Charles Isaacs

Veteran comedy writer

Charles Isaacs, writer and producer: born Winnipeg, Manitoba 1914; married 1941 Doris Singleton; died Santa Monica, California 13 December 2002.

Although possessed of rare charm, the veteran comedy writer Charles Isaacs could also be a firebrand; he constantly sent irate letters to The New York Times and other publications. When he wasn't being "Disgusted of Santa Monica", he found time to sue Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis after they refused to pay him for a routine he knew they had used, to upbraid Jimmy Durante for not mentioning him in interviews, and to battle with Milton Berle, Red Skelton and countless other comedians when they inserted old jokes in his material.

Before a television career spent writing for such stars as Johnny Carson, Victor Borge, Bobby Darin, Shirley Temple, Dinah Shore and Eddie Cantor, Isaacs had a radio career, during which he created comedy for Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Groucho Marx, Edgar Bergen, W.C. Fields, Rudy Vallee, John Barrymore, Oscar Levant and Al Jolson.

Born in Winnipeg, Isaacs grew up in Minneapolis. While studying journalism at the University of Minnesota, he wrote one-liners for local newspaper columnists, discovering he had a talent for comedy writing when comics began stealing his lines and using them on the air.

After attempting unsuccessfully to break into radio in New York, he tried Hollywood. Although he wasn't a cartoonist, he worked briefly on Warner Bros' Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. "The guys had a big storyboard, and I would make suggestions for a gag," he told Jordan R. Young in the book The Laugh Crafters (1999). "I would describe the visual, and what the gag would be – and, if they liked it, they'd draw it."

Isaacs's first radio writing was for The Jack Haley Show (1937), but the future Tin Man of The Wizard of Oz gave him the axe after two weeks. Of longer duration was his employment on The Chase and Sanborn Hour, which starred the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his sharp-tongued dummy Charlie McCarthy. The show's most popular guest was W.C. Fields, who liked one of Isaacs's gags enough to use it in his film You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1939), in which Bergen also appeared. When the bibulous circus proprietor Larson E. Whipsnade (Fields) sighed, "Ah, as I look back on my life, I get a lump in my throat", Charlie McCarthy snapped, "It's probably a cork."

That one line didn't herald the start of a flourishing screenwriting career for Isaacs; by the time the film came out, he had been dropped by Bergen and was living on the front porch of a Los Angeles boarding house. More radio writing came along in the shape of The Rudy Vallee Show, which memorably teamed the nasal crooner with the great actor John Barrymore, and Three-Ring Time, the copycat series which, less memorably, teamed Milton Berle with Charles Laughton.

After working with the overbearing Berle, Isaacs was happy to enlist in the US Coast Guard for Second World War service. On his return, he wrote radio material for Bing Crosby's The Kraft Music Hall co-starring Al Jolson and Oscar Levant, The Martin and Lewis Show and Fanny Brice's Baby Snooks Show until Jimmy Durante and The All Star Revue (1950) brought him into television.

In his 85th year, Isaacs told Jordan R. Young, "I sometimes came on pretty strong. Whether it was Jolson or Berle or Durante, any of 'em . . . Yet, as mad as I got, I had tremendous respect for how these people came to where they were."

Dick Vosburgh