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Bob Tischler, a member of the Saturday Night Live writing and production team credited with helping revive the show in the 1980s, has died at 78.
His son Zeke told The New York Times that Tischler died due to pancreatic cancer at his home in Bodega Bay, California, on 13 July.
Tischler was born on 12 June 1946 in Englewood, New Jersey, and attended the Ithaca and Franconia colleges. He worked in radio and television as a sound engineer and went on to produce the National Lampoon Radio Hour and several of the comedy magazine’s albums such as Radio Dinner in 1972, Gold Turkey in 1975, and That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick in 1977.
He then worked on his friend and SNL cast member John Belushi’s first Blues Brothers album called Briefcase Full of Blues, which went on to top the Billboard album chart.
Tischler produced four more albums for the Blues Brothers, a musical comedy duo of Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. He also produced the soundtrack for their eponymous film in 1980, which hit number 13 on the Billboard chart.
From November 1980 to April 1981, SNL went through what critics consider to be its lowest ebb, after creator Lorne Michaels passed producer duties to Jean Doumanian for Season 6. When Dick Ebersol was brought in to replace Doumanian, he hired Tischler as a supervisory producer at the urging of then SNL head writer Michael O’Donoghue.
Tischler was promoted to head writer in 1981 when O’Donoghue was fired after he wrote a sketch comparing late NBC president Fred Silverman to Adolf Hitler. Tischler stayed head writer until he left the show in 1985.
Tischler was “exactly the leader the writers’ room needed,” Ebersol recalled in his 2022 autobiography From Saturday Night to Sunday Night: My Forty Years of Laughter, Tears, and Touchdowns in TV, describing him as “steady, calm and respected”.
Tischler is credited with revitalising SNL, writing for cast members who would go on to become stars such as Eddie Murphy, whom Tischler heavily backed, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Joe Piscipo, and Jim Belushi.
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“We had this thing for Eddie, because Eddie would take what we wrote and make it better every single time,” Tischler said in Live From New York.
The 1984 season also saw the return of incredibly popular performers like Christopher Guest, Martin Short, and Billy Crystal.
After leaving SNL, Tischler wrote for shows such as Empty Nest, Something So Right, and Boy Meets World.
He is survived by his wife Judith, son Zeke, and brother Jim.
