Danny DeVito’s final revenge: Hollywood’s ‘funny short guy’ gets the last laugh at age 80

The first episode of Taxi (1978), the series that earned Danny DeVito an Emmy and a Golden Globe, was based on a visual gag: the despotic and belligerent cab dispatcher who first appeared on screens shouting and imposing himself on everyone came out of his cabin halfway through the episode, and turned out to be 4 ft 10 in. At the time, the visual trick worked because DeVito was still unknown to viewers. Now the New Jersey-born comedian, who turned 80 on Sunday, is not only one of the most popular faces in Hollywood but also one of the most beloved actors by audiences of different generations thanks to his continued success over the decades. And with his stature as an inseparable element of his stellar image.

DeVito is now experiencing a new golden age, once again thanks to television: in 2006, he joined the second season of the cult series It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The sitcom is close to reaching its 20th season and becoming the longest-running live-action comedy in the history of American fiction, if the renewal signed with the FX network materializes. DeVito’s role as Frank Reynolds, the swindling father of two of the main characters, has become one of the great humorous creations of his career, a perfect synthesis of his ability to play mean-spirited characters who, despite the extremes of misery they may reach, always seem likeable. He has also just participated in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, released the Christmas comedy A Sudden Case Of Christmas, and returned to another one of the longest-running comedies in history, The Simpsons, for the return in the last season of Herb, Homer’s brother, whom he voices in the original version.

“The same thing happens with Chevy Chase in Community [2009]. They are actors who, for a generation, are associated with a certain type of humor or program and, decades later, they reappear with remakes of their archetypes, assimilated into more contemporary stories. And, above all, they seem very comfortable in those roles. They are having fun doing what they do,” says the film critic Ezequiel Boetti, author of Nueva Comedia Americana: Reír en el cine del siglo XXI (or New American Comedy: Laughing in 21st-century film).

Although DeVito is part of a generation that is older than the actors who formed the movement called New American Comedy, Boetti believes that his influence is evident, among others, in “the darkness” of his works as a director. “When you watch his films, there is a certain appeal to the dark, to characters that are at times quite detestable, like the neighbor in Duplex [2003] or the mother in Throw Momma from the Train [1987]. They are comedies that, beyond being funny, cause a significant amount of discomfort.”

Because DeVito, who made his way in Hollywood with comedies whose core was often based on the actor’s physical appearance — such as Twins (1988), where Arnold Schwarzenegger was the result of a genetic experiment to create the ideal man and he, his twin brother, was “the leftover crap” — eventually also became a prestigious filmmaker. He directed the 1980s classic The War of the Roses (1989), another very dark comedy about the tortuous divorce process of a supposedly exemplary marriage (Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, in two of the best roles of their careers), and he also helmed one of the best film adaptations of Roald Dahl’s Matilda (1996), where he also reserved for himself the role of the uncouth father of the child prodigy. In 1991, an article in The New York Times referring to him as “the new Robert Redford” stated: “In Hollywood a good script is a script Danny DeVito likes, a bad script is a script Danny DeVito doesn’t like, a script that needs work is a script Danny DeVito is thinking about.”

His flair for production is beyond question: he has produced none other than Pulp Fiction (1994), Gattaca (1997), Get Shorty (1995), Man On The Moon (1999) and Erin Brockovich (2000). He also has an additional title as a director that has never seen the light of day, St. Sebastian, an apocalyptic horror film officially shot in 2012 and never released, with no official explanations.

The journalist Ezequiel Boetti links his talent as a director to the ease with which he moves in his ensemble casts: he is rarely the absolute star of a production at his service, but rather someone who also generously favors the comic brilliance of his colleagues: “It is interesting, because many times the figure of the central comedian is too absorbing, as happens with Adam Sandler, whose films are built around him. Danny DeVito’s films are different, more about teamwork, where everything depends on the group and the situations. It’s difficult to find that figure of the all-round comedian in today’s scene. In his films as a director, he ends up getting involved for fun, to take on a character without so much narrative weight, more of a testimonial role. He enjoys directing, producing, leading the orchestra without needing to play all the instruments.”

