Chris Isaak and Men at Work’s Colin Hay have paid tribute to late comic great Garry Shandling, who has died at 66.
The Chicago-born funnyman, whose career has spanned decades in the entertainment industry, is known for his turns with The Larry Sanders Show and It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. He died Thursday in Los Angeles after a “medical emergency.”
Isaak, like many others, was devastated at the news. “I am so sad to be writing this. I can’t believe Gary is gone,” he writes in a message supplied from his reps to Billboard. “I was a huge fan and when I got the chance to work with him I was thrilled. The first time I saw him work, I was a fan. I hadn’t laughed so hard since Jackie Gleason did the Honeymooners. I got to appear on both the Gary Shandling show and the Larry Sanders show. Both shows were fun to do and he was hilarious, but the thing that always stuck in my memory was just eating lunch with Gary in his office.”
The rocker says the lunch invitation turned out to “the least Hollywood moment you could imagine.” The comedian, he recalls, “opened up a brown bag lunch, we sat down and split a couple sandwiches and fruit and talked. I always liked him as a performer, but one on one I thought he was just a great guy, really low key, down to earth and not a bit of ego. I don’t think we mentioned one thing related to show business, we talked about my Chevy, we talked about fishing, but we never talked about work. Some entertainers aren’t as nice as they seem on screen.” Gary, he says, “was even nicer.”
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Hay describes Shandling’s death as a “sad, grey day,” noting the passing TV star “was a comic genius, that is clear and true.” He remembers, “When he called me and asked if I’d be on his show, I was very excited. The Larry Sanders Show was, and still is my favorite American TV show. I was happy to be part of just one episode. I feel an emptiness from the news of his passing. Someone important has gone.”
Hay shares a memory of Shandling shouting from the top of the Scotland-born musos musician’s driveway: “’Are you sick, someone said you had the flu, I’ll talk to you from up here’. Occasionally he would call and carry on the conversation we had, from a couple of years before. I’ll miss that, and a lot more.”