Buddy Hackett, who broke into comedy in New York’s Catskill Mountains and went on to achieve iconic status as a raunchy nightclub performer and rubber-faced clown in movies including “The Music Man” and “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” died Monday at his Malibu home. He was 78.
The cause of death was not immediately clear. Mr. Hackett had been suffering from a chest cold, although he had been in “robust good health” until a few days ago, a family spokesman said.
Mr. Hackett had not worked professionally since 1996, when he stopped performing after experiencing dizziness and shortness of breath onstage.
Increasingly reclusive, he nevertheless managed to keep telling jokes. Dick Martin, who with comedy partner Dan Rowan hosted the seminal TV series “Laugh-In,” was among those who still received calls from Mr. Hackett regularly.
Mr. Hackett would not identify himself, Martin said Monday; he would just launch into the bit. “About every afternoon he [called] with a joke,” Martin said.
Like Milton Berle or Henny Youngman or Red Buttons, Mr. Hackett is among the pantheon of Jewish comedians forever associated with the rise of the stand-up comic on stage, radio and, eventually, television.
Mr. Hackett was born Leonard Hacker in 1924 in Brooklyn, N.Y. It was during the summers that a teenage Mr. Hackett went to work as a waiter and bellhop in the Catskills, the resort breeding ground for countless “Borscht circuit” comedians.
The show-business bug stayed with him through a three-year stint in the Army, and Mr. Hackett spent the late 1940s and ’50s coming up as a comedian.
In 1952, when Rowan and Martin made their debut at the Catskills’ Concord Hotel, Mr. Hackett “was like a king there,” Martin said. Mr. Hackett had come up there as a “tummler,” a professional merrymaker.
The 1960s broadened the comedian’s appeal, as Mr. Hackett increasingly indulged his own voice. Over the decades, his look helped make him inimitable: the rotund body with the cross-eyed gaze and the delivery in which he seemed to be talking out of the side of his mouth.
Like many other nightclub comedians, Mr. Hackett made the transition to movies, but the results were hit-or-miss. In 1962 he gained attention as a second fiddle in “The Music Man,” helping out Robert Preston’s confidence man Harold Hill. A year later he appeared in Stanley Kramer’s Cinerama romp “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”
He also enjoyed a popular turn as Dean Jones’ sidekick and mechanic in the 1968 Disney hit “The Love Bug.”
But those who saw him perform live remember Mr. Hackett most vividly. He held court onstage from Atlantic City to Las Vegas, where he performed regularly for decades. His act was salty, not for the easily offended, skating on the thin ice of ethnic humor and sex jokes.
Mr. Hackett is survived by his wife, Sherry; his son, Sandy; two daughters, Lisa and Ivy; and two grandchildren.
