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      Alan Kalter, Longtime Voice of Letterman’s ‘Late Show,’ Dies at 78

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      Far more than just an announcer, he contributed all sorts of outlandish, incongruous comic bits to “Late Show With David Letterman.”Alan Kalter, the announcer for the “Late Show With David Letterman” for some 20 years and a participant in a ridiculous array of comic bits during that run, died on Monday at a hospital in Stamford, Conn., where he lived. He was 78.The death was announced by Rabbi Joshua Hammerman of Temple Beth El in Stamford, the synagogue Mr. Kalter attended. No cause was given.Mr. Kalter would welcome viewers with an opening quip (“From New York, home of mad cab disease … ”) and a recitation of the guest list. He would introduce the nonsensical “secret word” of the day and tell Mr. Letterman what was to be put to the “Will It Float?” test, a recurring comic bit. He would work himself into a lather over this or that and run off down the street shirtless.But, just as incongruously, he once sang a heartfelt version of “Send In the Clowns” for no particular reason, bolting offstage afterward overcome with emotion as the audience stood and applauded. Another time, he turned what at first seemed like some fatherly advice about attending the prom into a painful confessional about going to the prom with his own mother, “her middle-age body squeezed like a sausage into a sequined gown, her makeup and perfume a cruel mockery of the womanhood your hormones crave.”His transformation from announcer to all-purpose comic started early. On his first day, he said, Mr. Letterman, who had an Olympic diver as a guest, had Mr. Kalter jump into a pool while wearing his best suit.“I’m floating on my back, looking up at the cameraman, going, ‘This is what it’s like to announce on Letterman,’” he recalled in an interview on CBS New York in 2015, when Mr. Letterman ended the show.“If you’re going to have a talk show,” Mr. Letterman said on Tuesday in a telephone interview, “you’ve got to have a strong announcer, and he filled that way beyond what is required.”Mr. Kalter replaced Bill Wendell in September 1995, after Mr. Wendell retired. Mr. Letterman said that Mr. Kalter’s audition tape had left no doubt when he and his producer at the time, Robert Morton, heard it.“It was like, ‘Oh, my God, here we go,’” Mr. Letterman said.Mr. Kalter’s voice was already familiar to television viewers by then; he had announced on game shows like “To Tell the Truth” and “The $25,000 Pyramid” and provided voice-overs for numerous commercials. Mr. Letterman’s “Late Show,” though, brought him an entirely different kind of fame. His red hair and rumpled good looks made him instantly recognizable, and Mr. Letterman gave him ample opportunities to display his aptitude for both deadpan and over-the-top comedy.Mr. Kalter in 2015. “I don’t recall the guy ever saying no to anything,” David Letterman said in an interview.John Palmer/MediaPunch /IPX via Associated PressBarbara Gaines, the longtime “Late Show” producer, said Mr. Kalter had fit right into the show’s zaniness.“Alan would good-naturedly do almost anything we asked of him,” she said by email, “which is how we like our people.”Mr. Kalter said that he had always been given the option of declining to do a particularly nutty stunt or asking that it be modified, but Mr. Letterman remembered him as being perpetually game.“I don’t recall the guy ever saying no to anything,” he said, “and I guess that tells us something about his judgment.”And, he added, “it wasn’t begrudgingly — it was, ‘I’m all in.’”But Mr. Letterman also noted that, for him, Mr. Kalter and his music director, Paul Shaffer, were steadying influences.“He and Paul, to me, they were fixtures every night,” he said. “You’d look over and see Alan and see Paul and know that it’s going to be OK just like last night.”Guests, too, found Mr. Kalter to be a calming force.“Appearing with Dave triggered its own unique set of nerves,” Brian Williams, a frequent “Late Show” guest, said on Monday night on his MSNBC news program. “But seeing the smiling face of a nice man like Alan Kalter backstage was always the tonic needed in that moment.”The show may have made Mr. Kalter a celebrity, but he kept a low profile when off the set and at home in Stamford, where he had lived since the 1970s.“I played cards in a poker group for a year and a half,” he told The Stamford Advocate in 2003, “before somebody said, ‘Somebody told me you were in broadcasting.’”As for his “Letterman” job, Mr. Kalter was grateful for the opportunity and the long run.“I loved what they let me be,” he told The Pulteney Street Survey, the magazine of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where he was once a student, “a 10-year-old, paid for doing stuff my mom would never have let me get away with.”Alan Robert Kalter was born on March 21, 1943, in Brooklyn. He started announcing on WGVA radio in Geneva, N.Y., while at Hobart. The radio job had a fringe benefit.“In my off hours,” he said, “I would create the music tapes for all our fraternity parties from the 45’s that came in to the radio station.”After graduating in 1964 he studied law at New York University, then taught high school English for three years, at the same time recording educational tapes and working weekends in radio in the New York suburbs. The pull of radio eventually proved irresistible.“I left teaching for an afternoon radio show at WTFM,” he told the college magazine, “and was hired to be a newsman at WHN Radio in New York, which quickly became a four-year gig interviewing celebs who came into town for movie and Broadway openings, as well as covering nightclub openings three or four nights a week.”When WHN went to a country format in 1973, he turned to making commercials, and then got into game shows.He is survived by his wife, Peggy; a brother, Gary; two daughters, Lauren Hass and Diana Binger; and five grandchildren.Mr. Kalter’s do-almost-anything commitment to “Late Show,” Mr. Letterman said, was a nice counterpoint to Mr. Letterman’s more laid-back style.“I never liked to put on funny hats,” he said. “Alan would dress like a Martian and make it work.”“He filled in so many blanks on that show,” Mr. Letterman added, joking, “he probably deserved more money.” More

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      For Al Franken, a Comeback Attempt Goes Through Comedy Clubs

