Dangerfield Hospitalized After Mild Heart Attack

Nov. 26 -- After suffering a mild heart attack on Thanksgiving, Rodney Dangerfield is listed in stable condition at a Los Angeles hospital.

Dangerfield was stricken on Thursday, his 80th birthday, one day after Jay Leno paid tribute to the comic on The Tonight Show. He was brought to the intensive care unit of Cedars-Sinai Hospital.

Dangerfield's publicist Warren Cowan told the Associated Press that Dangerfield is doing well and will undergo an angiogram — an X-ray of theblood vessels — today.

Flashing his "I Get No Respect" humor, Dangerfield asked his heart specialist, "Who gave me this [birthday] present?" Cowan said.

Dangerfield's wife, Joan, 48, expects her husband to be home by the end of the week.

Caddyshack Comic Still Gets Laughs

Dangerifield appeared last year in Adam Sandler's devilish comedy Little Nicky, playing the part of Lucifer. He also wrote and starred in My Five Wives, which he described as "a lighthearted look at polygamy."

Dangerfield — born Jacob Cohen on New York's Long Island — began working as a teen-ager at Brooklyn's Polish Falcon Club and writing jokes. He married Joyce Indig, and in his mid-20s, dropped out of show business to support his family. As he has noted many times of his early retirement from show business, "Nobody noticed."

In his mid-40s, he returned to the stage, making a name for himself in East Coast resorts. That's where his self-deprecating style took hold. By his mid-40s, he had entered the public consciousness through a series of bookings on The Ed Sullivan Show, where he'd tell the audience, "My wife was afraid of the dark, saw me naked, now she's afraid of the light!"

Another classic quip: "I tell ya, with my wife I got no sex life. Just when I get going, she wakes up."

His second wife owns a Los Angeles flower shop, and they met in the mid-1980s.

"I never took the time to stop and smell the roses," he told ABCNEWS.com last year. "I finally did, and it's great."

Dangerfield became a movie star following his bit part in 1980's Caddyshack. He followed that with Easy Money and Back to School, one of the first comedies to gross more than $100 million. He even got accolades as the "dad from hell" in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. In a recent list of top comics, Entertainment Weekly ranked Dangerfield No. 36 out of the top 50 funniest people.