The Definitive Guide to Comedy
Another of the original writers for Saturday Night Live has died. Anne Beatts, who was the first woman hired to help edit The National Lampoon, and after SNL went on to create the cult sitcom Square Pegs, died Wednesday. Beatts was 74. Her former colleague, SNL’s Laraine Newman, confirmed the …
Jason Smith, the CEO of Starburns Audio, died on Friday. Originally from Sparks, Nev., Smith earned his bachelor’s degree in 2001 from the University of Nevada-Reno, before going on to study game design and development at Full Sail University. He was a partner in Feral Audio from 2015-2017, then became …
Tony Hendra has died at 79. His wife, Carla Hendra, told The New York Times the cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, often known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which was first diagnosed in 2019. Tony Hendra began his career at Cambridge University with the famed Footlights as the comedy partner of Graham Chapman, …
Richie Tienken, the founding owner of The Comic Strip on New York City’s Upper East Side and former manager of Eddie Murphy and Adam Sandler, has died. As Sandler said back in 2012 for a TV tribute to Murphy: “I tried to do everything he did in his career,” Sandler …
Comedian and actress Erica Faye Watson died on Saturday in Jamaica after contracting COVID-19. She had just turned 48 on Friday. Watson was a regular contributor to Windy City Live in Chicago, and performed on multiple TV series and movies that filmed in Chicago, including The Chi, Chi-Raq, and Chicago …
Stand-up comedian Erik Myers died suddenly and tragically this morning when he was hit by a car near Amarillo, Texas. Myers, 40, was en route to a weekend of gigs at Hyena’s Comedy Club in Dallas, where he was scheduled to perform tonight through Saturday. Hyena’s modified its page today: …
In the new Showtime docuseries about The Comedy Store, Andrew “Dice” Clay credited Mitchell Walters with calling him up and talking him into moving from Brooklyn to Hollywood, leaving Pip’s for The Store where he would cultivate his infamous “Dice” character. Before all of that, though…Walters was quite literally helping …
Big Mike Mitchell has died from a heart attack. Mitchell, who had moved to Tennessee during the pandemic, was born and raised in the Baldwin Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, attending Susan Miller Dorsey Senior High School. Mitchell had gotten into comedy after a stint in prison, as he explained …
Actor Dustin Diamond died Feb. 1, shortly after revealing he had been hospitalized with stage 4 small cell carcinoma. Diamond was 44. Diamond was best known for his breakout teen-aged role as Screech in NBC’s Saved By The Bell in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Dustin Neil Diamond was born Jan. …
Marc Wilmore, a comedian, writer and younger brother of Larry Wilmore, has died at 57. Marc Wilmore died from COVID-19, although his older brother said Marc had suffered from a variety of pre-existing health conditions ever since undergoing a kidney transplant in the 1990s. Marc Edward Wilmore was born on …