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      Onstage, the ex-senator and “S.N.L.” star doesn’t exactly address his fall from grace. But he doesn’t not address it either. Asked if he’ll run again, he is noncommittal.It was a fairly typical night at the Comedy Cellar’s Village Underground with a procession of young comics telling jokes about bickering couples, body issues and unglamorous sex. After Matteo Lane finished his set with a story about sleeping with a porn star, the curveball came: The host introduced “the only performer on the lineup who was a United States senator.”Then Al Franken, 70, bespectacled and wearing a button-down shirt, slowly walked onstage. He looked back toward Lane, took a considered pause and in mock outrage exclaimed: “He stole my act!”Franken has been opening with that joke a lot lately as he’s been refining material in basement rooms around town in preparation for a national stand-up tour. It’s his way of addressing how much he sticks out in his return to comedy, following a Senate career that ended with his resignation after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct, including unwanted kissing. New York comics generally don’t do impressions of the Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, or earnestly explain the reasons they remain Democrats. And yet, the four times I have seen Franken perform over the past month, he has consistently gotten laughs or even killed. The only time he really lost a crowd was after midnight when the fury of a rant about the Republican Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, (involving a dispute about an assault weapons ban) crowded out the punch lines. Franken’s set went long, around 50 minutes, and a couple of comics who followed needled him. “I would have killed myself if it wasn’t for his gun legislation,” Nimesh Patel joked.In Franken’s new material, he explains how as a politician, he was often implored by his staff to not be funny. It only leads to trouble. His act presents a less censored Franken, one that includes a story of him inside the Senate cloakroom telling a joke about oral sex with Willie Nelson — with Franken deftly imitating the New York Senator Chuck Schumer and former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, both Democrats, as they dissect the joke. Franken’s delivery is a Minnesota mosey with a bristling energy hinting at unspoken feelings and future ambition.On the street after the Cellar show, Franken and I discussed Norm Macdonald, who had died earlier that day. Franken mentioned that when he was on “Saturday Night Live,” Macdonald had beat him out for the Weekend Update anchor job, then recalled how the NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer supposedly fired Macdonald for making jokes about O.J. Simpson, Ohlmeyer’s friend. Franken quipped: “Got to give credit to Ohlmeyer for sticking by a friend.”It’s a funny joke, but as often happens with Franken these days, it can’t help but evoke his own scandal. After all, many of Franken’s colleagues did not stick by him in the wake of the accusations. After a photo of Franken pantomiming groping a conservative talk radio host on a U.S.O. tour was released, many Democratic senators called for him to step down, and he did, denying the allegations in a resignation speech. Since then, many (but not all) Democrats have seen that reaction as a rush to judgment, including nine senators who had called for him to resign now saying they regret doing so. Some politicians who stood by their calls for him to resign, like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, have faced a backlash.Franken only recently began explicitly mentioning the fallout onstage, but glancingly, with a bit involving a masked ventriloquist’s dummy named Petey who wants to talk about how he was treated by his Democratic colleagues. Without giving away the twist, the conversation gets sidetracked.Is the comedy tour a way to rehabilitate his political career? Franken said, with a laugh, “I’m not sure this is the best way to do that.”Todd Heisler/The New York TimesAt an Upper West Side diner, Franken didn’t want to go into details, calling it a “no-win,” but said it hasn’t changed his politics. “Part of the irony of all this is I was maybe the most proactive member of the Senate on sexual harassment and sexual assault,” he said.As for his old co-workers: “I have forgiven the ones who have apologized to me,” he said, tersely.Outside the diner, a man approached and told him that he looked more handsome in person and then said in a pointed way that seemed beyond politics: “I’m in your camp.”At a few of the New York shows, there was a certain tension in the room before he got onstage, and a curiosity over how warmly he would be received. Franken said he was never anxious about it. “People like me,” he said, in a cadence that couldn’t help but evoke his character Stuart Smalley, the 12-step aficionado he portrayed on “Saturday Night Live.” After I pointed this out, Franken burst into an impression of the cheerfully cardiganed character: “I’m fun to be with.”Franken — who moves effortlessly from inside-showbiz yarns to political ones — is less deadpan offstage than on, with a slightly quicker delivery, puncturing many sentences with a booming laugh that sounds like a baritone quack.Long before he was a politician, Franken, who moved from Washington to New York in January to be near his grandchildren, was something of a comedy prodigy — performing at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles in a double act with Tom Davis while still in college, and going to work as a writer for the original cast of “Saturday Night Live.” He then pioneered a no-holds-barred style of liberal comedy with best-selling books like “Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations.” Franken still delights in skewering the right-wing media entertainment complex amid dissections of public policy, which he does regularly on a titular new podcast that welcomes a starry list of politicians, journalists and entertainers. In his show, he says, “The leading cause of death in this country is Tucker Carlson.”Franken says he is returning to comedy because it’s a “part of him,” and his conversation is filled with references to friends in the business. He said he went to the Cellar after speaking with Chris Rock and Louis C.K. But it’s hard to escape the impression that politics animate Franken more than comedy. He said he loved campaigning and being a senator, and for someone as well-known as he is, his act includes an awful lot of résumé highlights (like casting the deciding vote for the Affordable Care Act) coddled in a layer of irony that knows you can get laughs by playing the jerk. “You’re welcome” is a recurring punchline.His act presents a less-censored Franken. Todd Heisler/The New York TimesThere are moments onstage that have elements of a stump speech, and it makes you wonder if this is all a prelude to another run. When asked, Franken shifted from casual comic to preprogrammed politician: “I am keeping my options open.”What about running for senator of New York? He repeated, “I am keeping my options open.”After chuckling at this diplomatic answer, I pointed out I’m not used to interviewing politicians. Franken let out another quacking laugh and acted out a scene imagining the ridiculousness of a comic answering a question about a joke with “I am keeping my options open.”It’s worth noting that even in his telling, the first time Franken ran for senator in Minnesota, his original impulse involved a measure of payback. After Senator Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash, his successor, Norm Coleman, called himself a “99 percent improvement” over Wellstone. In his book “Al Franken, Giant of the Senate,” he describes his reaction with a flash of anger, saying he knew someone had to beat Coleman, before adding that his reasons expanded from that “petty place” to one more about helping the people of his state.In the aftermath of his scandal, which Franken described as “traumatic” for him and his family, he has been trying to work through it and rise above, he said. “I think we need more of that. It’s a struggle but I’m getting there. That’s my goal.”In a sympathetic New Yorker article from 2019, Franken said that after losing his job, he started taking medication for depression; mental health is an issue he has long worked on, he said. When I asked about this, the policy wonk, not the comedian, answered. He brought up the first legislation he passed, calling for a study of the impact on giving support dogs to veterans suffering from PTSD. The conversation moved to the gymnast Simone Biles and how she prioritized her mental health at the Olympics. Franken brought up the people who criticized her, appearing to earnestly address Biles’s situation before making a sarcastic pivot subtle enough that it took me a beat to appreciate the subtext. “So odd — people criticize other people out of ignorance,” he said, a hint of a smirk on his face. “I’d never seen that before. I was just shocked.”When asked what he would say to someone who thought this return to comedy was a way to rehabilitate his political career, Franken said: “I’m not sure this is the best way to do that.” He offered another big laugh before getting serious. “I’m doing this because I love doing this.”On Sunday, running his entire show at Union Hall in preparation for a Friday performance in Milwaukee (it’s not often you hear material in Brooklyn about the Republican Senator Ron Johnson), Franken earned a roaring response to his dummy nudging him to talk about leaving the Senate. At one point, a member of the audience yelled: “Run again!”As the crowd cheered, Franken looked momentarily flustered and flattered. He appeared to be contemplating his next move or maybe weighing a joke. But instead, he made eye contact with the man egging him on and said: “I will need your help.” More

