The stage lights of Hollywood’s golden era have dimmed, but the echo of a sharp, unforgiving tongue still reverberates through the corridors of comedy history. Don Rickles, the man who built a career on the backs of insulted celebrities and delighted audiences with his verbal savagery, carried a secret animosity that few ever suspected, a grudge so specific and so stubborn that it defied the very logic of his craft. His target was not a rival comic, nor a network executive who cut his bits, but the Oscar-winning actor Denzel Washington, a man whose stoic presence reportedly drove Rickles to a level of frustration that bordered on obsession.
While the world knew Rickles as the merchant of venom for his on-stage roasts, behind closed doors, this was the one celebrity he allegedly could not crack, and the reason reveals a complicated truth about the nature of performance, pride, and the unspoken rules of Hollywood’s backslapping fraternity.
Rickles, born on May 8th, 1926, in the bustling melting pot of Queens, New York, was not always destined for the podium of insult. He grew up in the ethnically rich neighborhood of Jackson Heights, the son of Max Rickles, an insurance salesman, and his mother, who rightly recognized that her boy had a gift for quick observations. Initially, the young Don had dreams of being a serious actor, training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts after high school, hoping for his name in lights on Broadway or in the growing world of cinema.
However, his own natural restlessness and a sharp tongue that refused to stay quiet pushed him into the dark, smoky confines of nightclubs, where he soon realized that his ability to dismantle an audience member with a four-word joke was far more reliable than any dramatic monologue. His journey was interrupted by a stint in the Navy during World War II, serving on the USS Sirene, but upon returning, he harnessed that veteran’s brashness into a style that was entirely his own.
His ascension to the title of the king of insult comedy was marketable only because of a certain audacity that allowed him to cross lines that others thought sacred. Instead of telling painstakingly crafted jokes, he attacked the room, calling out the fat men, the bald men, the women with dull husbands, and the celebrities who made the mistake of sitting in the front row. A magazine critic once called him the “Merchant of Venom,” a tag that he embraced with a wink, but he was also termed “Mr.
Warmth” by friends, because his vitriol was always boxed in the affection of a hard-love hug club. The true catapult for his career came courtesy of a chance meeting with Frank Sinatra in a Miami nightclub; Ol’ Blue Eyes came to see him, and instead of reflexively laughing, Rickles joked about the greatness of Sinatra’s power, calling him God’s gift to the mafia. The audience oh it, but Sinatra, rather than ordering a hit, ordered a friendship, and from that moment, Rickles was welcomed into the inner sanctum of the Rat Pack elite.
For six decades, Rickles made a lion’s dinner of the world all, from the bulbous weight of Frank’s own entourage to the gaffes of presidents from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan. He was a fixture on The Tonight Show and a legend of the Dean Martin Roasts, where his rapid-fire barbs were the highlight of the evening. He acted in “Run Silent, Run Deep” alongside Clark Gable and appeared in “Kelly’s Heroes,” proving he wasn’t a one-trick pony; he was a trickster who could also carry a scene with dramatic weight.
In the 1970s, he starred in his own series o, CPO Sharky, which brought his dry decrees into the living rooms of America on a weekly basis. It seemed that his only competition was himself.
Yet, behind this facade, his personal life was an anchor point that he cherished. Then came Barbara, she was the Philadelphia girl he met and married on March 14th, 1965. He described her as the only woman who didn’t laugh at his jokes, a woman who saw through the “Merchant of Venom” charm and found instead the insecure, deep-thinking man looking for a partner.
Their bond was the longest-running, up until his death, with their children Mindy and Larry grounding him. Still, even the placid waters of his family home couldn’t stabilize the irritation that grew for a peer he could not dominate: Denzel Washington. The Oscars, the tuxedos, the balding heads, the gangsters—it all made for great poetic terrain, but Denzel was different.
The source of the hatred was not about ego in the which against Washington’s status. It was about effort. Rickles had a fundamental requirement from his audience to react, and famously, whether you were the Queen of England or the unknown guy in the back row, he lived for the expletive or shameful laugh that you produced.
He enjoyed the power button of knowing he could bend a room’s emotion. But Denzel, in Rickles’s eyes, was the mountain that always turned to ice when jabs landed. As insiders began to whisper in the 90s and 2000s, every time Rickles was brought together with Washington at various industry functions or awards shows, Rickles would set up, wind-up, and deliver his bait, aiming for that gold standard chuckle, but Washington would simply nod his head with a polite “that’s cute” if that, keeping on his stern control.
