He was nothing like the men he played on television.
The roles for which Jerry Stiller is most famous far from defined his decades-long career as a leading man of comedy, on-screen or off.
Larry David, who created Stiller’s iconic character, the hotheaded and occasionally belligerent Frank Costanza, for his sitcom Seinfeld, called Stiller “one of the sweetest and kindest men I’ve ever known, not to mention one of the funniest” in a statement after the announcement of his death last week. “I was blessed to be able to work with him.”
Stiller was nothing if not a paragon of comedy and one of only a handful of men who could comfortably be considered as defining a generation of comedians. He and his wife, Anne Meara, who died in 2015 after the two were married more than six decades, got their start as a couples act in nightclubs in the 1960s and later in appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, on which the pair would play expertly off each other, a husband vs. wife dynamic, complete opposites in everything but comedic timing.
He didn’t start out as a star but closer to the working-class characters he played on Seinfeld, and later, on King of Queens. He was the son of a New York bus driver who was only occasionally employed, according to CNN, and he used Hollywood to escape his life as a poor child growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
He joined the Army instead of going to college right away and worked a series of odd jobs before landing at Syracuse University, where he studied acting. He met his wife in an agent’s office and convinced her to be the second half of his comedy act, which held together until the pair decided to pursue individual careers in the 1970s to keep their husband-and-wife act as strong off the road as on, particularly after they had children.
He was mostly a small-parts actor, taking roles on game shows that required perfect comedic timing, until he was cast in Seinfeld in 1989, a role that changed his career and made him a household name, even though he could never quite figure out why.
When the series wrapped, he told Today, “This was an opportunity for me, for the first time, to test myself as an actor because I never saw myself as more than just a decent actor.” He initially didn’t even find the character of Costanza all that funny. He’d actually “been given direction to play it meek opposite Estelle Harris,” who played his wife.
Everyone else, though, thought of Stiller as a star, a giant, and a legend, a sentiment people expressed to his son, Ben Stiller, who announced his father’s death on May 11 in a simple tweet. Or, at least, it was a sentiment they expressed between praising Jerry Stiller for his kindness and generosity.
Kevin James, his co-star on King of Queens, called him “one of the most loving, kind, and funny people to ever grace this earth.” Actor Peter Gallagher told Ben Stiller, “Every Broadway show I ever did, your folks would come back to say hello, and it didn’t matter if the show was a hit or a flop … the light and love they brought was always the highlight of the day.”
Mike Weithorn, the showrunner for King of Queens, told Variety, “A lot of comics, when they are asked to act, don’t go too deep. If the laughs are on the page, they know how to rhythmically get the laugh. Jerry didn’t approach it that way at all. He was an actor through and through. He was so devoted to his craft that he had to make sure that what he was saying was rooted in real emotions. That’s an actor.”
That’s an actor.
Emily Zanotti is the senior editor of the Daily Wire.
