The famous comedian, writer and actor, Garry Shandling died on Thursday at the age of 66.
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Comedian Garry Shandling, who amused millions of Americans on his faux talk show, The Larry Sanders Show, in the 1990s, died Thursday. In a moving and deeply personal monologue on tonight’s show, Conan O’Brien attempted to express the real magnitude of this loss. And I want to make that point, because that’s something in this business – in comedy – that is very rare. Conan O’Brien and Seth Meyers both took time out of their late night talk shows to pay their respects to the late comedian.
“That was a big deal back then”.
“It’s Gary. I’m staying three doors down, we’re on an island, there’s no avoiding me”, Conan recalled Shandling saying to him. And I was just shell-shocked.
To further honor the late comedian, O’Brien shared several interview clips with Shandling and a famous Emmys sketch that involved them riding on horseback down the beach together.
“Here he is, this kid in Arizona, he’s not in New York”, Shandling told the Times, “and while being Jewish, he’s not at all Jewish in the traditional sense, of a noisy Jewish household”. In the 1980s he launched his first series, It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, a Showtime sitcom that called attention to its artificial nature with the actors routinely breaking the fourth wall.
He was more than a showbiz acquaintance to me, he was a dear friend, and I will miss him.
“I loved Garry. We were fulfilling his wishes to see the show move to HBO”, Mosko said.
“Working with him was one of the great privileges of my career”, said Rip Torn, his Larry Sanders Show co-star (via CBS News).
“[It] was completely groundbreaking, and changed the way I thought about TV and I think a lot of people thought about TV”, Meyers said.
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Amy Wallace’s keystone 2010 GQ profile actually opened with a vignette of Shandling and O’Brien’s chance meeting.
