Jonathan Winters

Hand Jonathan Winters a foot-long wooden stick, and he won’t tell a joke about it. He’ll hold it under his chin like a violin, cast it like a fishing rod, and crack it like a lion tamer’s whip, generating the sound effects from the back of his throat. He ignores setup and punchline. He simply contorts his face and slips into an argument between an old woman and a rural gas station attendant, switching voices so fast the crowd barely registers the transition.

While his 1960s contemporaries updated the subject matter of standup, Winters abandoned the format entirely. He built the template for high-speed solo improv. He routinely ignored club conventions by taking over late-night television broadcasts, treating a standard talk show couch as an excuse to do manic character work.

Because the act runs on whatever impulse fires across his brain next, his bits rarely follow a narrative arc. A premise just ends when he gets bored with it. He fills the stage with recurring figures like the aggressive granny Maude Frickert or the dim Elwood P. Suggins, often interrupting his own sentences. Long before it was common practice, he talked openly about his mental breakdowns, casually dropping jokes about his time in psychiatric hospitals into otherwise lighthearted television spots.

Before he found a microphone, he was a Marine gunner in World War II. Decades later, his elasticity made him an obvious choice for voiceover work, and he spent his final years voicing characters in The Smurfs.