Lenny Schultz, a wild-eyed comedian who became known in the 1970s and ’80s for high-energy performances that he delivered with a mouthful of sound effects and a table full of silly props, died on Sunday at his home in Delray Beach, Fla. He was 91.
His son and only immediate survivor, Mark, confirmed the death.
“I can’t tell a joke,” Mr. Schultz told The Orlando Sentinel in 1972, but that didn’t matter. “The guys I like and the guys I identify with,” he added, “are Sid Caesar, Jonathan Winters, Guy Marks — the zanies. I like the zanies. I am a zany!”
With his expressive face, his physicality and the rapid pace of his act, Mr. Schultz exuded a loony intensity. He began his comedy career in the late 1960s while keeping his day job as a high school gym teacher.
Onstage, he described the start of life on Earth, punctuating his narrative with explosions and other noises; bowed a banana as if it were a violin (while taking bites out of it); played the Lone Ranger, wearing a mask and a tiny cowboy hat while riding a small toy horse on a stick and flinging Froot Loops from a box; rendered a cockfight between game fowl of different ethnicities; and admonished the baby doll in his backpack to stop crying because William Morris agents were in the audience.
“Lenny has a special place in the hearts and memories of everybody in his peer group,” David Letterman, who met Mr. Schultz when they were performing in Los Angeles, said in a phone interview. “He is talked about more often, randomly, than any single person we spent time with at the Comedy Store in the 1970s.”
Mr. Letterman, who would later present Mr. Schultz to a national audience, recalled a night when Mr. Schultz smashed his face into a cake, covered his body in fruit and disrobed. “He said, ‘If you go crazy, I will take this banana and shove it into my underpants.’ The objective was to get the audience crazy enough to do it — he needed the motivation — and finally he gets them into a fever pitch. A grown man in his underpants.”
The next day, Mitzi Shore, the Comedy Store’s owner, met with Mr. Schultz to tell him that he could never do that routine again, Mr. Letterman said: It had created a problem with vermin.
“There’s so much garbage from Lenny’s act that it invited the rats in,” Mr. Letterman said.
Leonard Schultz was born on Dec. 13, 1933, in the Bronx. His parents — Louis Schultz, a tailor, and Dora Schultz, who managed the home — were both from Russia. Lenny aspired to pitch in the major leagues and was scouted by the Yankees, but he lost his chance at a contract when he injured his right shoulder.
After serving in the Army in Maine, Mr. Schultz earned a bachelor’s degree in education from New York University in 1955.
He soon began a career as a high school physical education teacher in New York City that would last for about 30 years and continue long after he became a working comedian. He enjoyed the stability of a city job with a pension as a hedge against the unpredictability of show business. He received his master’s degree in education from Hunter College in 1967.
Students were his first audience.
“When I was teaching, the kids in my class used to laugh so hard and say, ‘You should be in show business,’” he told The Bristol Herald Courier of Tennessee in 1980.
In 1969, encouraged by friends who loved his sense of humor and told him he should develop a routine, he went to an open-mic night at the Improvisation, the Midtown Manhattan nightclub later called the Improv. He did well enough to be asked back. He also worked at Catch a Rising Star, another popular comedy club in Manhattan.
“He was beloved because there was nobody like him,” said Bill Scheft, a comedian who met Mr. Schultz at Catch a Rising Star. “But you didn’t want to follow him, because the stage would look like somebody had thrown up in the middle of a grocery store.”
His act preceded that of Gallagher, who would become known for splattering audiences with watermelons that he smashed with a sledgehammer.
“I’d juggle water to circus music and people put up their plastic and umbrellas,” Mr. Schultz told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1996. “I remember Gallagher watching me do this years ago at the Comedy Store in L.A.”
When Mr. Schultz opened for the iconoclastic rocker Frank Zappa at Madison Square Garden in 1976, Joe Bivona, reviewing the show for The Daily News, wrote, “Anyone who likes to pull the wings off flies might find humor” in Mr. Schultz, adding, “We threw in the towel when the comedian started foaming at the mouth.”
Mr. Schultz was seen on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and numerous other talk shows. He also performed at many hotels in the Catskills.
In 1976, he was a regular on two television shows: the short-lived sitcom “Ball Four,” based on the former New York Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton’s best-selling book and starring Mr. Bouton, on which he played a pitcher; and “The Late Summer Early Fall Bert Convy Show,” on which he played the Bionic Chicken, a costumed action hero.
In 1977 and 1978, Mr. Schultz appeared on a new version of “Laugh-In.” The original show revolutionized TV comedy in the late 1960s, but the reboot, despite a cast that included a young Robin Williams, was canceled after six episodes.
Mr. Schultz went into semiretirement in the 1990s but continued to perform occasionally into the early 2000s.
His marriages to Francine Ornstein, who was Mark’s mother, and to Helen Fleischer, who ran the sound system for Mr. Schultz during their marriage, ended in divorce.
Although Mr. Letterman admired Mr. Schultz, he had him as a guest only once, in 1982, when he performed an epic, exhausting routine that lasted nearly nine minutes on an early episode of “Late Night With David Letterman.” Mr. Letterman said that some members of his staff didn’t want to have him on the show again — and prevailed.
“If I failed him, I regret it,” he said. “If I had had him on the show more often, his career might have gone better.”