Eric on The Road

Journeys into the offbeat, off the beaten path, overlooked and forgotten - by Eric Model

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Passing: Irving Brecher, 94, Comedy-Script Writer

From The New York Times:


By BRUCE WEBER
Published: November 19, 2008


Irving Brecher, who wrote vaudeville sketches for Milton Berle, jokes for Henny Youngman, comedies for the Marx Brothers, a television series for Jackie Gleason and screenplays for movie musicals including "Meet Me in St. Louis" and "Bye Bye Birdie" died on November 17 in Los Angeles. He was 94.


Within the tribe of Hollywood gag writers, Mr. Brecher (pronounced BRECK-er) was a literary lion, a reflexive offerer of reactive jokes, a relisher of puns, a connoisseur of often topical, arch repartee. He once angered the film producer Daryl Zanuck, telling him the movie he had just made hadn’t been released; it had escaped.

“If I were any drier, I’d be drowning,” he had Groucho Marx saying, stuck in the rain in the 1939 film "At The Circus".


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/movies/19brecher.html?_r=1

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