Saturday Night Dead

Tom Davis, Al Franken’s shadow, has died of throat and neck cancer at the age of 59. Improv ace Davis and comedic structuralist Franken were high school friends who joined the newly formed Saturday Night Live as two of the first writers hired in 1975, the two sharing a weekly salary of $350 a week. Davis proved to be a bargain – helping to create the Coneheads, working with Dan Aykroyd on his Julia Child sketch where she cuts herself and bleeds to death, helping to create Irwin Mainway and the Bag o’Glass, developing Steve Martin’s bloodletting medieval barber-surgeon, writing the skit about Nixon’s drunken anti-Semitic rant to past president’s paintings, giving Bill Murray the structure for Nick the Lounge Singer, and writing The Continental for Christopher Walken. Davis and Franken headlined the writing team that won 4 Emmys for the show and related specials. The two were close – Al Franken’s daughter is named Thomasin Davis Franken – but by 1990, Davis’ drug abuse had gone from charming quirk (he went to the University of the Pacific because its foreign affairs program would let him go to India where he could smoke opium) to bottomless pit. Davis pulled no punches about his addictions in his autobiography Thirty-nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss, which he withheld until after Franken’s election to the Senate.