Larry Gelbart

last updated 8 January 2015

Larry Gelbart wrote raucous comedy for some 60 years, receiving Oscar nominations for his movies Oh, God! (1977) and Tootsie (1982), and a Tony for his Broadway musical City of Angels (1989). He was best known for developing the hit series M*A*S*H for television.

Gelbart grew up in Los Angeles, the son of a Latvian immigrant barber, said The Washington Post. One day, Gelbart’s father, who had many celebrity clients, talked Danny Thomas into giving his quick-witted son a job writing radio gags. Later Gelbart “entered television during its formative years” by joining Sid Caesar’s Caesar’s Hour. His first Broadway effort, a musical called The Conquering Hero (1961), “met with such punishing reviews that Gelbart quipped, ‘If Hitler’s alive, I hope he’s out of town with a musical.’” But in 1962 he shared a Tony for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, “a vaudevillian-style farce based on writings by the Roman satirist Plautus.”

In 1971 Gelbart wrote the pilot for a TV version of the darkly humorous film M*A*S*H, said the London Daily Telegraph. Debuting in 1972, with Gelbart as a producer and key writer, the series followed “the antics of the cynical, war-weary personnel” of an army hospital during the Korean War. M*A*S*H became a pop-culture landmark, thanks largely to “Gelbart’s quick-fire, gag-laden scripts, underpinned with frequent references to sex” and other taboo issues. But exhausted by “relentlessly battling studio executives over controversial story lines,” Gelbart left after the first four of the show’s 11 seasons. “War is hell,” he said. “So is TV.”