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      Ego Nwodim Used to Be Obsessed With Jay-Z. Now She Is Again

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      The ‘S.N.L.’ comedian talked about navigating life with ‘The Four Agreements’ and why “The Town” will always be her favorite movie.The new season of “Saturday Night Live” was less than a month away. But Ego Nwodim’s brain was telling her she had plenty of time to do more.An avowed workaholic, Nwodim intended to pack her schedule to overflowing before returning to 30 Rock with her Dionne Warwick impression. Earlier this summer, she had traveled to Italy for a single day of shooting on the comedy “Spin Me Round,” opposite Alison Brie, and then flitted from Venice to Milan to Positano to Florence, with stops in between, “in that sort of nonsensical way,” she said.More recently she’d wrapped “Players,” a Netflix rom-com with Gina Rodriguez and Damon Wayans Jr. And just the day before she’d done a little audio tweaking for the second season of “Love Life” with Anna Kendrick, which begins Oct. 28 on HBO Max.“Today I counted how many jobs I did on my hiatus,” she said. “And I was like, ‘You actually did a lot.’ Because there was a point this summer where I go, ‘You haven’t done anything or enough.’ My brain told me that.”Nwodim rather famously majored in biology at the University of Southern California, a deal she made with her family so that she could move from Maryland to Los Angeles, where she honed her comedy chops at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. “I didn’t enjoy the bio major — it’s not my passion clearly,” she said. “But I have an aversion to quitting.”“I don’t encourage people to be like me,” she added with a laugh. “It’s sometimes good to quit.”In a video call from her light-filled Brooklyn apartment, Nwodim elaborated on a few of her cultural essentials, including “The Four Agreements” guide to living, the gold jewelry that makes even sweats look intentional and the cool quotient of Jay-Z.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz It is such a simple guide as far as how to approach so much of life and so many of the stressors that I encounter. I always start with, Don’t take anything personally. That’s not the No. 1 agreement, but that’s the one I find myself constantly going back to. Everything people do and say is a reflection of them and where they are in their life, even positive stuff. That is a fascinating one because it feels easy to apply to criticism. But I’m also not going to take praise personally? That’s tough.2. Jay-Z In college, I was obsessed with him. I used to get in arguments with people about how cool he was. Then I took many years off, calmed down and I was like, “That’s not a way to live.” And now, I’m back. I’m such a huge fan of his journey as a person, from drug dealer to corporate businessman and father, husband, son to Gloria Carter. I really admire his work ethic and the way he moves about the world. Look at me [smiling and laughing]! But this isn’t a crush. I just have the utmost respect for this person. I think he’s so freaking cool. And every time I go, “OK, enough about how cool Jay-Z is,” he just gets cooler.3. Ben Affleck’s “The Town” I know it’s not some art house film. But I like heist movies, and I saw that movie in theaters maybe six times. No joke. I still talk about this movie. I still quote this movie. Everyone sort of rolls their eyes at it. People have been like, “It’s just the white man version of ‘Set It Off,’” which probably sounds about right. Key moment: When Ben Affleck goes to Jeremy Renner, “We got to go do something. Can’t ask me what it is. Don’t ask me later.” And Jeremy goes, “Whose car are we driving?” That is best friendship.4. Gold Jewelry Before I had “S.N.L.,” I had a lot of gold rings that were not real gold because I was broke. I’m still not rich, by the way. I ran into my friend Khoby [Rowe] at a Comedy Central Emmys party, and I go, “I think I’m going to treat myself to a real gold ring — one that I can wash my hands and put lotion on and not have it turn.” And she was like, “Hell yeah. This ring on my hand, I treated myself, too.” And when I got “S.N.L.,” her text to me was like, “I think you’re allowed to get yourself a ring.”5. Yerba Mate I would watch friends develop coffee addictions. It became such a part of the routine, like, “I literally can’t get my day started without this.” And I basically want a life where I don’t need anything to function besides water and food — you know, Maslow’s hierarchy. So I don’t like to drink coffee, and if I do it’s because I’m really in a pinch. I prefer yerba mate. I feel like I get energized, and it’s natural, so they say. It could very well be a placebo effect, but I’m OK with that.6. “Death, Sex & Money” Podcast It’s about the human experience. “Death, Sex and Money” does a great job of reminding us that we’re connected. And so much of our experiences are shared regardless of race, gender, religion. Think of all the ways we are divided as a people. So, I love that podcast. Big fan. The tagline is “things we think about a lot and need to talk about more.” And it’s true.7. Prayer and Meditation I am a person of faith, is how I’d like to describe myself. And praying is just a conversation with God. I was listening to a podcast, and a guest, who I believe is sober, said that every thought, action and word is an offering to God. Kind of like everything’s a prayer. And if you can remember that in the moment, that’s really beautiful.8. Offerings in Los Angeles I lived in L.A. for 12 years, and I get disappointed any time a friend is in a different city and I need to send them flowers. Can’t find them elsewhere. Just the most beautiful floral arrangements. I’m so excited to hear people’s reactions to receiving those flowers, because they always have something to say. I sent them to Melissa Villaseñor once, and she goes, “I feel like a queen.”9. Solange’s “A Seat at the Table” What a beautiful body of work, top to bottom. I remember when I first heard it, I was sitting on the floor in my bedroom in Santa Monica, and I was thinking, “Great, this’ll be background noise while I get ready.” But I felt stopped in my own tracks. I was like, “Whoa, what am I listening to?” I got to see her on tour for that album at the Hollywood Bowl, and I wondered, “How is she going to be able to fill this space?” Because I think of neo-soul as such an intimate experience and the Hollywood Bowl is huge. And she did — someone’s essence and artistry can do that — and I was brought to tears.10. My Niece Sophia was born on July 25, and a picture came to my phone, and I was instantly in love. Then I go home to Maryland, and I get to hold her, and my heart just grows a hundred sizes in a way I did not know it could until maybe I had my own children. I would sit there and just stare at her sleeping. It’s cool to find out where your heart can take you. I’ve never felt that kind of love, and I think that love opened me up to other love. More

