So far, all of the tributes I’ve seen for Rodney Dangerfield, who died yesterday at the age of 82, have made use of his famous “I get no respect” line to paint Rodney’s comic persona as an everyman loser, a guy who was constantly putting himself down. The words “self-deprecating” have occurred in so many of these pieces that I’m starting to think there’s some kind of contractual obligation involved with their usage.

However, I would argue that “self-deprecating loser” isn’t how most people of my generation experienced Rodney Dangerfield. Maybe that description was true of his stand-up act, but We who came of age in the ’80s first encountered his bug-eyed visage in the movies, specifically in two movies: Caddyshack and Back to School. He played a similar character in both, a fun-loving but unbelievably obnoxious guy with money to burn.

In my favorite of the pair, Caddyshack, Rodney’s character was the personification of every negative stereotype about the “nouveau riche,” a crass and vulgar man who’d amassed a fortune in real-estate development but was conspicuously lacking in manners or dignity. In terms of plot, he served as a counterweight to Ted Knight’s stuffy “old money” character, and watching Rodney reduce Knight to a huffing, puffing puddle of indignation remains one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on film. I didn’t see him as a loser at all in Caddyshack, and the character himself certainly didn’t. Instead, he was the witty guy who had a knack for deflating the pompous villain of the piece. He was also the guy who supplied the beer for the party. Maybe you didn’t like him, exactly, but you liked having him around. That’s a far cry from the version of Dangerfield’s signature character that the obituaries keep putting forward, a guy whom nobody wanted around ever.

It’s been years since I saw Back to School, but as I recall he played a slightly softer version of the Caddyshack character. If I’m remembering correctly, he had his insecurities and vulnerabilities — I do remember that there was some tension between the character and his son — but he was still basically the guy who put the stuffed-shirts in their place and hosted the party for everyone else. Hardly a loser.

So what’s my point here? I don’t have much of one, actually, just that I find it interesting how people tend to reduce men like Rodney Dangerfield to an easily quantifiable catch phrase while ignoring contradictory aspects of their career or character. Take, for example, Charlie Chaplin. We’ve all seen the clip of him stabbing forks into dinner rolls to turn them into an makeshift puppet, and most people think there’s not much more to him than that sort of cutesy slapstick, but the truth is Charlie displayed a much greater range in his roles, even though he kept playing some variation of The Tramp. So it was with Rodney Dangerfield, who always played off the fact that he was a fat guy with buggy eyes, a tendency to sweat too much, and a generally twitchy way of moving, but who didn’t actually play the same guy all the time.

We can choose not to follow the herd, though, and we can interpret and remember the artists we love any way we wish. The Rodney Dangerfield I will remember isn’t the one who said, “A girl phoned me the other day and said ‘Come on over, there’s nobody home.’ I went over. Nobody was home.” He’s the one who had the cool golf bag with the built-in tape deck and beer tap. Somebody cue the Journey, and let’s dance! We’re all gonna get laid!

(Apologies to any who may have been offended by the last remark, but that’s how Caddyshack ends…)