Ronnie Schell, who rose to prominence in show business after playing the main character’s best friend on the 1960s sitcom “Gomer Pyle,” earning him the title of “America’s slowest rising comedian,” died Friday. He was 94 years old.
Shell died of natural causes at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Publicist Harlan Boll, who spoke with Mr. Schell’s son, Gregory, said he had recently been hospitalized after a fall.
Shell played a Marine Corporal. Duke Slater starred opposite star Jim Nabors on the hit CBS show for three seasons.
He left during season 4 to star as a DJ on his own sitcom, Good Morning, World. However, the series failed after 26 episodes, and Shell returned to Gomer Pyle for the fifth and final season. By that time, his character had been promoted to corporal.
Shell was labeled the “slowest riser” by San Francisco radio personality Don Sherwood.
“Sherwood coined the term, because everyone he worked with has moved on,” Shell told the Mercury News in 2011, citing Phyllis Diller and the Smothers Brothers as newcomers who went on to become big hits.
Goldie Hawn, who co-starred with Shell on “Good Morning World,” became a regular on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” winning Best Supporting Actress in 1970.
“I always say it was very lonely in the middle,” he told a San Jose, Calif., newspaper.
However, Schell found steady work and sometimes outlived many of his contemporaries who enjoyed early success but later became inactive or ceased to exist.
Born Ronald Ralph Shell on December 23, 1931 in Richmond, California, he enlisted in the United States Air Force after high school and served for four years. He became interested in entertainment while in the military and then attended San Francisco State University, graduating in 1958.
While performing in a college play, he was offered a two-week stint at the Purple Onion Comedy Club in San Francisco, which was booked for five months. Diller and the Kingston Trio split the bill.
The Kingston Trio hired him as the opening act for a national college tour.
Schell honed his comedy skills at Hungry Eye, San Francisco’s famous nightclub where Woody Allen and Mort Sahl got their start. Shell has been performing comedy in Las Vegas for over 40 years.
He worked as a writer and sketch performer for Sherwood’s radio and television shows in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“I didn’t get a big break, but I got a lot of little breaks,” he said in San Francisco State’s online Alumni Spotlight.
Shell appeared on a 1959 episode of the television quiz show You Bet Your Life, where he delivered a comical series of beatnik jive-talk to host Groucho Marx.
In 1962, he left the Bay Area for Los Angeles and two years later was hired by “Gomer Pyle.”
He had numerous television guest credits, including “The Andy Griffith Show” and “The Patty Duke Show,” and in later years, “The Love Boat,” “Mork & Mindy,” “Saved by the Bell,” “The Golden Girls,” and “Yes Dear.”
Shell provided the voice of a hockey puck-shaped character in the 1970s animated series “Peter Puck,” which aired during televised NHL games. In the 1980s, Shell appeared in a television commercial for Shakey’s Pizza.
He appeared in more than 24 films, including “The Shaggy DA,” “Love at First Bite,” and “Jetsons: The Movie.”
His extensive voiceover work includes “Goober and the Ghost Chasers,” “Skatebirds,” “Battle of the Planets,” and “The Smurfs.”
Schell served as a comedic advisor to actor Richard Dreyfuss on the 2019 Netflix film The Last Laugh.
He is survived by his wife Janet Rodberg, sons Gregory and Christian, and granddaughter Chiara.