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      Jay Sandrich, Emmy-Winning Sitcom Director, Is Dead at 89

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      Acclaimed for his work on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Cosby Show,” he also made a crucial casting decision about “The Golden Girls.”Jay Sandrich, a prolific sitcom director who won Emmy Awards for the two series he worked on most often, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Cosby Show,” died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 89.The cause was dementia, his wife, Linda Sandrich, said.Mr. Sandrich did not think of himself as funny, but he knew how to guide a cast of comic actors through half-hour episodes. He understood the mechanics of directing (move the cameras, not the actors) and knew how to make scenes work.“Sitcom directors have a reputation as traffic cops because it’s a writers’ medium,” James Burrows, whose directing credits include “Cheers,” “Frasier” and “Will & Grace,” and who considered Mr. Sandrich a mentor, said by phone. “But Jay taught me to speak up and say what I thought so that you’re contributing to the show, not just parroting what everybody wants.”By 1970, Mr. Sandrich was a sitcom veteran, but he did not believe he had done “anything great”; his credits at that point included “He & She,” “That Girl,” “The Ghost & Mrs. Muir” and, perhaps most notably, “Get Smart.” Then, after another director dropped out, he was asked to direct the pilot episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”When the cast gathered for a run-through in front of an audience, nothing worked.“It was a disaster,” he told the Television Academy in an interview in 2001. “I don’t think we got six laughs.”Afterward, he told the cast to trust the material and keep rehearsing. By the time the episode was taped, the performances had sharpened and the laughs had been found.The cast of “The Golden Girls,” from left: Rue McClanahan, Bea Arthur, Estelle Getty and Betty White. It was Mr. Sandrich who suggested that Ms. McClanahan play the role originally intended for Ms. White, and vice versa.Walt Disney Television, via Getty ImagesReferring to a moment in the scene where Mary Richards, played by Ms. Moore, is interviewing for a television news job with Lou Grant, played by Ed Asner (who died last month), he said, “Ed, I remember, when he said, ‘You’ve got spunk — I hate spunk,’ he did it so loud” that the audience gasped. “He had found the perfect level.”Over the next seven years, Mr. Sandrich directed 118 more episodes of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” including the series finale, and won two Emmys for his work on the show. He also directed other series under the banner of Ms. Moore’s company, MTM Enterprises, including “Rhoda,” “The Bob Newhart Show,” “Phyllis” and “Lou Grant.”In the late 1970s, he directed 53 episodes of “Soap,” Susan Harris’s parody of soap operas. In 1980 he directed the movie “Seems Like Old Times,” written by Neil Simon and starring Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase. It was a hit, grossing $44 million — about $139 million in today’s dollars — but he never made another feature film.Jay Henry Sandrich was born on Feb. 24, 1932, in Los Angeles. His father, Mark, was a director whose films included the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical “Top Hat.” His mother, Freda (Wirtschalter) Sandrich, was a homemaker.As a child, Jay saw snow falling for the first time — on the set of “Holiday Inn” (1942), with Astaire and Bing Crosby, which his father was directing. It was an exciting sight, even if the snow was plastic.Goldie Hawn in “Seems Like Old Times” (1980), the only feature film Mr. Sandrich directed.Columbia Pictures, via Getty ImagesAfter graduating in 1953 from U.C.L.A., where he studied theater arts and film, he joined the Army and shot training films for the Signal Corps.Following his discharge, he wrote to W. Argyle Nelson, the head of production at Desilu Productions — Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s production company — and he was hired as a second assistant director, working on “I Love Lucy,” “Our Miss Brooks” and “December Bride.” He later discovered that he had gotten the job because Mr. Nelson had been an assistant to his father on a film years earlier. Mr. Sandrich went on to become an assistant director on “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour,” the successor to “I Love Lucy,” from 1957 to 1959.He had similar positions on “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and on “Make Room for Daddy,” starring Danny Thomas, where he started his directingcareer.“I remember waking up in the middle of the night,” fearful before directing his first episodes of “Daddy,” he told the Television Academy. “I was so scared. Nobody was going to listen to me.”People listened to him for the next 40 years.In the 1980s, he directed 100 episodes of “The Cosby Show,” for which he won two Emmys. In 1985, he directed the pilot for “The Golden Girls,” and he played a critical role in casting Betty White as Rose, the naïve character, and Rue McClanahan as the libidinous Blanche, the opposite of what had been originally planned — in part because Ms. White had already played a similar role, Sue Ann Nivens, on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”“Jay Sandrich, in his genius, said if Betty plays another man-hungry, they’ll think it’s Sue Ann revisited. So let’s make her Rose,” Ms. White said at a 2006 “Golden Girls” reunion in Los Angeles staged by the Paley Center. She added, gesturing to Ms. McClanahan, “They got a real neighborhood nymphomaniac to play Blanche.”Mr. Sandrich at an Academy of Television Arts and Sciences panel discussion in Los Angeles in 2013. His TV career began in the 1950s and continued into the 21st century. Frank Micelotta/Invision for Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, via Associated PressMr. Sandrich continued to work into the 21st century. His last assignment was an episode of “Two and a Half Men” in 2003.He married Linda Silverstein in 1984. In addition to her, he is survived by his daughter, Wendy Steiner; his sons, Eric and Tony; and four grandchildren. His marriage to Nina Kramer ended in divorce.Mr. Sandrich’s association with “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” ended when the series itself did, in 1977. He later recalled that as the cast rehearsed the last episode, Mr. Asner’s emotional line, “I treasure you people,” caused tears to stream from Mr. Asner’s eyes.And when Ms. Moore talked about how much her co-workers meant to her, Mr. Sandrich said, “My only direction to her was to hold off crying as long as you can.”“If you see the show,” he added, “you see the tears well up and I started crying and the audience started crying.” More

