That's the great comedy writer Larry Siegel, the way he might like to be remembered: Surrounded by Laker Girls. A three-time Emmy winner (seven-time nominee), Larry wrote for — and this is a very partial list — That Was the Week That Was, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, The Carol Burnett Show, Good Times, That's My Mama, Chico and the Man, CPO Sharkey, Playboy and a helluva lot of stuff for MAD magazine.
In fact, he was one of MAD's most prolific contributors. His first published byline appears to have been in MAD #46 (April, 1959) but Larry said he had work in there earlier. He and his frequent partner Stan Hart (another longtime MAD writer) also worked on The Mad Show, which was a successful off-Broadway production, and on some of the various attempts to turn MAD into a TV show. No matter how busy he got in television, Larry always found time to write for MAD and was the author of some of their most memorable movie and TV parodies.
Before MAD, he was a writer for Harvey Kurtzman's magazine Humbug and he worked with Kurtzman on other enterprises, including Little Annie Fanny for Playboy. He had previously worked for Playboy in its sales department and graduated from there to writing humorous pieces for the magazine.
Larry was born in 1925 and he received a Purple Heart and a fistful of other medals for his military service in World War II. He died yesterday at the age of 93 following a long struggle with Parkinson's Disease. He was a very funny man who wrote an awful lot of things that made people laugh. It's always bad to lose people who know how to do that, especially when they did it as well as Larry Siegel.