Comedian Garry Shandling dies at 66
The ‘Larry Sanders Show’ star passed away on Thursday at age 66, of an undisclosed cause.
los angeles — Garry Shandling, who as an actor and comedian masterminded a brand of self-inflicted phony docudrama with The Larry
Sanders Show, has died. Los Angeles Police officer Tony Im said Shandling died on Thursday in Los Angeles of an undisclosed cause. He was 66.
Im said fire officials were dispatched to Shandling’s Los Angeles home on Thursday morning for a reported medical emergency. Shandling was transported to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
An innovative and eccentric humourist with pillowy lips and a voice that always seemed on the verge of a whine, Shandling claimed to disdain too much logic cluttering his life.
“The answer isn’t gonna be in the facts,” he said in 2009. “It’s gonna be in intuition. That’s how I work creatively. I’m always teachwing people that the answer to that creative question is right here, in the room, between us here.”
More to the point, it was dealing with the questions he confronted in himself.
Born on November 29, 1949 in Chicago, Shandling was raised in Tucson, Arizona.
On arriving in Los Angeles as a young adult, it was a short hop from a brief stint in the advertising business to comedy writing and stand-up.
Then in the 1980s, he began to experiment with TV comedy, and to toy with the sitcom form, with his first series, It’s Garry Shandling’s
Show, a Showtime project that made no bones about its inherently artificial nature. Then, in August 1992, Shandling created for HBO his comic masterpiece with The
Larry Sanders Show, which starred him as an egomaniacal late-night TV host with an angst-ridden showbiz life behind the scenes.
Larry Sanders proved to be an act of courage, a brave effort led by someone portraying a character dangerously close to himself. As Larry, Garry dug deep to confront his own demons, and did it brilliantly as the series teetered between dual realities: public and private; make-believe and painfully true.
After “Sanders” ended in 1998, Shandling’s public appearances were few.