...BECAUSE fALLENNESS IS FUNNY:

"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 sound effects. He often entertained his high school friends by imitating a race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

A poor student, Mr. Winters enlisted in the Marines before finishing high school and during World War II served as a gunner on the aircraft carrier Bon Homme Richard in the Pacific.

After the war he completed high school and, hoping to become a political cartoonist, studied art at Kenyon College and the Dayton Art Institute. In 1948 he married Eileen Schauder, a Dayton native who was studying art at Ohio State. She died in 2009. His survivors include their two children, Jonathan Winters IV, of Camarillo, Calif., known as Jay, and Lucinda, of Santa Barbara, Calif.; and several grandchildren.

At the urging of his wife, Mr. Winters, whose art career seemed to be going nowhere, entered a talent contest in Dayton with his eye on the grand prize, a wristwatch, which he needed. He won, and he was hired as a morning disc jockey at WING, where he made up for his inability to attract guests by inventing them. "I'd make up people like Dr. Hardbody of the Atomic Energy Commission, or an Englishman whose blimp had crash-landed in Dayton," he told U.S. News and World Report in 1988.

After two years at a Columbus television station, he left for New York in 1953 to break into network radio. Instead he landed bit parts on television and, with surprising ease, found work as a nightclub comic.

A guest spot on Arthur Godfrey's "Talent Scouts" led to frequent appearances with Jack Paar and Steve Allen, both of them staunch supporters willing to give Mr. Winters free rein. Alistair Cooke, after seeing Mr. Winters at the New York nightclub Le Ruban Bleu, booked him as the first comedian to appear on his arts program "Omnibus."

In his stand-up act, Mr. Winters initially relied heavily on sound effects -- a cracking whip, a creaking door, a hovering U.F.O. -- which he used to spice up his re-enactments of horror films, war films and westerns. Gradually he developed a gallery of characters, which expanded when he had his own television shows, beginning with the 15-minute "Jonathan Winters Show," which ran from 1956 to 1957. He was later seen in a series of specials for NBC in the early 1960s; on an hourlong CBS variety series, "The Jonathan Winters Show," from 1967 to 1969; and on "The Wacky World of Jonathan Winters," in syndication, from 1972 to 1974.

Many of Mr. Winters's characters -- among them B. B. Bindlestiff, a small-town tycoon, and Piggy Bladder, football coach for the State Teachers' Animal Husbandry Institute for the Blind -- were based on people he grew up with. Maude Frickert, for example, whom he played wearing a white wig and a Victorian granny dress, was inspired by an elderly aunt who let him drink wine and taught him to play poker when he was 9 years old.

Other characters, like the couturier Lance Loveguard and Princess Leilani-nani, the world's oldest hula dancer, sprang from a secret compartment deep within Mr. Winters's inventive brain.

As channeled by Mr. Winters, Maude Frickert was a wild card. Reminiscing about her late husband, Pop Frickert, she told a stupefied interviewer: "He was a Spanish dancer in a massage parlor. If somebody came in with a crick in their neck he'd do an orthopedic flamenco all over them. He was tall, dark and out of it."

One of Mr. Winters's most popular characters, she appeared in a series of commercials for Hefty garbage bags, which also featured Mr. Winters as a garbage man dressed in a spotless white uniform and referring, in an upper-class British accent, to gar-BAZH. Carson kidnapped Maude Frickert and simply changed the name to Aunt Blabby, one of his stock characters. Mr. Winters said that the blatant theft did not bother him.

Mr. Winters often called himself a satirist, but the term does not really apply. In "Seriously Funny," his history of 1950s and 1960s comedians, Gerald Nachman described him, a bit floridly, as "part circus clown and part social observer, Red Skelton possessed by the spirit of Daumier."

He was hard to define. "I don't do jokes," he once said. "The characters are my jokes." At the same time, unlike many comedians reacting to the Eisenhower era, he found his source material in human behavior rather than politics or current events, but in him the spectacle of human folly provoked glee rather than righteous anger.

In 1961 Variety wrote, "His humor is more universally acceptable than any of the current New Comics, with the possible exception of Bob Newhart, because he covers the mass experiences of the U.S. common man -- the Army, the gas station, the airport."

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