Writer shaped Saturday Night Live

In 2004, contestants on Jeopardy! were stumped by the clue: “He was the comedy partner of Al Franken.”

Tom Davis, that comedy partner, sighed as he watched. He was so inured to playing second fiddle to Franken, now a Democratic senator from Minnesota, that he called himself Sonny to Franken’s Cher.

But the fact is that Davis helped shape Franken’s comedy, and vice versa, from the time they entertained students with rebellious, razor-edged humor at high school assemblies in Minnesota. In 1975, Davis, brilliant at improvisational comedy, and Franken, a whiz at plotting funny sequences, became two of the first writers on a new show called Saturday Night Live, which has lasted 37 years.

Davis never lost the quirky, ori- ginal tone that helped shape the show, and in his last months he referred to death as “deanimation.” He deanimated on Thursday at his home in Hudson, N.Y., at age 59. The cause was throat and neck cancer, his wife, Mimi Raleigh, said.

Davis shared three Emmys for his writing on SNL and another for The Paul Simon Special in 1977.

Thomas James Davis was born in Minneapolis on Aug. 13, 1952, and attended the private Blake School, where he and Franken bonded over comedians such as Jack Benny and Bob and Ray.

After graduating, Franken headed for Harvard, while Davis chose the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., because, he said, he had heard that it had a foreign study program in India, where he hoped to smoke opium. (They did, and he did.)

Davis worked for SNL from 1975 to 1980, and again from 1986 to 1994. Davis retired in the mid-1990s but returned to SNL as a writer as recently as 2003.

In addition to his wife and his brother, Robert, Davis is survived by