Mark Russell, Washington’s social-political satirist and stand-up comic who spoofed and teased celebrities, politicians, politics and popular culture for more than 50 years from behind his star-spangled piano, died March 30 at his home. He was 90.
From the waning years of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration through the presidencies of 10 succeeding chief executives, Mr. Russell poked fun at the foibles and flaws of the well-known, the pompous and the powerful in monologues replete with pithy one-liners and musical ditties. He called himself “a political cartoonist for the blind.”on Washington’s stages and in hotel bars, Mr. Russell gained a national following on public television, where for 30 years he made regular broadcasts.
He was a fixture at the Marquee Lounge of Washington’s Shoreham Hotel, when the Watergate scandal launched him to broader prominence. Journalists began featuring his quips in their stories and calling him to appear on television to bring levity to an otherwise grim epoch in American politics. When the Rev. Jesse Jackson was running for president as a Democrat in 1984 and invoked a multicolored patchwork quilt to symbolize his “rainbow coalition,” Mr. Russell countered that Republicans had their own quilt. He pulled a white cloth out of a bag and asked viewers to note all the shades of vanilla, ivory and cream. married a women 44 years his junior in 1968, the comedian told an audience: “On a social note: Yesterday in South Carolina, Strom Thurmond’s next wife was born.
Marcus Joseph Ruslander was born in Buffalo on Aug. 23, 1932; he said he took Russell in the mid-1960s because “if your name was the least bit complicated, you changed it.”His father, a gregarious man, was a gas station owner who encouraged pranks and show-business ambitions in his two sons. Mark’s younger brother, Dan, became the cocktail lounge pianist Dan Ruskin, who for years manned the piano at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel.
His desire was to play jazz piano, but he soon realized he lacked the talent. Instead he played piano at enlisted men’s clubs in Japan and Hawaii, composing ditties deriding officers and senior noncoms in his unit.
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