Jonathan Winters, pioneer of improv, dies at 87

LOS ANGELES - Jonathan Winters, 87, the cherubic comedian whose breakneck improvisations and misfit characters inspired the likes of Robin Williams and Jim Carrey, has died.

The Ohio native died Thursday evening at his Montecito, Calif., home of natural causes, said Joe Petro III, a longtime family friend.

Mr. Winters was a pioneer of improvisational standup comedy, with an exceptional gift for mimicry, a grab bag of eccentric personalities, and a bottomless reservoir of creative energy. Facial contortions, sound effects, tall tales - he could use them all.

On The Jack Paar Program in 1964, Mr. Winters took a foot-long stick and in rapid succession became a fisherman, violinist, lion tamer, canoeist, U.N. diplomat, bullfighter, flutist, delusional psychiatric patient, British headmaster, and Bing Crosby's golf club.

His humor was mostly rooted in reality - his characters Maude Frickert and Elwood P. Suggins were based on people he knew growing up in Ohio.

A devotee of Groucho Marx and Laurel and Hardy, Mr. Winters and his free-for-all brand of humor inspired Johnny Carson, Billy Crystal, Tracey Ullman, and Lily Tomlin, among others. But Williams and Carrey are his best-known followers.

 Mr. Winters' only Emmy was for best supporting actor for playing Randy Quaid's father in the sitcom Davis Rules (1991). He also won the Kennedy Center's second Mark Twain Prize for Humor in 1999, a year after Richard Pryor.

Mr. Winters made television history in 1956, when RCA broadcast the first public demonstration of color videotape on The Jonathan Winters Show.

Mr. Winters was born Nov. 11, 1925, in Dayton, Ohio. Growing up during the Depression as an only child whose parents divorced when he was 7, Mr. Winters spent a lot of time entertaining himself.

Mr. Winters described his father as an alcoholic. But he found a comedic mentor in his mother, radio personality Alice Bahman.

"She was very fast. Whatever humor I've inherited I'd have to give credit to her," Mr. Winters told the Cincinnati Enquirer in 2000.

Mr. Winters joined the Marines at 17 and served two years in the South Pacific. He returned to study at the Dayton Art Institute, where he developed keen observational skills.

After stints as a radio disc jockey and TV host in Ohio from 1950 to 1953, he left for New York, where he found early work doing impressions of John Wayne, Cary Grant, Groucho Marx, and James Cagney, among others.

Two days after a theater janitor told him he wasn't breaking new ground by mimicking the rich or famous, Mr. Winters cooked up one of his most famous characters: the hard-drinking, dirty old woman Maude Frickert, modeled in part on his mother and an aunt.

Appearances on Paar's show and others followed, and Mr. Winters soon had a following - and was struggling with depression and drinking. He was hospitalized for eight months in the early 1960s. It was a topic he rarely addressed and never dwelled on.

When he got out, there was a role waiting in the 1963 ensemble film It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Roles in other movies followed, as did TV shows, including his own. He also wrote and painted. His writings include a collection of short stories called Winters' Tales (1987).

"I've done for the most part pretty much what I intended - I ended up doing comedy, writing, and painting," he told U.S. News & World Report. "I've had a ball. And as I get older, I just become an older kid."