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      Comedians Turn Their Attention to Abortion

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      Alison Leiby has an hourlong set looking at the experience of an unwanted pregnancy. She’s among a spate of female artists finding humor in the issue.A stand-up show about abortion sounds like a bad idea. The comic Alison Leiby knows that. Just look at her title: “Oh God, an Hour About Abortion.”Leiby doesn’t just anticipate your expectations. She subverts them. As states like Texas pass laws dramatically restricting abortion rights, and the Supreme Court prepares to hear a case in December that could overturn Roe v. Wade, her deftly funny, jarringly understated show doesn’t respond to the news so much as clarify it.Abortion is not new territory in comedy, and there’s a long history of male comics doing against-the-grain bits staking out an abortion-rights position while also poking fun at the idea that a fetus isn’t a person. I saw this done decades ago by George Carlin, and again this month by Bill Burr. Neal Brennan also has a quick joke in his current show, “Unacceptable,” about how liberals show empathy for everyone — but fetuses. Leiby is part of a recent spate of female artists making comedy about reproductive rights that digs into the realities of abortion today more than abstract arguments about it.Leiby, who has been performing her show around New York City (next up: Caveat on Tuesday), employs none of the debating-society smirk of those jokes about the life of the fetus. Without a trace of didacticism, she finds humor in the messy, confusing, sometimes banal experience of an unwanted pregnancy and an abortion. This is comedy about the heartbeat of the mother — and to the extent it engages with the abstract question of life, it’s when Leiby mentions her friends’ first Instagram post of their newborn, which, she says, “I think we can all agree is when life really begins.”Her offhandedness is part of her charm, but it has a purpose. Leiby wants to give us a portrait of abortion not as a crisis or a moral question, but as a common and confusing medical procedure. The broader context of this show, as she reminds the audience, is a culture of silence surrounding women. From sex education to birth control, she explains how much is unspoken, rushed through or hidden from view. Leiby even shocked herself when she called Planned Parenthood, she says, and in asking about an abortion, whispered the word. She mocks the vague ads for birth control and imagines an honest one in which a 37-year-old woman wakes up in a cold sweat screaming next to a mediocre white man, which leads to a scene of him eating Cheetos in a hospital room as she gives birth.Leiby doesn’t move much onstage, and her gestures are limited. Her comedy leans on her nimble writing, which displays a range and density of spiky jokes — puns, metaphors, misdirection. She knows how to set a scene and is alert to the details of nightmares. She is terrified of scary movies and has a ticklishly amusing podcast, “Ruined,” in which a friend, Halle Kiefer, explains the plots of horror films to her. It’s like listening to a play-by-play announcer and color commentator of a game on the radio, except instead of balls or strikes, it’s about beheadings and exorcisms.What comes across on the podcast and in this show is a sensitivity to anxiety and fear mitigated by curiosity. Leiby understands that whether to have a child is a subject fraught with confusion for many, and she acknowledges it, but that’s not her issue. She presents herself as a wry if bumbling protagonist of her own story, describing her attitude toward the prospect of children like this: “I acted like my eggs were Fabergé: feminine but decorative.”In 2004, The New York Times published an article about culture and abortion titled “Television’s Most Persistent Taboo.” That has changed. In a short set on “The Comedy Lineup,” on Netflix, the comic Kate Willett has a sharp joke about how men looking to hook up should care about abortion rights. “I don’t even know if the men that I know understand that sex can make a kid,” she said. “They are super worried that sex can make someone your girlfriend.”In the past year, streaming services have put out two comedies, “Plan B” (directed by Natalie Morales) and “Unpregnant” (directed by Rachel Lee Goldenberg), about girls who go on the road with a friend to get reproductive help. These knockabout buddy films aren’t explicitly about the recent state-level pushes for anti-abortion legislation, but they certainly haunt the action, with closed clinics and ideologues providing key plot points.Like Leiby’s show, these movies present getting an abortion or taking the morning-after pill, often called Plan B, as ordinary decisions made relatively easily, but because of the dictates of a commercial comedy, their plots are full of incident and action, romantic and villainous turns. They make the process of getting an abortion into a high-stakes adventure.Haley Lu Richardson, left, and Barbie Ferreira in “Unpregnant.”Ursula Coyote/HBO MaxVictoria Moroles, left, and Kuhoo Verma in “Plan B.”Brett Roedel/HuluIn observational comedy, Leiby has found a form better suited to what she wants to say. “Oh God” is about details, and by zeroing in on them, it navigates the difficult terrain of making a funny hour about a difficult, polarizing subject. Even so, this isn’t one of those comedy shows interrupted by grave talk or political speeches. It’s one where the response to the person at the clinic asking if she wants “pills or procedure” is: “That’s a real fries or salad.”There’s a power in the relatable details of storytelling. Before Leiby gets the procedure, she’s asked a series of questions: Does she want to know if there’s a heartbeat? Does she want to know if it’s twins? In her telling, these are poignant, even painful moments leavened by quips. To the question about twins, she wonders: “Does it cost more?”Leiby proves that light comedy can be as pointed and meaningful as that which advertises its own weightiness. For while she tells a story about a safe, legal and quick abortion, she doesn’t ignore other more fraught situations, either today or in a potential post-Roe future. She explores this indirectly through her relationship with her mother, which gives her an opportunity to dig into the issue before abortion was legal. Through this historical perspective, she frames the stakes of the next year, when abortion could grow even more prominent in the American discourse.Political stand-up typically lends itself to argumentative point-making, but it can use other tools. In repositioning abortion not as a political battle of ideas but as the real-world choices in the lives of flawed human beings, she brings this charged issue down to earth. More

