Why Did The Turtle Cross The Road?

When I was about ten, my father told me about how he had seen Jonathan Winters do this amazing story about turtles crossing the road. To "do" a story rather than simply tell it, he became each and every one of the characters and supplied all the sound effects. What left an impression on my father were those sounds. "You could do something like that," he told me. And so for the rest of the weekend, I started working on my rendition of a Jonathan Winters bit that I had never seen. At some point, after dinner, I set to work. Many of our family's best comedy came from around that table, but that night I died. I couldn't help but feel a little set up by my father.
This was, after all, the man who I later understood could do ten minutes with noting but a stick. Long before Robin Williams brought his manic energy from Ork to Boulder, Colorado, Jonathan Winters was working to make everyone's life just a little more surreal. He showed up on Dean Martin's Roasts, and talk shows from Jack Paar to David Letterman. Everywhere he went, things tipped a little from the center. There were many personalities bouncing around inside his head, and sometimes it was hard to discern just where they stopped and the real Jonathan began. It was around the time that I was considering standup comedy as a profession, in my senior year of high school, that I learned about Mister Winter's history of mental illness. This knowledge, along with repeated viewings of "Lenny," helped derail the career path that my father had set me on some eight years earlier.
And now Jonathan is well and truly gone. Or perhaps he's just gone off on some magnificent tangent that only appears like death. Kudos to you then, Mister Winters, and aloha.