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    Lenny Schultz, Comedian Who Made a Lot of Noise, Dies at 91

    A highly physical performer, he said he couldn’t tell jokes. But he became well known for a wild act that fellow comedians didn’t want to follow.Lenny Schultz, a wild-eyed comedian who became known in the 1970s and ’80s for high-energy performances that he delivered with a mouthful of sound effects and a table full of silly props, died on Sunday at his home in Delray Beach, Fla. He was 91.His son and only immediate survivor, Mark, confirmed the death.“I can’t tell a joke,” Mr. Schultz told The Orlando Sentinel in 1972, but that didn’t matter. “The guys I like and the guys I identify with,” he added, “are Sid Caesar, Jonathan Winters, Guy Marks — the zanies. I like the zanies. I am a zany!”With his expressive face, his physicality and the rapid pace of his act, Mr. Schultz exuded a loony intensity. He began his comedy career in the late 1960s while keeping his day job as a high school gym teacher.Onstage, he described the start of life on Earth, punctuating his narrative with explosions and other noises; bowed a banana as if it were a violin (while taking bites out of it); played the Lone Ranger, wearing a mask and a tiny cowboy hat while riding a small toy horse on a stick and flinging Froot Loops from a box; rendered a cockfight between game fowl of different ethnicities; and admonished the baby doll in his backpack to stop crying because William Morris agents were in the audience.Mr. Schultz in 1977 on the first episode of the rebooted “Laugh-In.” The original show had revolutionized TV comedy, but the new version was canceled after six episodes.NBCUniversal Photo Bank, via Getty Images“Lenny has a special place in the hearts and memories of everybody in his peer group,” David Letterman, who met Mr. Schultz when they were performing in Los Angeles, said in a phone interview. “He is talked about more often, randomly, than any single person we spent time with at the Comedy Store in the 1970s.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Herbert Schlosser, a Force Behind ‘S.N.L.’ and ‘Laugh-In,’ Dies at 95

    As a top NBC executive, he wrote a memo envisioning the show that became “Saturday Night Live.” He also helped recruit Johnny Carson and oversaw a raft of hit shows.Herbert Schlosser, a longtime NBC executive who put an indelible stamp on the network by negotiating Johnny Carson’s first deal to host “The Tonight Show,” putting “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” on the air and overseeing the development of “Saturday Night Live,” died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 95.His death was confirmed by his wife, Judith Schlosser.Mr. Schlosser was president of NBC in 1974 when he faced a late-night predicament: Carson no longer wanted the network to carry repeats of “Tonight” on weekends. But pleasing Carson, the network’s most important star, led to an inevitable question: What would NBC televise at 11:30 on Saturday nights?Mr. Schlosser wrote a memo in early 1975 that laid out the fundamentals of an original program that would be televised from NBC’s headquarters at Rockefeller Center; would be carried live, or at least taped on the same day, to maintain its topicality; would be “young and bright,” with a “distinctive look, a distinctive set and a distinctive sound”; would “seek to develop new television personalities”; and would have a different host each week.“Saturday Night is an ideal time to launch a show like this,” Mr. Schlosser wrote. “Those who now take the Saturday/Sunday ‘Tonight Show’ repeats should welcome this, and I would imagine we would get much greater clearance with a new show.”A sketch from the first episode of “Saturday Night Live,” seen on Oct. 11, 1975; from left, George Coe, John Belushi, Chevy Chase and Gilda Radner. The formula for the show had been spelled out in a memo by Mr. Schlosser earlier that year.Herb Ball/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty Images“Saturday Night Live,” originally called just “Saturday Night” — which followed much of Mr. Schlosser’s formula, and which was produced, then as now, by Lorne Michaels — made its debut on Oct. 11, 1975, after Game 1 of the World Series, between the Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds. Mr. Schlosser had attended the game in Boston with Bowie Kuhn, the strait-laced baseball commissioner, and invited him to his hotel room to watch.“He didn’t laugh. And I thought, ‘Well, that’s Bowie,’” Mr. Schlosser recalled in “Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of ‘Saturday Night Live’ as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests” (2002), by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. “And then after a while, he started to chuckle. And then he’d actually laugh. And I figured, ‘Well, if he likes it, it’s going to have a wider audience than most people think.’”Mr. Michaels, in a phone interview, said that Mr. Schlosser had been a staunch backer of the show.“We wouldn’t have been on the air without him,” he said. “‘Live’ was his idea, not mine. He just believed in the show. He protected it.”Mr. Schlosser, a lawyer, had been an executive in NBC’s business affairs department, where he negotiated programming contracts to carry, among other events, the 1964 Summer Olympics from Tokyo and talent deals like ones with the comedian Bob Hope, whose specials were a mainstay of NBC’s prime-time schedule.“There were always kickers to his deals,” Mr. Schlosser told the Television Academy in an interview in 2007. With each new one, NBC had to buy a piece of land from Hope, one of the largest private landowners in California.