Source:Rodney Dangerfield– on CBS’s What’s My Line in 1973.

“Rodney appears as the mystery guest on a 1973 episode of “What’s My Line?”, where he tells the story about how he came up with his iconic line, “I don’t get no respect”.

From Rodney Dangerfield

We had a post on The New Democrat yesterday (that I actually read, even though I didn’t write it) about Carl Reiner being on The Tonight Show n 1983 and talking about his insecurities. I’m not mentioning Carl Reiner here to show no respect to Rodney Dangerfield since this post is about The original Dangerman, but to make a broader point about Hot Rod’s no respect routine.

Rodney Dangerfield, if he’s not in the first class of the greatest comedians ever or in the first car on a train of the greatest comedians, the first class, (however you want to put it) his foot is just on the outside of those levels. And yet his whole shtick was about him not having enough respect in life as a performer or anything else.

He’s like the guy who reaches the mountaintop in life and automatically assumes he’s going to hit a loose rock and fall a thousand feet to the ground. The guy whose just bought a great sports car worth 100,000 dollars and automatically assumes it gets totaled or stolen the day he drives it home. The man who thinks he’s going to go bankrupt even though he’s worth a 100 million, the day after he moves into his new mansion.

Finland is stereotyped for having a lot of depressed people and maybe that’s just because of the arctic weather that it gets that depresses so many Fins, but Rodney Dangerfield sounds like a great candidate for a Finnish mental hospital to be treated for depression. (The Fins are apparently the experts on depression) Literally one of the greatest comedians ever and yet his whole act (and that’s exactly what it have been) was about him getting no respect.