Barry Blaustein, whose work on “Saturday Night Live” in the early 1980s and collaborations with Eddie Murphy across film and television made him one of Hollywood’s most influential comedy writers, has died. He was 71.
Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, where Blaustein had been a screenwriting professor since 2012, confirmed his death. He had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2017 and learned last month that he had stage 4 pancreatic cancer, according to reports.
A Partnership That Reshaped Late Night
Born Barry Wayne Blaustein on September 10, 1954, he was raised on Long Island, New York, and attended W.T. Clarke High School before graduating from New York University with a Bachelor of Arts degree. An internship at NBC News in New York served as his entry point into the entertainment industry.
Blaustein and writing partner David Sheffield joined “Saturday Night Live” in 1980 for its sixth season, the same year Eddie Murphy arrived as a cast member. What followed was one of the most productive collaborations in sketch comedy history, with Blaustein and Sheffield writing exclusively for Murphy and creating characters including Gumby, Buckwheat, Mr. Robinson, Velvet Jones and James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub.
The Mr. Robinson sketches, a parody of children’s television host Fred Rogers, eventually prompted a response from Rogers himself.
“Mr. Rogers actually came up to the offices one day,” Blaustein told NPR’s Terry Gross in a 2000 interview. “He basically said, ‘You’ve had your fun, now stop doing the sketches.’ We were tired of doing them anyway.”
From Studio 8H to the Big Screen
The Murphy partnership extended beyond television and produced some of the actor’s most commercially successful films. Blaustein and Sheffield wrote “Coming to America” in 1988, which became a signature Murphy vehicle, then returned to the franchise more than three decades later for “Coming 2 America” in 2021.
Between those bookends came “Boomerang” in 1992, “The Nutty Professor” in 1996 and “Nutty Professor II: The Klumps” in 2000, establishing Blaustein as a central figure in studio comedy for nearly two decades. He also directed “The Ringer,” a 2005 comedy with Johnny Knoxville and Katherine Heigl, and “Peep World” in 2010, which he shot in 21 days for about $1 million.
The Wrestling Film That Became His Favorite
Despite writing a catalog of hit comedies, Blaustein frequently identified “Beyond the Mat,” his 1999 documentary about professional wrestling, as the favorite thing he had ever done. The film tracked wrestlers Mick Foley, Terry Funk and Jake “The Snake” Roberts through the brutal physical demands and emotional costs of their profession, earning recognition as one of the genre’s defining works.
He was able to make the documentary, he once explained, because he had accrued such goodwill with Imagine Entertainment partners Ron Howard, Brian Grazer and Michael Rosenberg, and was so passionate about the subject matter.
A Second Act in the Classroom
Beginning in 2012, Blaustein taught screenwriting at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, launching a teaching career he approached with the same energy that had fueled his years at “SNL.” Colleagues and students described him as a mentor who took the craft seriously while treating students as partners.
“I find teaching students really inspiring, and I hope to make them better writers, because I know they make me a better writer,” Blaustein said.
Stephen Galloway, the dean of Dodge College, remembered him as a writer who understood comedy’s full emotional register.
“Barry understood what made comedy function better than anyone I know. He knew that it includes darkness as well as light. And yet it was the light that filled his last years. Even as he declined with Parkinson’s, he showed a positivity that always stunned me. He’ll be remembered as a wonderful writer, but an even more wonderful human being,” Galloway said in a statement.
Following his Parkinson’s diagnosis, Blaustein became an advocate for the Parkinson’s Foundation and spoke openly about living with the disease. Those who knew him during his final years described a man who maintained both his humor and his generosity despite declining health.
Tributes from former students, comedians and longtime collaborators have poured in since the announcement of his death, a measure of a career spent making other people funnier — first a rising star at 30 Rock, then a generation of screenwriters who never got to share an office with him but absorbed his lessons all the same.