“We bought it, got capital gains and never lost money on it,” Mr. Schlosser said.In 1966, Mr. Schlosser was named NBC’s vice president for programs on the West Coast, based in Burbank, Calif. Over six years, he was involved in developing numerous shows, among them some with Black stars, like the popular comedian Flip Wilson’s variety series and “Julia,” a sitcom starring Diahann Carroll as a single nurse with a son. He also hired the first woman and the first Black person to be vice presidents in the department.Flip Wilson, left, and Richard Pryor in 1973 on “The Flip Wilson Show,” which Mr. Schlosser had helped develop.Paul W. Bailey/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesMr. Schlosser particularly championed “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” a fast-paced satirical series that made its debut in early 1968. It was considered outrageous then for the political and risqué humor of its skits, performed by a cast of future stars including Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin.George Schlatter, the executive producer of “Laugh-In,” recalled that Mr. Schlosser had protected him from those within NBC who found the show’s content offensive.“Every Tuesday morning there was a parade into his office — censors, lawyers, bookkeepers,” Mr. Schlatter said by phone. “They’d say, ‘Herb, talk to him.’ Then he’d say to me, ‘I promised them I’d talk to you.’ And he’d say, ‘Just keep doing what you’re doing.’”Herbert Samuel Schlosser was born on April 21, 1926, in Atlantic City, N.J. His father, Abraham, owned a furniture store; his mother, Anna (Olesker) Schlosser, was a homemaker.After serving stateside in the Navy, he studied public and international affairs at Princeton University, graduating in 1949. Two years later, he graduated from Yale Law School.He started as a lawyer with a Wall Street firm, but the insurance work there bored him, and he moved to Phillips Nizer Benjamin Krim & Ballon (now called Phillips Nizer LLP), a Manhattan firm with many film and television clients. That experience led to his hiring around 1957 as general counsel of California National Productions, a film, merchandising and syndication subsidiary of NBC. He later became its chief operating officer before moving to NBC’s business affairs department in 1960.Johnny Carson in his first appearance as host of “The Tonight Show,” on Oct. 1, 1962. Mr. Schlosser had led the negotiations that brought him to NBC from ABC.NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesAs a lawyer with the department, he led the talks to bring Carson to NBC to replace Jack Paar as the host of “Tonight” in 1962. At the time, Carson was with ABC as M.C. of the game show “Who Do You Trust?,” and ABC required him to fulfill the last six months of his contract.Mr. Schlosser said he had agreed to pay Mr. Carson $2,500 a week (about $21,000 today). But when ABC held up his departure, one of Mr. Carson’s agents made a further demand.“He said, ‘Now that you can’t get him, we want more money,’” Mr. Schlosser recalled in the Television Academy interview. “I said, ‘We’re sticking with our price.’”Mr. Schlosser rose steadily at NBC. He was named executive vice president of the television network in 1972; promoted to president a year later; and named president of the National Broadcasting Company, the network’s corporate parent, in 1974 and chief executive in 1977.“He supported quality programs and had an idea that news was probably the most important thing the networks did,” Bud Rukeyser, a former executive vice president of corporate communications for NBC, said in a phone interview. “He gave news the benefit of the doubt. If news wanted a half-hour to do something, the answer was always yes.”But Mr. Schlosser was ousted in 1978 and replaced by Fred Silverman, who had engineered ABC’s rise to first place in prime-time ratings as its chief of programming.Mr. Schlosser’s standing had been hurt by NBC’s inability to produce a new prime-time hit series the previous season and climb out of third place.Shortly before Mr. Schlosser left NBC, the network presented “Holocaust,” a four-part mini-series that he had greenlighted. It won eight Emmy Awards. His main contribution to the project, he said, was persuading the executive producer, Herbert Brodkin, to change the title of the series, which had been called “The Family Weiss,” after some of its main characters.Mr. Schlosser and his wife, Judith, in 2011 at an event held by the Museum of the Moving Image at the Manhattan restaurant Cipriani. Mr. Schlosser was the museum’s first chairman. Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesMr. Schlosser didn’t have to go far for his next job: He was named an executive vice president of RCA, NBC’s parent company. His assignment was to develop software for RCA’s SelectaVision videodisc project. Three years later, he was named to run all of RCA’s entertainment activities, which also included RCA Records (but not NBC).He left in 1985 to become a senior adviser at Wertheim & Company, a Wall Street investment bank, as well as chairman of the planned Museum of the Moving Image, which opened in Queens in 1988. He remained there as either chairman or co-chairman until 2013.In addition to his wife, Judith (Gassner) Schlosser, Mr. Schlosser is survived by his son, Eric, the author of “Fast Food Nation”; a daughter, Lynn Jacobson, a former television executive; five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.Mr. Schlosser once recalled his certainty that “Saturday Night Live” could be a part of NBC for a long time, just as “Tonight” and “Today” were. Another model of late-night success at NBC under his watch was “The Midnight Special,” a series featuring pop and rock performers, that was broadcast on Fridays after “The Tonight Show” from 1973 until 1981.“NBC had this tradition of succeeding with shows like that,” he told the Television Academy. “To me, it was a no-brainer.” More