Don Adams, who played Maxwell Smart in the 1960s sitcom "Get Smart," combining clipped, decisive diction with appalling, hilarious ineptitude, died on Sunday at a Los Angeles hospital. He was 82.

The cause was a lung infection, his friend and former agent Bruce Tufeld said, according to The Associated Press. Tufeld said Adams broke his hip a year ago and had been in poor health.

Maxwell Smart was a bumbling secret agent for Control, the good guys, who weekly foiled the plans of the evil cabal Kaos for world domination.

Inevitably, Smart's ham-handed detective style landed him in hot water. Luckily, his faithful and beautiful sidekick, Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon), was as bright as he was dense and could bail him out. (Smart was Agent 86, bartender's code for cutting off service to a drunk.)

"Get Smart" twice won the Emmy for best comedy series, and Adams won three Emmys for best actor.

"Get Smart" ran on NBC from 1965 to 1969 and on CBS from 1969 to 1970. Years later, producers tried to recapture the show's initial spark in the 1980 film "The Nude Bomb," the 1989 television movie "Get Smart, Again!" and a revival on Fox that lasted seven episodes in 1995. Adams appeared in all the incarnations.

The original show spoofed the James Bond movies, and one of its most winning characteristics was the seriousness with which Maxwell Smart did and said things that were really stupid. Several of his lines became popular catchphrases, particularly with young people:

"Would you believe?" (Used when an agent of Kaos, or someone on his own side, had not believed one of his prevarications and he was about to suggest yet another.)

"Sorry about that, Chief." (When he reported to his boss, played by Edward Platt, after the inevitable failure.)

But Smart's charm lay in his humanness, the opposite of Bond's preposterous competence. In an interview with The Saturday Evening Post in 1966, Adams analyzed Smart: "He's not superhuman. But he believes in what he does and he wants to do his best."

His best was rarely good enough. Smart called into work with a dial phone on the sole of his shoe, and often got a wrong number. He wore jet shoes that shot him up, often into the roof. He was so security-minded that he would often swallow secret messages before reading them.

Donald James Yarmy was born on April 13, 1923, in Manhattan. He said he changed his surname to that of his first wife, Adelaide Adams, because acting auditions were often done in alphabetical order.

His father ran a few small restaurants in the Bronx. Adams grew up hating school and playing hooky at the movies. During World War II, he joined the Marines at 16 by lying about his age. On Guadalcanal, he was shot and contracted blackwater fever, fatal in 90 percent of cases.

After the war, he drifted into stand-up comedy, always refraining from dirty jokes, presaging the uprightness of Maxwell Smart. He cut back on nightclub work to support his family with jobs as a restaurant cashier and as a commercial artist.

His first real success as a comic came when he won an Arthur Godfrey "Talent Scouts" competition in 1954, which led to television variety show appearances on "The Steve Allen Show" and elsewhere. Adams created the comedy character Byron Glick, an incompetent house detective, who was a precursor to Max.

Adams tried comedy writing, producing material for Garry Moore and Allen. When his friend Bill Dana got a comedy series, he hired him to regularly do Byron Glick.

"Get Smart" was originally the brainchild of the producers Dan Melnick and David Susskind, refined by the writers Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. The program was immediately a success with viewers.