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      Anthony Johnson, Actor Known for ‘Friday,’ Dies at 55

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      Mr. Johnson, whose other film credits include “House Party” and “Menace II Society,” died on Sept. 6, his agent said.Anthony Johnson, an actor and comedian known for small but memorable roles in “Friday,” “House Party” and about two dozen other movies, died on Sept. 6. He was 55.His death, in a hospital in Los Angeles County, Calif., was confirmed by his agent, LyNea Bell, and the county medical examiner’s office; neither specified a cause.Mr. Johnson is perhaps best known for playing Ezal, a drug addict and thief who unintentionally interrupts a heist, in the 1995 movie “Friday,” starring Ice Cube. Mr. Johnson’s other film credits, sometimes as A.J. Johnson, include “House Party” (1990), “Menace II Society” (1993) and “B.A.P.S.” (1997).Mr. Johnson was born on Feb. 1, 1966, and grew up in Compton, Calif.“If you made it out of Compton, you can make it anywhere,” he said in a 2018 interview with VladTV. “You had to be really careful and watch yourself back in them days.”In a 2013 interview for a YouTube series called “Conversations of an Actor,” Mr. Johnson said his father, Eddie Smith, was a stuntman who worked with Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall and other stars. His father, he said, helped him get his start in the industry by getting him involved in work behind the scenes.“He told me whenever I’m on camera to always stand out, to do something on camera to make people remember me,” Mr. Johnson said in the 2018 interview.In the 2013 interview, Mr. Johnson said he had never taken an acting class.“It’s, like, real easy to act,” he said. “You just put yourself in the situation that you’re not in but you really want to be in.”Mr. Johnson’s survivors include his wife, Lexis, and three children, as well as a brother, Edward Smith, and a sister, Sheila.As the news of Mr. Johnson’s death spread on Monday, actors and performers shared memories and brief appreciations on social media. Ice Cube described Mr. Johnson on Twitter as a “naturally funny dude.”The rapper and actor Shad Moss, who is also known by his stage name, Bow Wow, credited Mr. Johnson with helping to set his career in motion. In a video on Instagram, he said that Mr. Johnson had been serving as the M.C. on the 1993 Chronic Tour, headlined by Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, when he picked Mr. Moss out of the crowd and invited him backstage.“If it wasn’t for A.J. Johnson’s eyes, and then picking me out of the crowd out of 20,000 people in Ohio, I don’t think there would have ever been a Bow Wow,” he said. “You will truly be missed, and you’re definitely going to go down in history as one of the greatest.”In addition to performing standup comedy and acting in movies, Mr. Johnson said in 2013 that he had also appeared in plays, and expressed a desire to return to the stage.“It’s like doing standup,” he said. “I love it. I love the theater. That’s where I’m going back.”Mr. Johnson said that Robin Harris, an actor and comedian who also appeared in “House Party,” had helped him early in his career, including by giving one of his first shots at doing standup.“I did about three minutes and got booed,” Mr. Johnson said in the 2013 interview. “He told me to go home and make up some jokes. I came back, and the rest is history.” More

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      Here’s Why Norm Macdonald Was Comedy Royalty. It’s Not ‘S.N.L.’

