Larry Gelbart: A Man and a Half

God, as Larry would have mused, has a sense of humor--sometimes black, sometimes bittersweet. The Irony that my "comedy father" has passed away on the very day I begin my journey to teach comedy abroad can hardly be missed. I'm in London at this moment, on my way to Zagreb, but London is the place I met Larry face to face in 1994. We had corresponded since 1992, so I count my friendship with him from that year.

Larry Gelbart had a signature phrase that he inserted into almost every script he penned, an homage to a favorite phrase of his mother's, and it consisted simply of " . . . and a half." Not particularly funny, but warm and genial, like the man himself.

I called his home Wednesday, and his wife, Pat, answered the phone (as she often does). She told me he was resting with back troubles and she didn't want to disturb him. I left the next day for London. Now he's joined many of the other writers, performers and producers he'd worked with over the years. More and more over the last ten years I've found myself emailing Larry to express my condolences for the loss of a friend or colleague (usually both): Hy Averback, Jack Paar, Jack Lemmon, and so forth. On Wednesday, I had planned to mention the passing of Army Archerd to him, since Archerd was always so nice and supportive of Larry and his work.

Larry called me his "official memory" of him after I published his biography a few years back. I have not been looking forward in any way to revising the book upon his death. I was hoping for another chapter or two derived from his latest projects. Now I'll work on that in Zagreb, too.

He never let me down when I needed a contact for an interview, or even his own time. We ate a meal when I visited Los Angeles, and discussed his career, comedy theory, or even a screenplay I had dedicated to him . . . I've been implementing his notes this summer.

What a melancholy day for American Culture! The critic Frank Rick said that real artists provide society with cautonary satire of where we're headed -- that they can see the future in some way. Gelbart was such an artist; his comedy over the last two and a half decades became more and more personal and pointed. Gone were the broad strokes of Tootsie or Caesar's Hour: he took a topic and assailed it with every ounce of his considerable wit. His play Mastergate: A Play on Words read like a manual from George Orwell on how to talk Politispeak. His dark comedy Power Failure and his HBO movie Weapons of Mass Distraction present a view of interconnectedness that haunts one long after the final lines are spoken.

He was a writer's writer and a Writer's Guild lion. One of his last public gestures was to throw his support behind a candidate for WGAw president. He never lost sight of the fact that his words were his weapons, sometimes defensive, sometimes offensive. He was a poweful writer who found himself enshrined in almost every screenwriting book, but had trouble getting a script to the right person in the last few years. Thus the business has evolved, and Larry Gelbart worked the writing profession in almost every medium out there: classic radio, television, film, stage, and internet. Although only 81 at the time of his passing, he had contributed his words in seven decades, from the 1940s to this century.

He is missed. Missed and a half.