The Dangerfields made the news again in October when Joan welcomed members of the alien-loving Raelian cult into their living room to discuss cloning Rodney. The Raelians came ''this close'' to swabbing Rodney's cheek for DNA. ''We decided to wait,'' she admits, blaming it on the extra time they spent thinking about it. Yet she adds that Rodney's genes have been mapped, and indicates she might come back to the idea someday.
''Right now we're just trying to extend Rodney's life,'' she says. ''We're trying to get him to live to be 120. He's taking antioxidants and it looks good. Rodney's in great health. Better than me, actually.''
It wasn't always so. Last year, Joan explains, two of the four arteries to Rodney's brain closed off, and he wasn't getting enough blood to his head. ''When he was walking around,'' she says, ''he'd start turning white.'' So during a rare and gruesome operation, doctors bypassed the clogged arteries, and shortly after a nine-day medically induced coma, Rodney walked into the hospital pressroom and delivered a full Vegas joke routine for his doctors and the media.
A little while later, Rodney has finished his lamb and rejoined the conversation, scoffing at the press his operation generated. '''How long he will last, we don't know.' It was stuff like that,'' he says in disbelief, regaling the crowd. ''Like I'm dead already, you know what I mean? And 'We're hoping for the best, but it doesn't look that good.' They think I'm dying! But it increased the merchandise sales!''
''Especially of the autographed items,'' Joan adds wryly.
''So I'm thinking maybe I'll do it again,'' Rodney says, on a roll. ''Even when I'm okay, I'll act sick.... More people want me dead than alive, I think.'' The whole table is loving it.
Bob Saget, his friend of 20 years, calls Rodney a survivor. ''For a guy to wake up out of a brain coma and have a million thoughts through his head, ready to go -- it's the mind that can't stop,'' he says over the phone a few days later. ''I actually went to visit him in the hospital, and the doctors came in and asked, 'Are you coughing up much?' And he said, 'Last week, $500 for a whore.' That's Rodney.''
To Permut, who has 85 hours of Rodney on film for his documentary, he's the Energizer Bunny. ''I joke with him,'' he says. ''I tell him, 'You know, the world's ending and it's gonna be you and Cher.'''
With dinner done, everyone's headed in the limo toward Hollywood Boulevard, where Rodney will check out his star on the Walk of Fame for the first time since they laid it out in 2002. ''You get a star and you feel okay, until you see that Richard Simmons is also getting a star,'' he says, having resumed his seat, marijuana pipe in hand, by the window. ''He got a star, Richard Simmons. So what the hell's it mean to get a star, I don't know.'' (For the record, Simmons doesn't actually have a star, but hey.) The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce turned Rodney down for the honor two or three times, until Joan sent them a hefty dissertation on why he deserved it. ''I wrote exactly 50 pages,'' Joan says.
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