This is an obit for Bob Einstein, part of a family that includes many funny people including him, his brother Albert Brooks, and their father. Their father was Harry Einstein, a great comic (mostly in radio) who performed as a befuddled Greek man named Parkyakarkus. Like his father, Bob Einstein was best known by his character names — Officer Judy on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Marty Funkhouser on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and his long run as the self-immolating daredevil Super Dave Osborne. You never knew what daring feat Super Dave would attempt; only that at the end of it, he would meet some fate previously met by Wile E. Coyote.
Einstein was very funny and very deadpan in front of a camera and he was very funny and very smart in yet another role of his — that of a TV producer and writer. He won or was nominated for Emmy Awards in all three capacities: Producer, writer, performer.
The obits I've seen so far either forget or minimize how many shows he was involved with, behind-the-scenes. They included the show with the Smothers Brothers but also Bizarre (with John Byner), Van Dyke and Company (with Dick Van Dyke), various shows with Sonny Bono (with and without Cher), Pat Paulsen's Half a Comedy Hour, Redd Foxx's variety show and many more. What those shows all had in common was a mischievous sense of humor and a profound attempt to do things on television that no one had ever done before. That probably wasn't wholly because of Bob Einstein but those goals were present in all his work.
I met him a few times and he was always dour, self-deprecating, pissed-off about something and quite hilarious in his real or postured misery. The first time was after he'd written and directed the 1972 Another Nice Mess, a film which portrayed then-President Richard Nixon and then-Veep Spiro Agnew as, respectively, Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel. The movie was not a success and Einstein seemed pretty angry, not that it hadn't made money but that almost no one had seen it.
The last time, I think, was when I got a mysterious phone call in 1992 that he wanted to meet with me. The person who called wouldn't say what it was about but I had a hunch. I went in and, sure enough, it had to do with a Super Dave cartoon show that was then in production and but a few months from debuting. Mr. Einstein said he was very unhappy with how things were doing and someone had told him I was a "fixer" in such circumstances and shown him some shows I'd worked on. He wanted to know if I could come in and "save" his animated series.
I asked how many of the thirteen had been written and recorded. He said, "Eight." I said, "If they're truly as bad as you say, it's over. There's never been a cartoon show that had eight poor episodes and got better." He sighed, said I was probably right…and the business part of our meeting was effectively over. Since he'd cleared the hour and I'd driven all the way there, we sat around for the next 57 minutes talking about his past work, his father and his (and he brought this up) problems with being overshadowed by his younger brother. He also told me around thirty great off-color jokes and I told him a few. It was a great hour even if you considered that all I'd really accomplished there was to talk my way out of a job.
I don't know how to end this without using the term "very funny" again because he sure was. It's always a shame when we lose the kind of person you can't talk about without using that term.