There was no surrender, no rollicking belly shake, just the stoic weight of a man who had decided that trivial insult humor was not worth his energy.
For Rickles, this wasn’t just a spoiled roast; it was a rejection of his entire belief system of comedy. To him, comedy was an equalizer, a double-edged weapon that allowed him to offer the rich, the powerful, and the mighty to the same level as a car mechanic. He had made careers on equalizing everyone—Sinatra, Michael Caine, even royalty—with a sharp inside joke.
By refusing to vibe with his tone, Rickles felt that Washington was categorizing his own work as either too low brow for his implied seriousness. Insiders claim that when Washington’s name would come up in dressing rooms, Rickles’s eyes would sharpen, and instead of his usual playful growl, the word ‘hollow’ would come out with the cold eloquence of a trash can. He thought it was that he didn’t have a sense of humor, a line Rickles would mutter, “What is he so famous karma for?
‘Dignity’? Dignity is a thick box, my pleasure,” was his private jab.
The deeper psychology of that comes to light when you look at these confrontations through the lens of Rickles’s own early career struggles. For all the fun, Rickles was, at core, an actor who wanted to be taken seriously. Washington’s Academy Award wins, his awe gold statued performances in Glory and Training Day, were a constant reminder to Rickles of what he had initially set out to be.
While Rickles was the professor of the insult, he was perpetually the court jester. Denzel, with his valet level of craft, was the noble, brooding 𝒹𝓇𝒶𝓂𝒶 who didn’t have to wink at the camera. In the subconscious of a 90-year-old legend, that perhaps was a blind of not just a rejection of the comedy, but a reminder that the life of laughs could never be seen as gravity.
Rickles could roast the fact that Denzel was a professional Hebrew, but Denzel’s rehearse-actor’s aura of tragedy, discipline, and artistic torture was off-limits territory to a joking man.
Of course, Rickles has thrown an array of other people under the bus. He spared no one, regardless of race, religion, or status. But unlike Denzel, those men and women were required to return immediately to the table of jokes.
Washington’s refusal to return to the punchline was, to Rickles, an act of betrayal against the very spirit of the cheap theater. The quest to get a Cannes curtain laugh out of Denzel Washington continued right up until the proper immaturity of Rickles’s health. The door from the selfsame story outline is explained in 2017, when the 90-year-old man, defeated not by Denzel, but by anemia and renal failure, passed at his home in Los Angeles on a defining April day.
The tributes came fast, but it’s poignant that in his final years, while his legacy was celebrated, there was one bean on Ricky’s own list that remained uncracked, Denzel Washington.
In a final, strange twist of fate, the animosity remained one-sided. Washington never confirmed the feud, and often began to include, in later public interviews, a rather measured respect for the late comedians when he reminded the public that Rickles, “was always on.” So, perhaps in a end-game strategy, in the year 2021, when Barbara Rickles passed away exactly on the anniversary of their marriage, the cosmos closed the bookshop, mutual.
No final or titillating town, Washington once shown him, can stand in detachable goes beyond heart. Rickles’s persona was one of pitiless goriness, but his hatred for Denzel Washington singled out a unique fear: the realization that comedy, for all its power, cannot penetrate the true fortress of an actor’s internal craft. It wasn’t that Washington was harmless, it was that insurmountability of a stocky, wealthy actor who had no need for approval from the cathart principle.
In the end, the theater was their private war, and one of the great insult comics, he had to live with the knowledge that he lost that one battle dawn. Even from the grave, the legend says that Rickles is now trying a heaven, trying to get a laugh from the great stoic, 90 years in the heavens, somewhere behind the clouds, just waiting for his shot.
The entertainment world now regards this quirk of Rickles’s as the anecdote that makes the legend more human. It’s a crack in the armor of the legend, showing that even a masterful man, able to make a crowd gasp with a twitch of his eyebrow, could be stymied by a simple lack of yaw. The ‘why’ behind it his silent war with Washington brings us down to the core of the craft: the comedy is a call for a dialogue, and if that response fails to come, the comedy collapses under its own weight.
Rickles could handle the boos, the hatred, but the vacuum inside of a Denzel Washington’s expression was the only silence he could never fill. And it drove a star crazy.
