We're always sorry to report the passing of funny people. Sam Denoff sure was one. He was mainly a writer and producer, though occasionally an actor, and he gained his greatest fame as half of the team of Persky and Denoff. He and Bill Persky wrote for and later produced The Dick Van Dyke Show. Remember the one where Laura went on the game show and told the world Alan Brady was bald? That was theirs. Remember the one where Rob thinks they brought the wrong baby home from the hospital? Persky and Denoff. They wrote a lot of the best episodes and won a couple of Emmys for them.
Later, they went on to create Good Morning, World and That Girl and a half-dozen other shows, and Denoff wrote some things without Persky and vice-versa…but they were all well-respected programs. An amazing couple of careers there.
Elsewhere, I've told the story of how when I was just shy of thirteen, I got in to see an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show filmed. It was very exciting and that trip had a lot to do with me answering the question you get all the time when you're a kid: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" There were two men on the set during the filming who weren't performers (something I already knew I could never be and didn't really want to be) but they were important people there who belonged on that stage and you could tell that they had a lot to do with that show's creation each week. I somehow figured out that their function was in the areas of writing and maybe producing and I also thought, "Hey, that's what I want to do." One of those men was Bill Persky and the other one was Sam Denoff.
I only got to know Sam casually. We're both members of a group of comedians and comedy writers called Yarmy's Army but he's been ill the last few years and rarely at meetings. But I got to tell him the above tale and to thank him for being a role model. I am by no means the only person who ever told him that. He heard it a lot.