The corpus delicti

In his essay Danny DeVito’s Body, published in 2008 in the journal Genders, Dr. Michael Tavel Clarke, a professor of American literature and culture at the University of Calgary (Canada), reflected on whether DeVito’s success had come about despite discrimination against short people, as one might say in a coming-of-age story, or, on the contrary, thanks to how those physical attributes played a vital role in Hollywood cinema. This, of course, without neglecting his “undeniable talent.” Clarke argues that DeVito’s comedies, from a carnivalesque perspective, often use him as the repository of a masculine power that, as a short person, should not correspond to him according to social norms.

“While the trademark lechery of his early career suggests that he represented a threat to women, DeVito’s characters most often represent threats to power relations and normative masculinity. Anxieties about the erosion of white, heterosexual, male power found their perfect articulation in DeVito’s body,” he writes. “As such, his body was also a site on which to enact a restoration of the status quo […] a white male whose masculinity is represented as deviant, un-natural, simultaneously constituted by deficiency and excess. This displacement serves to sanitize normative masculinity.”

Clarke, who also believes that many media approaches to the actor are riddled with a paternalism that takes his success as a joke, says that this dynamic “is the subtext of a lot of his work, evident in films like the 1995 Get Shorty, in which he appears posing as Napoleon, or Other People’s Money [1991].” “I don’t think DeVito has transcended the cultural stereotypes that dominate our perception of short men, and I doubt any actor will be able to do so as long as those stereotypes exist. The best one can hope for is that they are countered and modified, and DeVito sometimes manages it,” he says.

For this scholar, an actor who has inherited part of that role is Kevin Hart, the co-star of Central Intelligence (2016) alongside Dwayne Johnson, while another contemporary actor of short stature, Peter Dinklage, has been treated in a more respectful manner, although outside of comedies.

Is DeVito what they now call a “short king,” the supposedly inclusive social media fad of considering men who aren’t tall attractive? “The idea that Jeremy Allen White or Tom Holland [frequent recipients of the label] are short kings is curious. They’re both about the average height of men in the world. The implications for truly short men are not good. The concept expresses a fundamental surprise that a short man could be attractive or romantically potent.”

Happy old age

The comedian and director has turned 80 separated from his wife of more than three decades, the actress Rhea Perlman, who played his wife in Matilda. According to both, it was an amicable split and they are not divorced; they still see each other and get along much better now than in the last years of their relationship. The two met when they were taking their first steps in acting and worked together in plays for the Westbeth Feminist Playwrights Collective, one of the first feminist theater groups in the United States. In a 2019 interview for The New York Times, the journalist Maureen Dowd joked with DeVito by asking him if, with his new life as a bachelor, he had opened a Tinder account. “I still rely on the kindness of strangers!” he replied, playing along.

The interview addressed the current concerns of DeVito, many concerning the political sphere (he has actively supported the most left-wing wing of the Democratic Party, represented by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), but tempered by a desire for carefreeness that, he said, he has carried as a flag in his professional life. In the interview he suggested that the occupants of the White House (at that time, the first Trump administration) should leave their positions and simply go fishing. “[Right now] I’m just looking for a good story. And a good book. And a good screenplay. Work with people that you like. Go to dinner. Go on vacation. Have a good time. Yeah, no stress. Vote for Bernie Sanders,” he said, in what might sound like the epic beginning of a modern manifesto.

As for working with people he likes, last year he starred on Broadway alongside his daughter Lucy DeVito in the play I Need That, for which they received rave reviews. His status as an internet idol has also led to bizarre phenomena such as people painting their vans with his face and calling their vehicles Vanny DeVito, or even erotic coloring books such as The Regular Adventures Of Danny DeVito: The Coloring Book, published last year. At the last Academy Awards he enjoyed his share of nostalgia when he appeared alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger to pay tribute to both the 35th anniversary of Twins and their respective roles as Batman villains.

The Penguin, the role that fell to DeVito in Batman Returns (1992), has now been taken on by Colin Farrell, who has played him in both the film The Batman (2022) and the recently released Max series The Penguin. In a video for Vanity Fair in which he agreed to undergo a lie detector test, DeVito, laughed that his own Penguin in Batman Returns seemed better to him.

For those who want to enjoy a new approach to the character, DeVito dared to write a comic for DC in 2021, within the series Gotham City Villains. Unlike what happened in Tim Burton’s film, in this version the villain was a kind of modern Robin Hood who robbed the rich and did manage to fulfill a personal dream: seducing Catwoman.

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