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      He may have been best known for his work on “Saturday Night Live,” but he should be really remembered for decades of club sets and you-can’t-miss-this clips.My favorite Norm Macdonald joke — and trust me, there’s serious competition — is one he told as anchor of Weekend Update on “Saturday Night Live” in the late 1990s. Papers in front of him, he reported with a cheer: “Yippie! Jerry Rubin died this week.” Looking down, he apologized for his mistake and tried again: “That should read: ‘Yippie Jerry Rubin died this week.’”Silly, dark, ruthlessly concise, this gem is a model of craft, and like many of Macdonald’s bits, it proves how the smallest change in tone, language or, in this case, exclamation mark can radically shift meaning, providing the kind of jolt of surprise that produces belly laughs.Macdonald, who died Tuesday of cancer, maintained a studied modesty about his work. He said that his act had no substance, that it was all “gossip and trickery.” And he claimed without self-pity that he would be remembered only for his few years at “Saturday Night Live,” not his decades of stand-up, which he referred to as “a shabby business, made up of shabby fellows like me who cross the country, stay at shabby hotels, and tell jokes they no longer find funny.”He described his life as a sprint to outrun the wolves of irrelevancy. “They caught and devoured me years ago,” he wrote in his 2016 quasi-memoir, “Based on a True Story.”Whether he believed this about himself doesn’t matter (Macdonald was a very skillful liar) and there is some merit to his points about stand-up and his credits, but the ornate way he beats himself up hints at a deeper truth: Macdonald was not only one of the funniest comics of his generation, but also a sneaky aesthete who elevated stand-up, helping shift its cultural prestige over the past few decades into an art deserving respect.His legacy is not clear from his level of stardom or even his list of television shows and specials, although he has some signal accomplishments, including an early stint as a writer on “Roseanne” and one of the best Netflix specials of the past decade, “Hitler’s Dog, Gossip & Trickery.” Macdonald’s greatness is not on his IMDb page so much as in the number of you-have-to-see-this moments, the kind that friends tell you about at parties and then send you the clip the next day.Many of these came from talk shows, where he was a hall-of-fame guest. He told one of the most justly revered jokes in late-night history on Conan O’Brien’s “Tonight” show, a preposterous masterpiece of literary suspense-building about a moth in a podiatrist’s office. Another moment on the couch from the same show went viral decades later: He interrupted an interview with the actress Courtney Thorne-Smith to savagely insult Carrot Top, the star of the movie she was promoting, a brutally hilarious act of sabotage.Macdonald had other talents. When it comes to parodies of roasts, he stood alone, turning intentionally awful jokes at the roast of Bob Saget into disorienting performance art that remains one of the funniest bits of anti-comedy you will ever see. And on “Saturday Night Live,” he may have been at his best on the Weekend Update desk (ultimately getting fired after his jokes about O.J. Simpson), but he also delivered several singular impressions, including a version of David Letterman that was both accurate and far too bizarre to be realistic.Letterman proved to be a key figure in Macdonald’s career, a champion of the stand-up’s work (the talk-show host said no one was funnier) who booked the comic on his show’s final week. Macdonald, breaking from his trademark acerbic style, ended on a surprisingly moving tribute, displaying an emotional side that usually only lurked under the surface of his comedy.In a column from 2017, I argued that what distinguished Macdonald’s comedy was his sensitivity to language, his peculiarly poetic brand of plain talk. He made stylish turns of phrase and folksy flourishes seem conversational and offhand. A lover of Bob Dylan, Macdonald was also a sponge for influences, borrowing and repurposing figures of speech or unusual words to create funny-sounding sentences.But describing him as merely a master of joke writing misses his quickness, wryly deadpan delivery and, most of all, a unique level of commitment. He did not bail out of jokes and never pandered. You see this in his Bob Saget roast: the conviction to push through despite the confusion of the response. He pleased the crowd without being a crowd-pleaser. And no one had a nimbler and more assured sarcastic voice, which he used to find humor in ambiguity. There was a wonderfully odd moment on David Spade’s talk show a few years ago when Macdonald told Jay Leno he was maybe the best talk-show host ever, and no one, including Leno, seemed to be able to tell if he was being sincere.There’s a lot of fun to be had in this liminal space between earnestness and just kidding. One of Macdonald’s most impressive feats is writing an entire memoir that remains there. It’s one of the greatest comedian memoirs but also a pointedly frustrating mix of fact and fiction, cliché and originality. It’s very funny, sometimes tedious, occasionally wise. The title, “Based on a True Story,” isn’t just a gag. It’s rooted in his faith that, as he puts it, “there is no way of telling a true story. I mean a really true one, because of memory. It’s just no good.”Just because you can’t tell a really true one doesn’t mean that art can’t get closer to the truth. In an interview with New York magazine, Macdonald balked at the trend toward confessional art, saying he thought art was supposed to be about concealment. That was revealing.The fact that he struggled with cancer for a decade was something he certainly didn’t advertise in his work. His death came as a shock to many. But clues were everywhere. Death has been among his favorite subjects in recent years. In a great viral moment, he delivered one of the earliest and best comedy club sets about the coronavirus. It was at the Improv in Los Angeles in March 2020 right before venues were shutting down. “It’s funny that we all now know how we’re going to die,” he said. “It’s just a matter of what order.”At the start of his memoir, he tells a story about reading on his Wikipedia page that he had died. Then he imagines if it were true, laughing until a thought stops him cold. “The preposterous lie on the screen before me isn’t that far off,” he wrote. This seemed like jokey melodrama when I first read it, but now it hits differently.Macdonald once talked about an uncle dying of cancer, skewering how we now describe people suffering from that disease as “waging a battle” because that means the last thing you do before you die is lose. “I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure that if you die, then the cancer also dies at the same time,” Macdonald said on Comedy Central. “That to me is not a loss. That’s a draw.” More

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      Norm Macdonald, ‘Saturday Night Live’ Comedian, Dies at 61

