Gotta admit: I was never a huge fan of Rodney Dangerfield. Well, I kinda liked that you had a guy who flopped as a comedian and didn't let that stop him. He got out of show business for a while, then gave it another go and clicked. (That was why he got stuck with the joke name. When he went back to performing, he didn't want friends from his "other" job to know, so Jacob "Jack Roy" Cohen became Rodney Dangerfield, just for a while. Then the second career took off before he got a chance to change it to something else.) He worked hard and managed to develop a truly funny comic persona…though one that seemed to me to be paper-thin and sometimes very nasty. He was a performer who often made me nervous, and not in a good way.
He was always so "programmed." When Carson had him on, he didn't dare ask a real question. He just let Rodney sit there and do the jokes he'd picked in the order he'd planned. I remember one Tonight Show appearance in the Leno era when a guest on the couch interrupted Rodney with a comment, and you've never seen a professional comedian get so lost in the middle of his act. Dangerfield suddenly had no idea where he was, what he'd just said, what he was going to say next.
Audiences generally loved him, though the word along the comedy circuit was that he often disappointed them with high ticket prices, short sets and too-familiar material. People who worked with him were wildly divided, and I suspect that now that he's gone, there will be a suitable period of deference and then we'll start hearing anecdotes to the contrary. First, though, we have to get through an awful lot of obits that will say, "He finally got some respect."