Don Rickles

NEW YORK — Don Rickles loved everybody: black or white, gay or straight, fat or thin.

For more than half a century, the hollering, bald-headed “Mr. Warmth” let everyone have it. Insults rained on the meek and the mighty, from unsuspecting fans to such fellow celebrities as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Johnny Carson.

And few seemed to mind. Rickles, who died Thursday at age 90, was among the most loved people in the business.

He was the acknowledged grandmaster of insult comedy. Despite jokes that from other comics might have inspired boycotts, he was idolized by everyone from Joan Rivers and Louis CK to Chris Rock and Sarah Silverman. James Caan once said that Rickles helped inspire the blustering Sonny Corleone of “The Godfather.” An HBO special was directed by John Landis of “Animal House” fame and included tributes from Clint Eastwood, Sidney Poitier and Robert De Niro. Carl Reiner would say he knew he had made it in Hollywood when Rickles made fun of him.

Rickles appeared everywhere from strip joints to the 1985 inaugural gala for President Ronald Reagan and remained a popular act well after his ethnic and racial humor had become outdated. In 2008, he won an Emmy for best individual performance in a variety show for the Landis film “Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project.” At the ceremony, he joked: “I’ve been in this business for 55 years and the biggest award I got was an ashtray from the Friars in New York.”

Rickles’ many friends returned the wisecracks, whether labeling him as a man everyone loved to hate or, as his friend Bob Newhart joked, a man with whom it was annoying to travel. But the topper came from radio host Casey Kasem, who dressed up as Hitler at a roast for Rickles and told the comedian: “You are the only man I know who has bombed more places than I have.”

Rickles patented a confrontational style that stand-up performers still emulate, but one that kept him on the right side of trouble.

“I think the reason that it (his act) caught on and gave me a wonderful career is that I was never mean-spirited,” he once said. “Not that you had to like it, but you had to be under a rock somewhere not to get it.”