Goodbye to Jonathan Winters.

"Mr. Winters did much of his best work in nightclubs, but he hated life on the road. In 1959 he suffered a nervous breakdown onstage at the Hungry I in San Francisco and briefly spent time in a mental hospital. Two years later he suffered another collapse, and soon after that he quit nightclubs for good. Between 1960 and 1964 he recorded his most-requested monologues for Verve on a series of albums, notably 'The Wonderful World of Jonathan Winters,' 'Here’s Jonathan' and 'Jonathan Winters: Down to Earth.'"

I remember seeing these albums in my parents record collection — in there with all the Julie London and Ray Coniff Singers — and I don't remember any other comedy albums. I remember trying to grasp the idea of a "nervous breakdown" and the relationship between comedy and inner pain.

Here are  "The Wonderful World of Jonathan Winters,” “Here’s Jonathan” and "Jonathan Winters: Down to Earth."

Jonathan Winters was  — as I understood it, possibly wrongly — the greatest of all comic geniuses, but we only ever got to see a small part of what he might have done, and the greatness and the denial of the whole were part of a single phenomenon, something about his mind. From the first link:

“Mother and dad didn’t understand me; I didn’t understand them,” he told Jim Lehrer on “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” in 1999. “So consequently it was a strange kind of arrangement.” Alone in his room, he would create characters and interview himself.

The family’s fortunes collapsed with the Depression. The Winters National Bank failed, and Jonathan’s parents divorced. His mother took him to Springfield, where she did factory work but eventually became the host of a women’s program on a local radio station. Her son continued talking to himself and developed a repertory of strange sound effects.

He studied art and married an art student when he was 23. They were married for 60 years, until she died. His entry into show business came at the urging of his wife, who pushed him to enter a talent contest, which he won and which led to a morning radio show, on which he created characters and interviewed himself.