A sad end to a sad story. Emmy-winning comedy writer Jack Hanrahan died Monday at a nursing home in Cleveland. Jack is the guy we wrote about here…the man who somehow went from writing for shows like Laugh-In, Get Smart and Sonny & Cher in Hollywood to being homeless in the streets of Ohio. He was 75 and, as a friend of his e-mailed me this morning, "had been suffering from just about everything."
The saga of Hanrahan is recounted here so I'll just add what I can: I knew Jack briefly in the early eighties. The word "jolly" comes to mind. He was a very funny man, the kind of person who created a party atmosphere wherever he went…always glad to see everyone, always prepped with the latest joke. He was a great joke writer but he was also a great joke teller, and those skills don't always go together.
When he was teamed with his friend Phil Hahn, he was half of the hottest comedy-writing team in town. They went very rapidly from writing greeting cards to writing for MAD Magazine to writing cartoon shows for Hanna-Barbera to writing top, prime-time TV shows. I didn't know Phil or Jack then but got to know them later, after they'd gone their separate ways, and could easily believe something I heard back when I was starting out in TV. When I started out, I was teamed with a clever gent named Dennis Palumbo.
Our agent one day mentioned the names of Hahn and Hanrahan and warned us, as he warned all teams, that when partners split, they don't automatically each get 50% of the team's career. Producers worry that the sum is greater than the parts, especially when one guy is loud and gregarious and the other is relatively quiet. Sometimes, they fear that the loud guy has all the ideas and the quiet guy is just the one who knows how to type. Or sometimes, they fear that the loud guy is the one who's good at selling and the quiet guy is the one who really does the writing.
I don't know what it was like when Jack and Phil were alone in the room working on a script — each spoke well of the other — but Jack was the loud one and Phil was the quiet one. After they parted, they both had trouble establishing new lives in Hollywood. Phil did pretty well, working on top variety shows, often as head writer. Jack…well, Jack had problems.
Like I said, he was a great guy to be around. When you hear how it all ended, you just have to shake your head and sigh.