Larry Gelbart's comedy gives capable people plenty of ways to make fools of themselves. We warmly recommend his farce and ensemble writing, with a reservation about the moments when the characters start explaining how decent they are.
Fi1m perspective
Michael Dorsey dresses as Dorothy Michaels to secure a soap-opera role in Tootsie (1982), bringing his difficult temperament along. Larry Gelbart's writing finds trouble in Michael's belief that he knows what he is doing. We laughed at that confidence, because Gelbart and co-writer Murray Schisgal keep finding complications it cannot account for. Sydney Pollack lets the characters treat the situation seriously, so the farce can grow out of their behaviour. There is affection here for Michael's ability, without much indulgence for his vanity.
The quick dialogue had years of practice behind it: radio comedy, television work for Sid Caesar's Caesar's Hour, and the book he co-wrote for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962). With producer Gene Reynolds, he helped develop MASH* (1972) and served as its principal writer and producer for the first four seasons. The Korean War setting gives the doctors a continuing problem: how to save lives inside an organisation that keeps delivering casualties. The ensemble's different responses keep that situation from becoming one repeated joke. The writing makes room for people to be funny while taking their work seriously.
After leaving the series in 1976, Gelbart concentrated on feature screenplays, but the weaknesses in the two works are related. MASH sometimes explains its decency too insistently, alongside jokes that have gone stale. In Tootsie*, Michael gets too much authority to tell us how women are treated. Gelbart and Schisgal scrutinise his vanity while leaving some comfortable assumptions about men and women alone. Lange and Garr make their characters interesting enough that we want the screenplay to let them complicate his education more often.
Later television films included Barbarians at the Gate (1993), which took corporate greed as its subject. The movement between stage, film and television suits a writer whose dialogue works through people wanting things, defending themselves and getting in one another's way. Start with Tootsie for an evening; give MASH* longer, and allow for the occasional lecture.
Biography
Larry Gelbart was an American comedy writer, playwright and screenwriter. Born in Chicago on 25 February 1928, he began his career writing for radio comedians while still in his teens and later contributed to television variety shows including Your Show of Shows.
He developed the long-running television series MAS*H, which aired from 1972, and co-wrote the book for the Broadway musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962). Gelbart received an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay of the 1982 film Tootsie, on which he also received story credit. Other screen credits include Oh, God! (1977) and Neighbors (1981).
Gelbart died in Beverly Hills on 11 September 2009.
