When he was a child and lost his parents at the beach, he asked a policeman, “Do you think we’ll ever find them?” “I don’t know,” came the reply. “There’s so many places they could hide.”

No breaks, no how, no way. His father worked in a bank and got caught stealing pens. Research reveals that Rodney Dangerfield is the sap in his own family tree. The line has never been broken. Elevator operators eye him and always say the same thing: “Basement?” On a night out in a Chinese restaurant, he opens his fortune cookie and gets the check from the next table. The trauma reaches into the intimate parts of his life. He has become such a maladroit lover that he caught a peeping Tom booing him. His wife “cut me down to once a month. I’m lucky. Two guys I know she cut out completely.”

The weeks of his life are run-on reminders of his inferiority. No luck. No chance. And of course—as a connoisseur of the hairsbreadth art of stand-up comedy will tell you—no respect. These components of Rodney Dangerfield’s fractured comic mask form one of the unlikeliest success stories around. Dangerfield was a has-been even before he was anyone at all.

“I dropped out of show business once,” he often confesses in his act. “But nobody noticed.”

He went into business selling paint, and scribbled jokes between appointments. By the time most businessmen are playing chicken with their first heart attack, Rodney was planning his comeback from nowhere. At 45, he made his first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. He was 47 when he went on Carson for the first of 63 appearances. Now, at 58, Dangerfield has a rambunctious new comedy album out and his first starring role in a Hollywood movie.

In Caddyshack, Rodney shows up as a real estate developer who dresses in color combinations out of a Sherwin-Williams sample book and outrages the gentry at the local country club with such reflections as, “You look at that kid, you know why tigers eat their young.” Rodney must compete for attention in the film with alumni of Saturday Night Live and one mechanical gopher. He draws more laughs than the TV kids and chews up at least as much of the screen as the rodent.

Dangerfield, who keeps his traveling to a minimum and works as much as possible out of his own club on Manhattan’s East Side, has put together one of the best comedy acts in the trade by dealing shamelessly in things other comics struggle to hide—like fear, anger and humiliation. In performance, Dangerfield is the enemy of poise.

A minute after he hits the lights, his brow throws off sweat like a lawn sprinkler. His eyes bulge. His hands claw at his throat. He may be trying to loosen his tie, but it looks as if he is trying to strangle himself.

The whole performance is a screwball incarnation of the comedian’s deepest nightmare: flop sweat, the purgatorial feeling of bombing out, when every joke falls like a barbell and the only laughs come when you introduce the band. Other guys fight their way past flop sweat, or cool it out. For Rodney Dangerfield, cool is a dial on a Fedders. He sets fear on parade, and all its consequences are his best punch lines.

Jack Benny once told Dangerfield that his signature line—”I don’t get no respect”—cuts right to everyone’s soul. Indeed, Dangerfield’s best comedy is based on a futile lashing out against misery, often sexual and always social.

“Comedy is essentially mood, not a series of one-liners,” Dangerfield says. “Every joke is a complete story.”

The way he tells one, the audience can often see a whole life in a setup, and a fate in a punch line. “During sex my wife wants to talk to me,” he confesses, then adds: “The other night she called me from a hotel.”

Even Dangerfield’s silliest gags have the sting of truth. How accurate they may be about his own life is another matter. He talks about “comedic license,” but whether he is doing a shotgun discourse on marriage or about growing up Jewish and poor in a subsection of New York City that is well-off and Waspy, he seems to be drawing from deep roots. Rodney was Jacob Cohen when the neighborhood kids had names “like Marianne and Biff.” When they were on the tennis courts, he was delivering groceries. He started writing gags when he was 15. At 19 he was playing the Catskills for $12 a week.

Jobs outside the Catskills were even harder to come by. He got a spot as a singing waiter at a Brooklyn joint called the Polish Falcon, where the emcee was a woman named Sally Marr. Rodney hung around with her I son, who was in the Navy then. He called himself Lenny Bruce.

If the Catskills were the training ground for that time, a Broadway drugstore called Hanson’s was the laboratory. Rodney, Lenny and a lot of other young guys hung out in the back booths, nursing coffee, nailing each other with wild ideas, gags, nutty notions for routines. A few made it out of the drugstore. Some, like Joe Ancis, were brilliant in the booth and on the street; Bruce once admitted that he owed maybe a third of his act to Joe. But Ancis trembled before the prospect of flop sweat. He never went onstage. Others, like Rodney, fought the flops, but never got out quite far enough. When he married Singer Joyce Indig, he was close to 30 and still far from the big time. He worried that long weeks working joints on the road would hurt the marriage. So he packed it in and started selling paint.

