I'm not sure what I want to write about Garry Shandling here. I knew him but I didn't know him that well.
I certainly knew his work. He did a series called It's Garry Shandling's Show that was very funny and much-admired in the business. A few years after its completion, he announced he was coming back to TV with a new situation comedy and the "buzz" in the industry was that it was a likely flop. No one had seen it yet but it stood to reason: How could this new series, The Larry Sanders Show, possibly equal his first series? Well, it didn't. It was better. In fact, it was one of the best sitcoms ever…and they wisely ended it before it stopped being that.
His stand-up comedy was also outstanding. I wrote some material for him and so did several friends of mine…but I don't think any of us would claim much (if any) credit for his success in this area. From what I could tell, he came up with most of his best stuff himself and when others wrote for him, he rewrote to make it better. That's not true of all stand-ups who buy jokes but it seems to have been true of Garry.
The bios will tell you he was a successful situation comedy writer but that after seeing much of his material being rewritten, he decided to stop writing for others and do his own act. That's not quite true. He only sold a couple of sitcom scripts, the last one (I think) being his one script for Welcome Back, Kotter. That script was indeed completely rewritten — every word of it. And I oughta know because my then-partner Dennis Palumbo and I did the rewriting.
It wasn't Garry's fault. What happened was that he was hired by one set of producers and he wrote a script as per their directions and preferences. What he handed in was perfectly fine by their approach to the show…but before it could be produced, those producers were let go. The network and the star (Mr. Kaplan) were not happy with their approach so new producers were hired to change the direction. Dennis and I were handed Garry's script and told to rewrite it as per the new direction. We managed to save a semi-colon on page eight but that was about it.
Garry understood why the surgery was necessary and didn't hold it against us. In fact, every time I ran into him after it began rerunning, he'd grin and say, "Hey, I just got another $3.50 residual check from your script."
He turned to stand-up and it wasn't long before he became one of those comics whose career was made by a successful spot on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. Ordinarily, it would be quite some time after that before he'd even be considered as a guest host but not long after his third or fourth stand-up appearance, he got to sit in Johnny's chair as a last minute fill-in.
Another comedian — I want to say it was Albert Brooks — was set to guest host one night but he had some quarrel with Carson's producer Fred DeCordova over a guest booking or a sketch or something. I'm a little fuzzy on the specifics but I'm pretty sure Garry stepped into the host position with about eighteen hours notice. And he told me once that when he arrived at the studio that day, he was sure someone was going to tell him, "Oh, you're not hosting after all. We found a real guest host."
But he did it and did it well. Later, when Joan Rivers was abruptly terminated as Johnny's guest host, a lot of folks at The Tonight Show wanted Garry to replace her — and he did for a few nights. But at the time, there was an immediate problem: Garry was doing It's Garry Shandling's Show and hadn't the time or energy to do that plus fill-in on Johnny's frequent nights off. It was announced that he'd switch off with Jay Leno but soon after, Garry bowed out and Jay became the sole guest host.
Later on when David Letterman left NBC for CBS, Shandling was offered the slot after Leno and he declined it. A friend of mine who knew Garry a lot better than I did said, "Garry will never host a nightly talk show. He doesn't have the stamina for it. He spends two hours polishing every joke and then later, three hours wondering if it was all right." That's probably true but it's still a shame he never did that kind of series.
And of course, it's a bigger shame that now he'll never do any kind of new series…or movie or stand-up appearance or anything else. He really was a very talented guy. He seemed perpetually paranoid that whatever he was doing wasn't good enough…and all those jokes about him worrying about how his hair looked or if his ass seemed large were true. He really did worry a lot about things like that but so what? I really liked him, on-camera and off. We have plenty of comedians in this world but we don't have nearly enough as good as Garry Shandling.
