Jonathan Winters

Jonathan Winters' career started as a result of a lost wristwatch, about six or seven months after his marriage wife Eileen Schauder in 1948. The newlyweds couldn't afford to buy another one. Then Eileen read about a talent contest in which the first prize was a wristwatch, and encouraged Jonathan to "go down and win it." She was certain he could, and he did. He was then hired as a morning disc jockey at WING in Dayton, Ohio, where he made up for his inability to attract guests by inventing them. “I’d make up people like Dr. Hardbody of the Atomic Energy Commission, or an Englishman whose blimp had crash-landed in Dayton,” he told U.S. News and World Report in 1988.

When Stanley Kramer offered him a part in "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" (1963), he almost didn't take it because he had just recovered from a nervous breakdown. His wife talked him into it.

Winters often called himself a satirist, but the term does not really apply. In “Seriously Funny,” his history of 1950s and 1960s comedians, Gerald Nachman described him, a bit floridly, as “part circus clown and part social observer, Red Skelton possessed by the spirit of Daumier.” In 1961 Variety wrote, “His humor is more universally acceptable than any of the current New Comics, with the possible exception of Bob Newhart, because he covers the mass experiences of the U.S. common man — the Army, the gas station, the airport.”

More influential than successful, Mr. Winters circled the comic heavens tracing his own strange orbit, an object of wonder and admiration to his peers. “Jonathan taught me,” Robin Williams told the correspondent Ed Bradley on “60 Minutes," “that the world is open for play, that everything and everybody is mockable, in a wonderful way.”

Happy Birthday, Jonathan Winters!