The FBI Sting That Created Rodney Dangerfield
Comedian Rodney Dangerfield was born Jacob Cohen, he told Barbara Walters in 1983. The name didn’t stick for long — as a boy, he went through school as Jack Cohen. At age 19, he changed his name again to Jack Roy, a reference to his father who used the name Phil Roy in vaudeville. Young Jack Roy struggled to get a foothold in show business, working as a singing waiter and writing jokes for other comics in between stand-up gigs.
Roy patterned his comedy after the style of Henny Youngman, another purveyor of rapid-fire punchlines, according to Kliph Nesteroff’s The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy. The young stand-up struggled, but “he knew how to tell jokes,” according to comic Art Metrano. “‘My wife is such a bad cook, the dogs beg for Alka-Seltzer.’”
The young comic’s problem was attitude, not jokes. “He had a reputation for being angry,” said actor Bobby Ramsen. “They called him Angry Jack. When Jack Roy was working it was with an edge.”
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Comedian Pat Cooper gave a similar review: “He was very depressed and angry.”
Roy’s wife wasn’t a fan either, convincing Roy to turn down gigs to spend time with the family. Depressed and frustrated by both his career and his unhappy marriage, he quit comedy to sell aluminum siding and house paint on a commission. It was a steady paycheck while he continued to sell jokes to comedians out of the back of his car.
Dangerfield later claimed that he changed his name from Jack Roy to erase the painful memory of his early stand-up career. But according to Nesteroff, the switch was to cover up the fact that he’d been working as a con man. Men like Roy would pretend to be World War II veterans selling cheap home repairs on leaky roofs or drafty windows. But the whole operation was a scam.
“In a series of midnight and pre-dawn raids, the FBI today collared 15 men accused of faking $600,000 in home repair loans,” reported the Long Island Star-Journal in 1955. One of the top men indicted was Jack Cohen aka Jack Roy.
Somehow, Cohen/Roy managed to escape prison. “The charges were all dropped,” says comedian Robert Klein. “It had to do with the federal housing something or other, but it never came to court. He was never in jail.”
And he was never in the home repair business again, thanks to the FBI. He returned to the comedy business with a sullied name and needed a new one. According to the Barbara Walters interview, the comic told a club owner to pick a name at random. He thought the choice — Rodney Dangerfield — was “weird,” but he took it anyway. “I was going through a very depressed time. I was about 40, and life was just caving in with craziness so I became Rodney Dangerfield.”
In another version of the story, Dangerfield claims to have plucked the name at random from a phone book. But Nesteroff says it was Rodney’s manager Roy Duke who insisted on the fresh start, borrowing a gag name for a holiday party guest from an episode of The Jack Benny Show.
Ricky Nelson also used the name Rodney Dangerfield as a phony cover for a blind date on an episode of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
The name was appropriate — blind dates get no respect. Ironically, the sullied name of Jack Roy would have gotten even less.
