When I was a kid, Rodney Dangerfield was a big name in comedy, but I could never figure out why. He simply wasn’t funny to me, but most people laughed with him anyway.
The world is full of people with talent who never achieve much success, but Dangerfield was just the opposite. He was the man with no real talent — but who managed to become wealthy and famous simply because he refused to quit trying.
I’d never thought much about Dangerfield’s success, but I read an article this morning that has me thinking about how artistic and commercial success happens. It’s a recent piece from the New York Times Magazine about how a “nobody” named Jacob Cohen turned himself into the world-famous comic named Rodney Dangerfield — the man who could “get no respect.”
When he started in comedy, Cohen used the name Jack Roy. (He even legally changed his name to Jack Roy and that remained his legal name for life.) He was a singing waiter at one point, but he was fired. When he did get on stage as a comic, almost nobody thought he was funny. He couldn’t get booked. He was a failure.
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