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Lou Cutell, who played the proctologist known as “Ass Man” on a 1995 episode of Seinfeld and the mohawk-sporting Amazing Larry in the 1985 film Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, has died. He was 91.
Cutell died Sunday, Paul Reubens (aka Pee-wee Herman) reported on Twitter. Reubens called him “sweet, caring and unassuming [and] slyly and wickedly funny” and said he got to visit him recently. No other details of his death were immediately available.
In one of his earliest roles, Cutell portrayed a doctor who aims to bring all of the women on Earth to Mars in Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965), routinely ranked as one of the worst movies ever made.
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However, he also appeared in several respectable films during his lengthy career, including Little Big Man (1970), The World’s Greatest Lover (1977), Foul Play (1978), Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) and Wedding Crashers (2005).
Cutell portrayed Leo Funkhouser on a couple of episodes of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm in 2004 and in 2013-14 appeared as one of the prankster seniors on Betty White’s Off Their Rockers at NBC.
On the sixth-season Seinfeld episode “The Fusilli Jerry,” Cutell played Dr. Howard Cooperman; his vanity license plates, which read ASSMAN, are mistakenly given to Kramer at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Besides my own film, my favorite thing Lou acted in was when he played an alien doctor in 1965’s "Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster." In real life, he was wonderful—sweet, caring and unassuming. He was also slyly and wickedly funny. pic.twitter.com/oZaZnI9MgC
— Pee-wee Herman (@peeweeherman) November 24, 2021
Born in New York on Oct. 6, 1930, Cutell got to Broadway in the 1961 musical The Young Abe Lincoln, then made his TV debut three years later on The Dick Van Dyke Show in the episode “My Mother Can Beat Up My Father.”
He went on to appear on dozens of other shows, from My Three Sons, The Wild Wild West and The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Starsky & Hutch, Lou Grant, Alice, The Golden Girls, The Wonder Years and Grey’s Anatomy, where he made his final onscreen appearance in 2015.
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