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      Acerbic and sometimes controversial, he became familiar to millions as the show’s “Weekend Update” anchor from 1994 to 1998.Norm Macdonald, the acerbic, sometimes controversial comedian familiar to millions as the “Weekend Update” anchor on “Saturday Night Live” from 1994 to 1998, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 61.His manager, Marc Gurvitz, confirmed the death. Lori Jo Hoekstra, his longtime producing partner, told the entertainment news outlet Deadline that the cause was cancer, something he had been dealing with for some time but had kept largely private.Mr. Macdonald had a deadpan style honed on the stand-up circuit, first in his native Canada and then in the United States. By 1990 he was doing his routine on “Late Night With David Letterman” and other shows. Then, in 1993, came his big break: an interview with Lorne Michaels, a fellow Canadian, for a job on “Saturday Night Live.”“I knew that even though we hailed from the same nation, we were worlds apart,” Mr. Macdonald wrote in “Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir” (2016), a fictional work with occasional hints of biography mixed in. “He was a cosmopolite from Toronto, worldly, the kinda guy who’d be comfortable around the Queen of England herself. Me, I was a hick, born to the barren, rocky soil of the Ottawa Valley, where the richest man in town was the barber.”In any case, he got the job, and by the next year he was in the anchor chair for the “Weekend Update” segment. In sketches, he impersonated Burt Reynolds and Bob Dole and played other characters.Mr. Michaels, in a telephone interview on Tuesday, said that Jim Downey, the show’s head writer at the time, had first brought Mr. Macdonald to his attention.“Jim just liked the intelligence behind the jokes,” he recalled.And Mr. Michaels saw it, too.“There’s something in his comedy — there’s just a toughness to it,” he said. “Also, he’s incredibly patient. He can wait” — that is, wait for a punchline.That, Mr. Michaels said, made Mr. Macdonald different stylistically from other “Weekend Update” anchors.“I think it took some getting used to for the audience,” Mr. Michaels said. “It wasn’t instantly a hit. But he just grew on them.”In early 1998, however, Mr. Macdonald was booted from the anchor chair, reportedly at the behest of Don Ohlmeyer, president of NBC Entertainment, West Coast, who was said to have been annoyed by Mr. Macdonald’s relentless mocking of his friend O.J. Simpson.Mr. Macdonald as the anchor of “Weekend Update” in 1995. He got the anchor job 1994, a year after joining “Saturday Night Live,” and lost it in 1998.Al Levine/NBCUniversal via Getty ImagesMr. Macdonald stayed on for a few more episodes but didn’t return for the 1998-99 season. His post-“S.N.L.” television ventures were a mixed bag. “Norm” (originally called “The Norm Show”), a comedy about a former hockey player, ran from 1999 to 2001 on ABC. “Sports Show With Norm Macdonald,” on Comedy Central, lasted only a few months, in 2011. “The dedicated fan will identify two patterns in his television work,” Dan Brooks wrote in a 2018 article about him in The New York Times Magazine. “It is invariably funny, and it is invariably canceled.”But Mr. Macdonald said he didn’t think of himself first as a TV performer, and he continued to work as a comedian throughout his career.“In my mind, I’m just a stand-up,” he told Mr. Brooks. “But other people don’t think that. They go, oh, the guy from ‘S.N.L.’ is doing stand-up now.”Though known for “Weekend Update,” Mr. Macdonald did not do much topical material in his own routines. He liked jokes that would still be funny years in the future. Among his most famous is one he told on “The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien” in 2009, about a moth that goes to a podiatrist. After a setup that rambled on for minutes, in which the moth pours out various emotional troubles, the podiatrist asks the insect why it came to a podiatrist rather than a psychiatrist. Mr. Macdonald’s punchline: “And then the moth said, ‘Because the light was on.’”Mr. Macdonald’s sense of humor sometimes got him in hot water. In 2018, for instance, he drew criticism for remarks that seemed to defend the comedian Louis C.K., who had been accused of sexual misconduct, and Roseanne Barr, who was under fire for a racist Twitter post. (Louis C.K. had written the foreword to Mr. Macdonald’s 2016 book, and Ms. Barr had hired him as a writer on her 1990s sitcom, “Roseanne.”) In apologizing for those comments, Mr. Macdonald made a remark that mocked people with Down syndrome.Missteps aside, Mr. Macdonald was always good for an unpredictable few minutes, or more, on a late-night talk show.“I’ve been interviewing Norm for 18 years, and he has consistently broken every talk-show rule,” Mr. O’Brien told The Times in 2011. “He tells anecdotes that are blatantly false. His stories have always been repurposed farmer’s daughter routines that he swears happened to him.”Mr. O’Brien added, “When Norm steps out from behind the curtain, I honestly don’t know what is going to happen, and that electrical charge comes through the television.”Mr. Macdonald in a scene from his sitcom “The Norm Show” (later called simply “Norm) in 1999. With him were Laurie Metcalf and Max Wright.Robert Votes/ABCNorman Gene Macdonald was born on Oct. 17, 1959, in Quebec City, according to IMDB.In 1998, his brother Neil told The Record of Ontario that Norm had had a flirtation with the newspaper business as a young man but that he had deliberately botched an interview for a job as a copyboy because he wasn’t that serious about the profession.“He once said he was interested in discovering the truth, but he hoped it would be within walking distance,” Neil Macdonald told the newspaper.He also recalled finding his brother hyperventilating in the washroom at Yuk Yuk’s, an Ottawa comedy club, before going onstage for his first stand-up gig. But he got it together and, as comedians say, killed.By 1984, Mr. Macdonald was skilled enough to spend four months opening for the comedian Sam Kinison. He eventually made his way to Los Angeles, and in 1992 he was hired as a writer on “The Dennis Miller Show” and then “Roseanne.”“I never wanted fame at all, I just wanted to do stand-up,” he told The Ottawa Citizen in 2010. “I found when I came to Los Angeles to do more stand-up comedy that people wanted me to do other things, which I really didn’t want to.”“Stand-up,” he added, “is an odd kind of job where, if you’re good at it, they figure you’ll be good at other stuff in show business, which is usually not the case.”Mr. Macdonald wrote the 1998 film “Dirty Work,” in which he starred with Don Rickles, Chevy Chase and others. Among his other credits were the “Dr. Doolittle” movies, in which he provided the voice of a dog named Lucky.His survivors include his mother, a son and two brothers, his manager said. “He was an original,” Mr. Michaels said, “and he didn’t compromise in a business that’s based on compromise — show business.”Dave Itzkoff More