed to do: throw it out?” she said.

Rodney gets his respect

Gail Simmons, Manhattanville”™s provost and vice president of academic affairs, shared the reaction of many when they first heard about the creation of the institute: Rodney Dangerfield is finally getting the respect he deserves. The college also gave him a posthumous honorary doctorate at its commencement ceremony May 14.

The creation of the institute has the faculty, administrators and alumni buzzing, according to Simmons. “There are very few things in life that when you tell people they smile about it, and this is one of those things,” she said.

Simmons envisions the institute eventually offering courses in a broad range of academic disciplines. Studies of comedy in film and literature are obvious, but the college hopes it can get serious with comedy and include it in the study of social action.

“Humor is often used as a way to grease the wheel of social interactions or denigrate people,” she said. Eventually, the college would like to investigate humor as a tool for change and also perhaps as a reflection of social injustice in sociology and cultural anthropology courses.

Van Hartmann, who will teach a freshman seminar called “Laughter and Respect” in the fall, said, “My thought was how do you reconcile laughing at things you”™re making fun of with a social mission of respecting things?” he said.

The institute will focus on Rodney Dangerfield himself, analyzing his work on stage and in films like “Caddyshack” ”“ and perhaps fittingly “Back to School.” Dangerfield was not only considered a master of the one-liner, but was known for mentoring young comedians like Jim Carrey and Jerry Seinfeld. His lineage, so to speak, is also an educational opportunity, Simmons said.

To laugh or not to laugh

Hartmann, a film and literature professor, said he was hoping to analyze the history of comedy from Greek playwright Aristophanes and Roman poet Horace up to contemporary novelist Richard Russo and films like “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?”

“You want your students to both experience the subjectivity of laughing but then you want them to take an academic approach and look at why they”™re laughing and what they”™re laughing at,” he said.

Hartmann has explored the philosophical question of what makes people laugh in film courses that have reviewed so-called “literary comedy” in print and in films such as Charlie Chaplin”™s “City Lights.” A film like Dangerfield”™s “Risky Business” may be uncharted but worthwhile territory, he said.

“On the continuum, there”™s a whole world of standup comedy we may have tended to define not as literary,” Hartmann said. “Maybe that other comedy, like Rodney Dangerfield”™s, needs to be explored and taken more seriously. … It really has the potential to take the type of comedy Rodney Dangerfield did and raise it up to greater legitimacy.”

When Joan Dangerfield told her husband he was a genius, he shrugged it off, saying he was just making people laugh. But in forming an institute for the study of comedy, is overanalyzing comedy taking the laughs out of the jokes?

Hartmann said, “I think when you study literature and when you study art, you always come up against that question ”¦ of the balance of subjectivity and release, and academic criteria and objectivity. I don”™t think it makes any difference whether it”™s comedy or a tragedy.”

Besides, much of Dangerfield”™s best material was filled with Shakespearian intrigue. “I could tell my parents hated me,” went one of his best one-liners. “My bath toys were a toaster and a radio.”