[1] Rodrigues was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts; his father came from Madeira, Portugal, and his mother was a local woman of Portuguese descent.
After a stint in the U.S. Navy, he read in Writer's Digest that a magazine entitled Country Gentleman was paying forty dollars for cartoons – then a large sum of money – and determined to become a cartoonist.
From the 1950s onward, he worked for many magazines in varying genres, including Esquire, TV Guide, a Catholic publication called The Critic,[2] and Paul Krassner's The Realist.
A classic black humorist, he rummages around in violence, insanity, perversion, bigotry and scatology, looking for what he needs to create the typical Rodrigues effect: wild laughter with a cringe of repulsion.
[3]He was also a long-time contributor to Stereo Review, beginning with its first issue in 1958, and created three comic features for the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate: Eggs Benedict, Casey the Cop, and the daily panel Charlie.
In 2013, Fantagraphics Books published Ray and Joe: The Story of a Dead Man and His Friend, and Other Classic Comics, a collection of his pages from National Lampoon.