Rodney Dangerfield, who tapped an enduringly rich vein of comedy gold when he created his stage persona as a middle-aged Everyman who gets no respect, died Tuesday. He was 82.

Dangerfield died at the University of California-Los Angeles Medical Center of complications after heart-valve replacement surgery Aug. 25, according to his wife, Joan.

After the surgery, he slipped into what his family described as a ``light coma,'' from which he emerged briefly before his death. The comedian had undergone arterial brain surgery in April 2003 to improve his body's blood flow in preparation for the heart valve replacement.

Ever the joker, Dangerfield had cracked: ``If things go right, I'll be there about a week, and if things don't go right, I'll be there about an hour and a half.''

Dangerfield, whose successful comeback as a stand-up comic in the 1960s when he was in his 40s made him a familiar figure on TV, in movies and on Las Vegas and comedy-club stages for more than three decades, had been active in comedy until his recent surgery.

Standing on stage in his trademark black suit, the bug-eyed Dangerfield was always the picture of sweaty unease, nervously tugging at his red tie as he delivered his sharply timed, self-deprecating lines.

``My wife's a water sign, I'm an earth sign; together we make mud.

``I mean, she's attached to a machine that keeps her alive: the refrigerator.

``It takes her an hour and a half to watch `60 Minutes.' OK, she's dumb.

``The other night she met me at the front door wearing a see-through negligee. The only trouble is she was coming home.

``No respect -- I don't get no respect at all. Are you kidding?''

In an hourlong performance, Dangerfield would do about 325 jokes, his stream-of-consciousness delivery and lovable loser persona finding fans in all generations.

An admiring Jack Benny once came backstage after watching Dangerfield perform. Benny had his vain and cheap image, he told Dangerfield, ``but your `no respect,' everybody can identify with that.''

Like Benny, Dangerfield would become a comedy institution, whose trademark white dress shirt and red necktie are housed at the Smithsonian Institution.

Like many comedians, Dangerfield drew on a lifetime of hurt and angst to make people laugh. Despite the fame, fortune and adulation that finally came his way, he was not a happy man.

``I have never been happy,'' he told a reporter in 1997, when he was 75. ``My whole life has been a downer.''

He was born Jacob Cohen in Babylon, on New York's Long Island, on Nov. 22, 1921. His father, a vaudeville comic whose stage name was Phil Roy, abandoned the family when Dangerfield was a child.

He and his sister were raised by their mother, who moved them to a neighborhood in Queens that was, he once recalled, ``too rich for us. When I was young, I had to deliver groceries to the homes of the kids I went to school with. I had to go to the back doors to make the deliveries. It was embarrassing.

``So constantly I felt like they were better than I am and my self-esteem was very low. . . . Things like that in life, I guess, can stay with you.''

At 19, he got his first job as a comic in the Catskills, the mountain resort area north of New York City -- 10 weeks at $12 a week, plus room and board -- and he legally changed his name to Jack Roy. He also was hired as a singing waiter at the Polish Falcon nightclub in Brooklyn.

After two years as a comic, Dangerfield was earning about $150 a week. But it was a constant struggle, and after working a series of what he termed ``dumps,'' he gave up show business at 28 to marry Joyce Indig, a 23-year-old singer, ``and lead a normal life.''

The couple had two children, and Dangerfield made a decent living running an aluminum siding sales office in Englewood, N.J. But there were problems. The couple divorced in 1962 and remarried a year later. They divorced again in 1970. It was while going through his divorce in 1962, a time when he was in debt and living in a seedy hotel, that the 40-year-old Dangerfield decided to give stand-up comedy another shot.

``Everyone thought I was absolutely insane,'' he once recalled. ``But show business was like a fix, and I had to have it to escape reality.''

It was slow going at first. A club owner bestowed the name Rodney Dangerfield on him when he said he wanted a fresh start. The turning point came in 1967, when Dangerfield's agent arranged an audition for him with Ed Sullivan, whose Sunday night variety show was the premier TV showcase for performers.

Dangerfield had been talking about how nothing goes right for him in his act -- a topic that perfectly suited his hangdog, been-through-the-wringer demeanor. But before making the fourth of his 16 appearances on the Sullivan show, he recalled that the gangsters he saw in the clubs he worked at always talked about getting or not getting respect. The phrase ``I don't get no respect'' would become the unifying theme of his act.