Dennis Fogg just wanted to make you laugh.

As a comedian, he performed in all the local festivals and venues. Last year and this year, he won a competition for New England’s Funniest Comedian. But he didn’t need the stage and a microphone to deliver a punchline.

“It didn’t matter where Dennis was,” said Ian Stuart, organizer of the Portland Maine Comedy Festival. “He was always a comedian. Dennis could be pumping gas — still a comedian. He could be working at the restaurant he owned and making pancakes for a child — still a comedian. He had a joke for every occasion.”

Fogg died Tuesday at the age of 64 after a battle with cancer, his family said. He was a legend in the local comedy scene and the longtime owner of Uncle Andy’s Diner in South Portland. Even if you didn’t meet him in person, you might have known him as the gorilla who danced in front of his house on Halloween.

But his wife, four kids and five grandkids knew him as a family man above all else. He sometimes opened his set with a quip about how he didn’t care if anybody came to the show because he was just happy to get out of his house. But anyone in the audience could see that he told jokes about his family because they were the center of his life.

In 2021, Fogg was a guest on “Comedy Think Tanked,” a podcast by local comedians Leonard Kimble and Nick Gordon. He talked about how he decided years ago that his family came first.

“I never wanted to have a show that I could not go to work the next day,” Fogg said on the episode. “You’ve got to support your family. No matter what, you gotta do that.”

His family told stories of him dutifully strapping himself into a roller coaster alongside his daughter even though he always got terrible motion sickness. He was always willing to dance in a TikTok video or attend a school play for a grandchild. Even when he got sick, he still drove to Cumberland Farms every morning to buy his wife, Tina, a Sprite.

“It did not matter how bad he was feeling,” his daughter Kayla Catlin said. “He needed to do that.”

LOOKING OUT FOR EVERYONE

One of six brothers, Fogg was born in Maine and grew up in Florida. As an adult, he returned to Maine. When his kids were little, he coached everything from softball to soccer. He started a basketball program at Presumpscot Elementary School just so they would have somewhere to play; his grandson is now on that team. Under his leadership, their teams won plenty of games, but that wasn’t the point.

“I’ve had people reach out to me who were on his sports teams when we were in elementary school who said, ‘Your dad was the best coach. I stuck with these sports because I had such a good foundation and a general love for it because of him,’ ” Catlin said.

Fogg worked as a chef before he and Tina took over Uncle Andy’s Diner in 2003. There, he became particularly famous for his ability to make a pancake into any shape requested by a young customer. A race car? Done. A flower? Sure. Mickey Mouse? Absolutely. An elephant riding a skateboard? Coming right up.

In 2010, the Knightville diner got a makeover on Food Network’s “Restaurant Impossible.” Thankfully, Fogg ignored the host’s advice to get rid of the custom pancake art.

“He told me the pancakes took too much time, and I needed to stop,” Fogg told the Portland Press Herald at the time. “I told him he’d never seen a kid’s face when they get one of these pancakes. He and I did not get along very well. I thought some of his ideas were silly.”

The diner was always open on holidays because he wanted everybody to have somewhere to go. He would make an off-the-menu breakfast for an elderly customer. The diner technically didn’t open until 6 a.m., but local fishermen knew they could come in at 5:30 a.m. and make themselves a pot of coffee. Fogg partnered with Spurwink to provide job training to kids with disabilities. Tina Fogg recalled their debate about whether to open in a particularly bad snowstorm.

“He says, ‘The plow guys will have to eat,’ ” she said. “So we ended up going up State Street with me driving and him sitting in the back of the truck to weigh it down.”

The family decided to close the diner in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. But for years, kids would recognize him in the aisles at Sam’s Club or at the Christmas tree lighting in South Portland.

“They’ll come up and say, ‘Uncle Andy! Uncle Andy!’ ” his daughter Amanda Fogg said.

‘MY COMEDY DAD’

Fogg got his start on the stage at the Comedy Connection, a club that closed in 2012. In the years since, he performed at nearly every local venue — bars and theaters and bowling alleys and casinos and American Legion halls. He said in an interview that he wrote his jokes in old-school composition notebooks, and he had hours and hours of material.

“If you write one joke a year and you stick around long enough, you’ve got a set,” he said on “Comedy Think Tanked.”

Stuart said Fogg had perfected not only the jokes, but also the rhythm of his set.

“Like a punk drummer, so on point,” Stuart said. “Bop, bop, bop. He knew how to hit it.”

In the days since Fogg’s death, comedians and friends have been sharing stories about him on social media. Their tributes show Fogg as someone who constantly supported other comedians by inviting them to perform with him and going to their shows.

“He’d give advice, but he’d be brutally honest with ya,” Johnny Ater said in an interview. “He wouldn’t sugar coat it, which is good because you need that brutal honesty.”

“Dennis was one of the first people to really believe in me being a comedian,” Ben Chadwick posted on Facebook. “He tried to get me booked on every single show he was on. We drove all over New England together. He was my comedy dad and a great friend.”

“People are very guarded with their art,” Stuart said. “Dennis, he would watch every comedian, and it was hard for him to not come up with tags or punchlines for other people’s jokes. There’s a couple of jokes that I still use today that he helped add a tag on for me.”

MAKING A CONNECTION

Getting sick didn’t stop Fogg from getting on stage. This summer, Stuart booked him to open at the State Theatre in Portland before the comedian Hannibal Buress.

“Backstage, he couldn’t hold himself up,” Stuart said. “He went on stage and crushed it. I watched his set, and I cried. He always brought it.”

Friends have organized a comedy benefit on Sept. 26 at 6:30 p.m. at Archie’s Strike and Spare in Parsonsfield. All proceeds will go to Fogg’s family. They’ve also established a GoFundMe to help with funeral and medical expenses. (“Because he worked for himself and spent much of his life performing, he didn’t have insurance,” the family wrote.) His celebration of life will be Oct. 5 at Turf’s Sports Grill in Portland from 2-7 p.m.

Stuart said the best way to honor Fogg would be to try the thing that he loved. Just make someone laugh.

“If anyone has ever thought of doing standup comedy, give it a shot once,” Stuart said. “So you can understand why it is that someone who is dying not only wants, but needs to get up there. It’s a connection. And Dennis wanted to continue to connect with people up until the end.”