During that period, he watched Lenny become a storm center, a genius and a martyr. He saw Joe Ancis go into the construction business. Rodney had two children, Brian and Melanie, but his marriage was rocky and finally fell apart. Rodney raised the kids. He also put together a new act and got a taste for a new life. Says Dangerfield:

“I asked the club owner not to put my name in the paper, to make up another name. When he came up with Rodney Dangerfield I thought he was crazy, but I was depressed enough to go along with it. I figured, if you’re gonna change your name you might as well change it.”

By 1967, he crashed the Sullivan Show, and by 1969 he had enough mileage behind him to settle down and open a club, from which he has been sallying forth ever since, pretty much at his own pleasure.

Rodney says a lot of offers come in now: movies, “dozens” of TV pilots. His attitude toward them is “I don’t want to spend my time poring over scripts and memorizing. When you do standup, you are the guy on. Live entertainment is the only real medium.” It is a medium filled with ghosts. You can hear Lenny Bruce beneath the skin of some of Rodney’s cracks, though Dangerfield disclaims any specific influence. Both of them share the same manic irreverence, the same compulsive wise-mouthing and fearless telling of truth.

They also shared the same pal, Joe Ancis, who has been boarding with Rodney and his children ever since Joe separated from his wife a couple of years back. Although Rodney occasionally pays $50 for a gag, he cooks up most of his own material, saying what he feels, working the jokes out in front of small audiences until they flow just right. “I play with a joke a long time,” Dangerfield admits. “I came up with this one sitting in the sauna at the health club yesterday: ‘When I got married all the property was put in two names. And her mother’s.’ ”

The hands reach for his throat. The eyes bulb out of his face like two Christmas ornaments dropped into a holiday pudding. “Do you think that’s funny?” he asks.

Many labels were hung on Rodney Dangerfield during his long, frenetic heyday as the funniest joke teller in America. His was “the comedy of angst,” or “the comedy of anxiety,” or “the comedy of the loser.” What it really was was the comedy of funny. It was the comedy of laughter. His act wasn’t conceptual or observational or stream-of-consciousness; it was a bunch of jokes.

The jokes tended to be self-deprecating and selfpitying and what they said at heart was “We’re all in this together.” But we’re not all in it together anymore. Rodney Dangerfield died at 82 Tuesday in New York after a long series of illnesses and operations.

“I don’t get no respect” was, of course, his signature line, but to the end he had the respect, and the gratitude, of everybody who ever laughed so hard they cried.

In the ‘70s and ‘80s, Dangerfield’s appearances on “The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson” were major television events, whether in college dorms or, who knows, retirement villages. Carson loved comedians and found Rodney so relentless in his pursuit of the ever-elusive next laugh that just the idea of Dangerfield amused him.

Dangerfield would come out from behind the curtain and do five or six minutes of prepared material, then sit on the couch and do several more minutes of jokes thinly disguised as conversation, Carson barely getting a word in except to set up more jokes. He’d ask Dangerfield, “How’s your health?” and Dangerfield would do a few minutes of health jokes, always involving his physician, the mythical “Dr. Vinnie Boom Botz,” being referred to of late by David Letterman on his own show.

He didn’t like it when he visited his doctor one time and was told he was crazy, Dangerfield recalled. “I said, ‘Oh yeah? Well I want another opinion.’ The doctor says, ‘Okay — you’re ugly, too.’ ”

Even at the dentist’s he was plagued. “I told my dentist, what can I do about having such yellow teeth? He said, ‘Wear a brown tie.’ ”

One night Dangerfield tore through his sit-down routine so fast that he ended early and so, mopping his brow with a handkerchief, no more jokes available, he turned to Carson and simply asked, “So what’s new with you?” Carson laughed so hard at this that he literally fell off his chair. They were gorgeous together.

Though he had two careers as a comedian — the first, as Jack Roy, began at the age of 15 — it was the second one, started late in life, that made Dangerfield a star and, in his rumpled black suit, solid red tie and unmade bed of a face, an American icon.

The success in other people’s clubs and on TV enabled him to open Dangerfield’s, a homey comedy club on Manhattan’s East Side. Dangerfield would roam through the crowd in his trademark silk bathrobe, greeting guests and watching the new comics. He was infallibly generous about giving young talent exposure at his club, and on his memorable HBO specials, where Roseanne Barr made her first big splash. He supported one of the most audacious and irreverent comics ever, the great Sam Kinison.

