Larry Gelbart

Published on Friday 18 September 2009 21:54

Comedy writer

Born: 25 February, 1928, in Chicago.

Died: 11 September, 2009, in Beverly Hills, California, aged 81.

LARRY Gelbart's caustic wit was the creative force behind the enduring success of the television series M*A*S*H, Broadway hits such as A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and film comedies like Tootsie.

He could boast of Tony and Emmy awards as well as Oscar nominations.

Along with Gene Reynolds, he helped to produce and develop M*A*S*H in 1972, then wrote and directed many of its first episodes. His association with the show lasted four years and 97 episodes, but it went on to become one of the longest-running series in television history, ending in 1983. It was also one of television's most influential sitcoms, with its innovative use of an ensemble cast, multiple plotlines and mix of drama and comedy.

Gelbart's aim was to put meaning as well as mirth into the story of a team of medical personnel who cared for the wounded during the Korean War as members of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. In a 1983 interview, he described the early episodes as "the Marx Brothers superimposed on All Quiet on the Western Front," and added: "I wanted it to be more crazy than sad."

The series, in half-hour episodes, was inspired by Robert Altman's 1970 film of the same name and starred Alan Alda as the wisecracking surgeon Benjamin Franklin Pierce, better known as Hawkeye. He was abetted by a cast that, over time, included McLean Stevenson, Wayne Rogers, Mike Farrell, Harry Morgan, Loretta Swit and Jamie Farr.

It usually used a laughter track, but if the laughs were abundant, the grim cost of warfare was hard to ignore.

A decade before M*A*S*H, Gelbart had teamed with Burt Shevelove to write the book for the 1962 Broadway musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. With music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and directed by George Abbott, the show was a zany riff on the works of Plautus. The setting was ancient Rome, where a wily slave named Pseudolus (Zero Mostel) was busy dreaming up ways to win his freedom. With a cast that also included David Burns, Jack Gilford and John Carradine, songs like Comedy Tonight and lines like "I live to grovel", the show was a runaway hit, earning its creators a total of six Tony Awards, including those for best musical and best book.

Tootsie (1982) was Gelbart's most successful film and earned him an Oscar nomination. It told the story of a struggling New York actor (Dustin Hoffman) who, desperate for work, disguises himself as a woman, wins an audition for a part in a television soap opera and becomes a huge success.

Gelbart had also been Oscar nominated for his screenplay for Oh, God!, a 1977 comedy directed by Carl Reiner and based on the novel by Avery Corman. It starred George Burns as a wisecracking personification of the Almighty and John Denver as the insignificant supermarket worker he chooses to be his earthly messenger.

Larry Simon Gelbart was born to immigrant parents in Chicago. In the early 1940s, his family moved to California, where his father, a barber, was soon grooming Hollywood entertainers. When he mentioned to the comedian Danny Thomas that his teenage son had a knack for humour, Thomas, who was performing on a radio show, gave him a try out and promptly hired him.

Gelbart was soon writing gags for the Jack Paar, Eddie Cantor and Bob Hope radio shows. He then moved into television, working for Red Buttons and Sid Caesar, among others.

His first try at writing the book for a Broadway musical came in 1961, with The Conquering Hero. Based on the Preston Sturges film Hail the Conquering Hero, it starred Tom Poston as a Second World War veteran who is persuaded to pose as a hero of the battle for Guadalcanal. It was a flop, but Forum was waiting in the wings.

Gelbart had more luck with his first film, The Notorious Landlady (1962), a mystery with laughs that starred Jack Lemmon and Kim Novak and which he wrote with Blake Edwards.

His movie credits also included The Wrong Box (1966), in which Ralph Richardson, John Mills and Michael Caine battle over an inheritance, and Movie Movie (1978), a take-off of the corny formula films of the 1930s.

Gelbart scored his second Broadway success with the 1976 comedy Sly Fox, starring George C Scott as Foxwell J Sly, a wealthy rascal who pretends to be on his death-bed to trick his greedy associates into surrendering not only their fortunes but their wives.

The Iran-Contra scandal that rocked Washington in the 1980s was fodder for Gelbart's biting 1989 satire Mastergate, which skewered double-talking politicians. The show closed after a brief run, but Gelbart was soon back on Broadway with a new musical, City of Angels," with a score by Cy Coleman and lyrics by David Zippel.

His script took theatregoers back to 1940s Hollywood, where a writer struggles with a screenplay about the adventures of his alter ego, a private eye. City of Angels went on to win six Tony Awards. For the second time in his career, Gelbart won for best book of a musical.

He also continued to write for television but was never able to repeat his success with M*A*S*H. In 1980, there was United States, a probing comedy about a marriage under stress.

Then came Aftermash, a 1983 sitcom about the post-war lives of several characters from the original M*A*S*H. It ran for two seasons on CBS.

Laughing Matters, a collection of Gelbart's essays and reminiscences, was published in 1998. It included a Gelbartian observation about growing old. "Contrary to popular belief," he wrote, "it's not the legs that go first, it's remembering the word for legs."

Gelbart married Patricia Marshall in 1956. She survives him, along with their two children, two stepsons, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.