Comedian, Larry Sanders Show creator

LOS ANGELES — Garry

Shandling, the actor-comedian behind the phony docudrama The Larry Sanders Show, has died. He was 66.

Los Angeles police officer Tony Im said Shandling died Thursday in Los Angeles.

Im said fire officials were dispatched to Shandling’s Los Angeles home Thursday morning for an undisclosed medical emergency. Shandling was transported to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

An eccentric humorist, 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 teaching people that the answer to that creative question is right here, in the room, between us here.”

Born on Nov. 29, 1949, in Chicago, Shandling was raised in Tucson, Ariz. 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.

Shandling had appeared as a stand-up on Johnny Carson’s

The Tonight Show and occasionally stood in for the show host. In the 1980s, he began to experiment with TV comedy, with his first series, It’s Garry

Shandling’s Show, a Showtime project that had its actors routinely break the fourth wall to comment on what they were up to. Even the theme song began with the lyrics, “The theme to Garry’s show. …”

In August 1992, Shandling created HBO’s The Larry

Sanders Show, in which he played an egomaniacal latenight TV host and interacted with real-life celebrities who appeared as guests on Larry’s show-within-the-show. His films included Hurlyburly in 1998, What Planet Are

You From? in 2000 and Zoolander in 2001. More recently, he appeared in Marvel Studios’ Iron Man 2 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier.