Don Adams, the comedian who played secret agent 86, Maxwell Smart, on TV in the late '60s, has left us. He was 82.

What a hilarious spoof that show was. With James Bond and The Man from UNCLE ruling the roost in popular culture, Get Smart was the ultimate sendup. People like Buck Henry and Mel Brooks were writing the gags, and so you knew you were in for laughs.

One of the bits I loved the best was, alas, one of the most politically incorrect ever to be seen on an American screen. You could never run it today, and of course, for good reason. But back when you could laugh at such things without even realizing how crass you were being, the showdowns between Smart and one of his arch-enemies, the Claw (played by Leonard Strong), were classic.

The Claw (pictured left) was an evil villain of Asian ancestry -- a distant cousin to Bond's "Dr. No." The Claw was so called because one of his hands was missing, a la Captain Hook. In its place, as I recall, was a powerful shoehorn-shaped magnet. (There you go -- two strikes already, both disability and ethnic stereotyping.) The Claw spoke English with a heavy accent, which was a good part of the joke. Picture Smart holding him off at gunpoint. Smart would turn to his sidekick, the lovely Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon), and say with a squinted brow, something like: "Well, 99, I see it's our old nemesis, the Craw."

Before 99 could respond, the villain would break in, growling: "No, not da Craw -- da Craw!"

The dialogue would come back to that more than once in every conversation between hero and villain, with the latter becoming more and more exasperated. Pretty soon you realized that the eternal struggles between good and evil, between life and death, were nothing compared to the confrontation between Smart's thick-headedness and the Claw's inability to correct him. "It's not Craw -- it's Craw!" I still laugh out loud when I say it, doing my best imitation of Strong. And in everybody's defense, the laughs are as much about Smart as they were about the Craw -- er, Claw.

I guess you had to be there to get it. But those of us who were, did, and 40-plus years later, we remember many other Smartisms. Who could forget the shoe phone? The secret entry to headquarters via the phone booth? The Cone of Silence? The dozens of other spy gadgets that never worked? We'll miss Adams, but perhaps not as much as we miss Max. (Via AboutItAll--Oregon.)