R.I.P. Buck Henry

Buck Henry has long been one of those creators who my parents held up as great. Long before I really knew who he was, there was a way that they reacted when they saw him on TV or just saw his name listed in the credits that made it clear what they thought of him. For most of my life though Henry has always been the co-creator of one of the great sitcoms – Get Smart. Starring Don Adams, Barbara Feldon, Edward Platt, the series famously came about when Henry and Mel Brooks were pitched “James Bond meets Inspector Clouseau”.

The show won multiple Emmy Awards and Henry and producer Leonard Stern won for writing in 1967 and it’s easy to see why. The show had a great cast, bizarre characters worthy of the genre – Bernie Kopell as Siegfried comes to mind, but King Moody as Shtarker, Dick Gautier as Hymie, and many others. 

Also, Agent 99. Barbara Feldon is an icon for a reason. 

There were a lot of great gadgets and sight gags – Max’s shoe phone, or most famously, the Cone of Silence – but Get Smart was also simply one of the most quotable shows there was:

“Sorry about that, Chief”

“Would you believe…?”

“Missed it by that much…”

Henry’s career hadn’t started there, though. By this point he’d been working in comedy for years. He had worked on the cult show That Was The Week That Was, written for Steve Allen, and co-wrote the 1964 film The Troublemaker.

That film grew out of The Premise, an improv comedy group started by Theodore Flicker (a writer and director best known for creating the show Barney Miller). Flicker had come out of Chicago, where he and Elaine May had worked together, and in New York gathered a group of people together including Henry, George Segal, James Frawley, and Gene Hackman).

After the success of Get Smart, Henry went onto create two more TV shows – Captain Nice and Quark – a superhero show and a science fiction show, neither of which lasted very long. 

On film though there was The Graduate.

Henry was responsible for the script and went on to write or adapt or co-wrote a long list of films in the years that followed.

Henry was one of the writers of Peter Bogdanovich’s screwball hit What’s Up, Doc?, he adapted The Owl and the Pussycat and Candy. 

They pale in comparison to Catch-22, however. Henry found a way to simplify the novel’s plot, to find a way for the story and the character of Yossarian to be more central without losing the frenetic energy, and still capture some of the disjointed edginess of the original novel. It certainly wasn’t to everyone’s taste – not that the novel was either – but Henry took a near impossible task and made the film possible.

Having grown up watching Get Smart, it was hard not to then watch Catch-22 (in many respects a better film than the novel it was based on) and see the connections between the two. The ways in which bureaucracy shapes and defines the organization and its goals. The way that absurdity creeps it at first and then becomes central to normal functioning. 

Or perhaps its best to see Catch-22 as the prequel to Get Smart. That to understand the absurdity and the nonsense that was at the heart of so much of the Cold War one must see it as connected to World War II and so much of what happened then. To see the present not as a disjointed break from the past but as a continuation. 

Of course director Mike Nichols and Henry followed that up with The Day of the Dolphin. After The Graduate and Catch-22, George C Scott training dolphins, which are then used to assassinate a President, isn’t really what anyone expected. I’m still not sure it’s a film anyone expected. Or wanted to expect, really. Still, everyone makes flops.

Henry co-directed Heaven Can Wait with star Warren Beatty in 1978, which was a success, and Henry followed it up with the comedy First Family in 1980, which I have to admit I’ve never been able to find a good copy of to see. It’s a political satire starring Bob Newhart, Gilda Radner and an all star cast, so I’m more than. Little curious.

At this time Henry was also on Saturday Night Live, where he hosted ten times in the first five years and appeared in the Mardi Gras special. This is where Henry’s dry, unflappable persona took center stage, as he went onto become better known as a character actors than as a writer in the second half of his career. 

Not that he ever stopped writing. There were TV episodes and films that followed along with dozens of roles. There was To Die For, the 1995 Gus Van Sant film starring Nicole Kidman, that stands as one of the best scripts of Henry’s career. 

In the end though I’m struck thinking about how subversive Henry’s comedy was, and yet, how funny he was. A lot of deeply subversive writers are just not laugh out loud funny, but Henry could make us laugh and find some way to make us think all at the same time. And not just think, but subvert our expectations, our understandings, our ideas. He made it funny that our assumptions were built on sand, and found ways to startle us and force us to rethink what we believed. Buck Henry could make us laugh, but he was never satisfied with or interested in just making us laugh. Laughter was important to him. Far too important to leave to simple joke-telling. For Buck Henry, laughter was the most important job there was. And we are all better off because of his work.

Rest in peace, sir.