The versatile actor Johnson won an Emmy for his work on Dan Rowan and Dick Martin’s Laugh-In in 1969 and was among the troupe members who developed breakout characters.
Arte Johnson, a lurking presence on US television’s Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In as a lecherous geriatric and a comic German soldier who found things on the show “verrry interesting” – but not necessarily funny – died on Wednesday at the age of 90, his family said.
Johnson died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles from heart failure following a three-year battle with bladder and prostate cancer, a statement from his family said today.
The versatile Johnson won an Emmy for his work on Dan Rowan and Dick Martin’s Laugh-In in 1969 and was among the troupe members who developed breakout characters.
The top-rated, award-winning show aired from 1968 through 1973 and was a ground-breaking, fast-moving mix of comedy, music and social satire, all overlaid with a hippie-era psychedelic sensibility. Guest stars ranged from falsetto-voiced Tiny Tim to Richard Nixon, who once uttered one of the show’s catch phrases – “sock it to me” – during an appearance in the midst of his 1968 presidential campaign.
The diminutive Johnson would play as many as 10 characters – often with foreign accents – in an hour long Laugh-in episode. Three of those characters would become stand-outs – a man in a yellow raincoat who inexplicably rode a child-sized tricycle until he tipped over, the dirty old man Tyrone F Horneigh and Wolfgang, the leering German soldier.
Before Laugh-In, Johnson’s career consisted of New York stage work, semi-regular sit-com parts starting in the late 1950s and one-off roles on popular 1960s shows such as The Andy Griffith Show, Bewitched and The Dick Van Dyke Show.
Johnson was born on January 29, 1929, in Benton Harbor, Michigan, reports Reuters.
