A Sweet, Gentle and Funny Man Has Left Us

The funniest comedian of my lifetime, Jonathan Winters, has died at 87 and I will take no comfort in the fact that he's not here any longer.

I once spent two hours in a hotel room with a couple of other people and a very drunk Jonathan Winters during the 1960s in Asheville, following an appearance. I laughed so hard I thought I was going to need hospitalization.

Drunk, sober or just normally crazy, he was always on, always a riot, always a gentle soul whose humor skewered nobody, but made us all fall down with its outrageousness. He was what my old friend Moon once alled "a sweet man."

I once had a dog named for one of his characters, Chester Honeyhugger. Ugliest dog I ever saw. And one of the loveliest men.