Dangerfield was thoroughly hip; he “got” all the jokes, including the ones he didn’t tell. He got all the jokes, he was all the jokes. Never did he break up at his own material, though. He was too worried about it. He slaved over it — sometimes with co-writers — into the wee hours, scribbling jokes on the lined pages of big notebooks.

His huge popularity may have been a reaction to all the pseudo-intellectual comics who stood before brick walls and talked about their neuroses. Dangerfield didn’t talk about his neuroses; he talked about how little success he was having in bed. “I asked one girl if she was going to hate herself in the morning. She said, ‘I hate myself now.’ ”

Or: “I remember one date I had, we ran into some guy she knew and she introduced us. She said, ‘Steve, this is Rodney. Rodney, this is goodbye.’ ”

Eventually he was able to star in such movies as “Easy Money” and “Back to School,” respectably funny if not artful comedies, and in “Caddyshack,” now a cult hit so beloved that some of its fans know the whole script by heart. Dangerfield plays a boor, a vulgarian, the ugly American. It was a stretch, but he brought it off.

Even in his movie roles, the jokes were on him — ridiculing the way he looked or talked or barged through life. He was a study in manic misery, hilarious homeliness, Emmett Kelly with a voice.

Perhaps if Steinbeck’s Tom Joad or Kafka’s Joseph K had been stand-up comics, they might have been something like Rodney Dangerfield.

No, wait — not at all. Forget that stuff. There was only one Rodney — one put-upon, perpetually pained, always discouraged Rodney. If he looked for that famous silver living, it would fall out of a cloud and hit him on the head. His was a humor that, like so many of the great comics of his generation (though his popularity spanned several generations), grew out of pain. Born Jacob Cohen, he remembered all his life how teachers — not just students, but teachers — made anti-Semitic remarks about him in front of classmates at New York’s P.S. 99.

And so he told jokes about being a miserable kid. But not about that aspect of being a miserable kid. The anger never came out in the comedy — not directly. He was a professional joke teller, not a guy looking for psychoanalysis from an audience in a nightclub, so you got jokes and gags, not anecdotes about the way it really was.

“My mother had morning sickness after I was born,” he’d say of his earliest days.

“My old man didn’t help, either. One time I was kidnapped. They sent back a piece of my finger. He said he wanted more proof!”

“I was lost at the beach once and a cop helped me look for my parents. I said to him, ‘You think we’ll find them?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, kid. There’s so many places they could hide.’ ”

Thus, according to his act — the way Chaplin’s or Keaton’s or Harold Lloyd’s characters were established — the patterns of this Rodney’s ramshackle life were immutably established.

“The other day they asked me to leave a bar I was drinking in. They said they wanted to start the happy hour.”

“Once the cops arrested me for jaywalking. The crowd shouted, ‘Don’t take him alive!’ ”

The litany of abuse would be punctuated with the occasional “I tell ya, I don’t get no respect. No respect at all.” The crowd would cheer.

And then back to the jokes.

The no-respect theme was encouraged by one of the most artful and adored of all stand-ups, Jack Benny. “He was an ace. He was a doll,” Dangerfield recalled in a 1979 interview. “And he says to me, ‘Rodney, I’m cheap and I’m 39, that’s my image, but your ‘no respect’ thing, that’s into the soul of everybody. Everybody can identify with that. Everyone gets cut off in traffic, everyone gets stood up by a girl, kids are rude to them, whatever.’ He says to me, ‘Every day something happens where people feel they didn’t get respect.’ ”

No matter how Dangerfield complained onstage about how life treated him, the comic never exploited it for pathos or poignancy. Still, there was just a trace of it in a soliloquy in which he talked about the fact that nobody ever gave him “one of these,” and made the “okay” sign, the little circle, with his thumb and finger. So if you saw him in the street after the show or in a club later or anywhere, he would tell an audience, it would be doing him a great service just to flash him “one of these.”

He figured it wasn’t much to ask. “You know what the trouble with me is? I appeal to everyone who can do me absolutely no good,” he’d mockingly lament. “At my age, if I don’t drink, don’t smoke, and eat only certain foods, what can I look forward to? From this point on, if I take excellent care of myself — I’ll get very sick and die.”

And so he did.

But he left behind infinite echoes of laughter, laughter that survives somehow even if it appears to have evaporated. And who knows but that right now, at this very moment, someone, somewhere is giving Rodney “one of these.”