March 18, 1981 — Garry Shandling's life changes a lot, mostly for the better, with his first appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. I knew Garry briefly when I was working on Welcome Back, Kotter and he wrote a pretty good script for the show which was wholly — and I mean every word of it — rewritten by the staff, mostly by my partner Dennis and me.
It wasn't Garry's fault. The show had changed producers and direction, and if the producers who'd hired him had still been in charge, much of what he wrote would probably have made it to air. But the new producers had to prove they were different from the producers who'd been fired so they couldn't just go with what the fired guys had commissioned and midwifed. Garry later cited that experience as one of several reasons he decided to try stand-up. It was a long, slow journey from that to this…