http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/arts/television/tom-davis-saturday-night-live-comedy-writer-dies-at-59.html?_r=1&smid=tw-share
July 19, 2012
Tom Davis Dies at 59; 'S.N.L.' Writer and Comedy Partner to a Future Senator
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
In 2004, contestants on "Jeopardy!" were stumped by the clue "He was the
comedy partner of Al Franken."
Tom Davis, that comedy partner, sighed as he watched. He was so inured to
being second fiddle to Mr. Franken, now a Democratic senator from Minnesota,
that he called himself Sonny to Mr. Franken's Cher.
But the fact is that Mr. Davis helped shape Mr. Franken's comedy, and vice
versa, from the time they entertained students with rebellious, razor-edged
humor at high school assemblies in Minnesota.
In 1975, Mr. Davis, brilliant at improvisational comedy, and Mr. Franken, a
whiz at plotting funny sequences, became two of the first writers on a new
show called "Saturday Night Live," which has lasted 37 years. (The two
should actually be called one of the show's first writers: they accepted a
single salary of $350 a week. Each, singly, was called "the guys.")
Mr. Davis never lost the quirky, original voice that helped shape the show,
and in his last months he referred to death as "deanimation." He deanimated
on Thursday at his home in Hudson, N.Y., at age 59. The cause was throat and
neck cancer, his wife, Mimi Raleigh, said.
With Mr. Franken and others, Mr. Davis helped create the clan of
extraterrestrials known as the Coneheads, who attributed their peculiarities
to having come from France. He and Dan Aykroyd collaborated on Mr. Aykroyd's
impersonation of Julia Child, in which the television chef cuts herself and
bleeds to death after grabbing a phone to dial 911, only to find it's a
prop. Her last words: "Bon app�tit!"
In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Aykroyd spoke of Mr. Davis's "massive
contribution" to the show, characterizing him as "very disciplined" and able
to herd less focused writers toward something concrete. "There was no
frivolous waste of time," he said.
Mr. Davis was present at the creation of Irwin Mainway (played by Mr.
Aykroyd), head of a company that made "Bag o' Glass" and other dangerous
toys. He midwifed Theodoric of York, a medieval barber-surgeon played by the
guest host Steve Martin, who believed bloodletting cured everything. A
famous sketch about a drunken President Richard M. Nixon stumbling around
the White House conversing with past presidents' portraits and spouting
anti-Semitism? Mr. Davis and Mr. Franken wrote it.
They flirted with the margins of taste: a sketch about the Holocaust was
rejected, but others about child abuse and the murder of lesbians made it
onto the air.
In the early years of "Saturday Night Live," Mr. Davis and Mr. Franken also
appeared as a comic duo. One routine was "The Brain Tumor Comedian," in
which Mr. Franken, his head bandaged, tried to tell jokes but kept
forgetting the punch line. Mr. Davis fought tears as he implored the
audience to applaud.
Mr. Davis shared three Emmys for his writing on the show and another for
"The Paul Simon Special" in 1977.
Thomas James Davis was born in Minneapolis on Aug. 13, 1952, and attended
the private Blake School, where he and Mr. Franken bonded over comedians
like Jack Benny and Bob and Ray. Their announcements of school events at the
morning assembly were peppered with sarcasm, and soon they were performing
at a local comedy club.
After graduating, Mr. Franken headed for Harvard, while Mr. Davis chose the
University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., because, he said, he had
heard that it had a foreign study program in India, where he hoped to smoke
opium. (They did, and he did.)
After a year of college, Mr. Davis returned to Minneapolis to work in
improvisational comedy. And after Mr. Franken graduated from Harvard, the
two convened in Los Angeles to do stand-up and caught the attention of Lorne
Michaels, the creator of "Saturday Night Live." He summoned them to New
York, where he negotiated with the writers' union to offer the two a single
apprentice job.
In a recent interview, Senator Franken said he and Mr. Davis had
complemented each other, Mr. Davis bringing his improvisational experience
to the act while Mr. Franken was adept at structuring a routine. Mr. Davis's
humor had a sardonic, even cynical, sting, he said, but retained "sweetness
and a Minnesota outlook."
Mr. Davis lived a defiantly unconventional life. In his 2009 memoir,
"Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss: The Early Days of SNL From
Someone Who Was There," he wrote that he first did LSD while watching "2001:
A Space Odyssey" at a Minneapolis drive-in. At the peak of the Vietnam War,
he decided to join the Marines, he said, then decided against it after
undergoing a revolution in consciousness at a Jimi Hendrix concert.
Mr. Davis worked for "Saturday Night Live" from 1975 to 1980, and again from
1986 to 1994. In addition to writing, he produced shows in his second stint.
He also collaborated with Mr. Aykroyd and Bonnie and Terry Turner to write
"Coneheads" (1993). (The "Conehead" characters, he wrote in his memoir, were
inspired by a trip Mr. Davis and Mr. Aykroyd took to Easter Island, famous
for its towering stone statues.) With Mr. Franken he starred in the film
"One More Saturday Night" (1986).
Mr. Davis retired in the mid-1990s but returned to "SNL" as a writer as
recently as 2003.
He and Mr. Franken were so close that Mr. Franken named his daughter
Thomasin Davis. But the two broke up as a team in 1990 as Mr. Franken tired
of his friend's drug abuse. They reconciled a decade later, and Mr. Davis
obliged his friend by publishing his all-too-candid autobiography only after
Senator Franken was elected. In his book, Mr. Davis wrote, "I love Al as I
do my brother, whom I also don't see very much."
In addition to his wife and his brother, Robert, Mr. Davis is survived by
his mother, Jean Davis.
In his last two years, Mr. Davis helped a friend write a book about Owsley
Stanley, famed for handling sound for the Grateful Dead and supplying the
group with LSD. He searched out objects like old barn doors and stones with
which to make large sculptures. And he worked with Mr. Aykroyd on a script
for a possible "Ghostbusters III" film.
As in his comedy, Mr. Davis said, "I'm improvising."