Johnny Hardwick, Voice of Conspiracy Nut Dale Gribble on ‘King of the Hill,’ Dead at 64

Johnny Hardwick, the Texan soul of the long-running animated sitcom King of the Hill — for which he voiced the eccentric, paranoid, chain-smoking neighbor Dale Gribble — died Tuesday at his home in Austin. He was 64 years old.

The Travis County Medical Examiner and Coroner’s office confirmed Hardwick’s death to Rolling Stone. A cause of death has yet to be determined.

After working for years as a bartender and then a comedian, with a number of TV and festival appearances, Hardwick was offered a sitcom deal by NBC that never went anywhere. But following a set about his Texan father at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles, he was approached by Greg Daniels, co-creator (with Mike Judge) of King of the Hill, a show set in the fictional Texas town of Arlen.

At first, Hardwick was to bring his experience to the writers’ room, but after negotiations with actor Daniel Stern to play the main ensemble character Dale Gribble fell through, Hardwick wound up with a voiceover job, too. He went on to become a producer as well, and ultimately earned four Emmy nominations, winning one award for his work in 1999.

But to viewers, Hardwick was beloved as the fan-favorite Gribble, an exterminator living next door to the titular Hill family who exasperates his stodgy friend Hank Hill with an endless stream of conspiracy theories and harebrained schemes. No matter how often his ideas backfired, Gribble could usually be counted on to maintain his unwarranted confidence as he lit up yet another cigarette, wearing his signature mirrored sunglasses and orange Mack trucks hat. “I ended up kind of basing his attitude on if he thought he was Jack Nicholson, but he wasn’t, or if he just thought he was the coolest guy around, like Matthew McConaughey’s character in Dazed and Confused,” Hardwick told the Austin Chronicle early in the series’ 13-season, 256-episode run.

Many of Dale’s idiosyncrasies are among King of the Hill‘s most cherished running gags. He’s impressively oblivious to the years-long affair his wife Nancy has with hunky Native American John Redcorn, who also happens to clearly be the biological father of the couple’s son, Joseph. In order to thwart government surveillance, he uses the alias “Rusty Shackleford” when it suits him — at one point prompting the real Rusty Shackleford to visit him in hopes of putting an end to this identity theft. Canonically, he’s smoked so much that he’s the only person to claim every item in the Manitoba Cigarette company’s gift catalog. And he once threw sand from his pocket into a man’s face, yelling, “Pocket sand!” The ridiculous combat maneuver lives on as an internet meme.

After King of the Hill ended in 2010, Hardwick continued to delight fans with Dale’s distinctively nasal voice in a series of YouTube videos, sometimes covering popular songs in character (and, in other clips, brandishing firearms, another familiar Gribble pastime). He was set to return for the show’s Hulu revival, announced earlier this year, though it’s unclear whether he had recorded any new episodes.

Still, Hardwick leaves behind a trove of comedic genius: jokes that come straight from the American heartland, shared with an inimitable sense of timing and delivery. In Gribble, he made you realize that even the irksome, deeply misinformed weirdo next door has a part to play in one’s community. Whenever Hank sighed and muttered, “Dammit, Dale,” you knew the latest offense had already been forgiven.