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Alan Zweibel Live on Game Changers With Vicki Abelson

Live from the Zoom Room, it’s Alan Zweibel! It was so great to jump back in with the fabulous, funny, and fun Emmy Winner.

Alan took us back to his earliest days in the biz, how he made his way in, the first joke he sold, still funny! The Catskill Mountains, Morty Gunty, Freddie Roman, Rodney Dangerfield, maybe his first collaborator… with whom Alan comes full circle, presently.  Doing standup with Billy Crystal, leading to years of collaboration, being discovered by Lorne Michaels… SNL, Alan’s game changer. Gilda, a partnership made in heaven -  how Roseannne Roseannadanna and Emily Latella came to be, Belushi, Ackroyd, the current film, Saturday Night, where it felt right, where liberties were taken, how it felt to have someone play him. 

Co-creating It’s The Garry Shandling Show with Gary, how they worked together. Writing Lunatics with Dave Barry, long distance, For This We left Egypt with Dave and Adam Mansbach, and a great story about how that friendship and collaboration began.  Broadway with Billy and with Martin Short, and the cute, sweet note after their encounter at the SNL 50th reunion. Alan’s current collab with Barry Levinson, how that started and where it is today, that full circle Rodney story coming to fruition currently… and through it all, Robin. Alan’s love and wife since the early SNL days… and his most fruitful collaborator.  

Alan’s devotion to his family is what stories are made of, as is his work ethic, resiliency, tenacity, and talent. His storytelling is what good conversations are made of, served up with laughs, lots of them. What an inspiration! 

Loved every minute of this. And I sure did need the eggs. 

Alan Zweibel Live on Game Changers With Vicki Abelson

Wednesday, 5/14/23, 5 pm PT, 8 pm ET

Streamed Live 

Links in the comments

Replay on YouTube 

Today LIVE! It’s been a while since I’ve sat down with a beloved guest, and longer still since I sat down with this beloved friend.  I so look forward to another opp with the fabulous, funny, and fun Emmy Winner, Alan Zweibel. 

An original Saturday Night Live writer, Alan has won five Emmy Awards for his work, including It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (which he co-created and produced), The Late Show with David Letterman, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

A frequent guest on late-night talk shows, Alan’s theatrical contributions include his collaboration with Billy Crystal on the Tony Award-winning play 700 Sundays, Martin Short’s Broadway hit Fame Becomes Me, and six off-Broadway plays including Bunny Bunny – Gilda Radner: A Sort of Romantic Comedy, which he adapted from his best-selling book. 

All told, Alan has written eleven books including his cultural memoir titled Laugh Lines – My Life Helping Funny People Be Funnier, published by Abrams Books; the 2006 Thurber Prize winning novel The Other Shulman; the popular children’s book Our Tree Named Steve; and a parody of the Haggadah — For This We Left Egypt? which he wrote with Dave Barry and Adam Mansbach. He has also penned a best-selling e-book, From My Bottom Drawer. 

The co-writer of screenplays for the films Dragnet,  The Story of Us, and North, Alan, received an honorary PhD from the State University of New York. Because of the diversity of his body of work, the Writers Guild of America, East honored him with their Lifetime Achievement Award.

In addition to talk shows, Alan has appeared in episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Law & Order and can be seen in the documentary The Last Laugh about humor and the Holocaust; Judd Apatow’s Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling (HBO), Gilbert about the life of Gilbert Gottfried, Remembering Gene Wilder (Netflix), and the Emmy nominated CNN documentary he executive produced titled Love, Gilda.  He is also an ensemble performer at New York’s Triad Theater in Celebrity Autobiography — and is a highly sought-after keynote speaker. 

Among his numerous awards, Alan also received an honorary doctorate in 2009 from the State University of New York.  And the following year, the Writers Guild of America East honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award for the diversity of his body of work.

A devoted family man, the production he's most proud of is the one he co-created with his wife Robin, their three children, and five grandchildren.

Alan’s always a gas, in the good way, and I’m so ready to laugh. No one better to look to! 

Alan Zweibel on Game Changers With Vicki Abelson

Wednesday, 5/14/23, 5 pm PT, 8 pm ET

Streaming Live on my Facebook

facebook.com/vickiabelson

What to do when in the midst of unfathomable national tragedy, and your guest is 5 x Emmy Winner, Alan Zweibel, one of the funniest humans on the planet? Face the elephant in the room head-on.  We discussed how comics and monologists deliver on a day like this, and what is verboten?  From there we moved into personal, current COVID crisis, where listener Julie Warner, Billy Crystal’s co-star in the film, Mr. Saturday Night, informed us we were depressing (she was playing… Alan is never is anything less than hysterical), and then we segued into his latest co-creation with Billy, Here Today, about an aging comedy writer whose memory is fading due to dementia. Har har har dee har har.  Well, the story that inspired the film is crazy funny, as is Alan’s telling of it. It was all comedy gold from there, covering Alan’s many of Alan’s most memorable collaborations, more on Billy from the early 70s standup days to their Tony-winning Broadway smash, 700 Sundays. The first sold joke to Morty Gunty (still a winner today), and other Borscht Belt favorites, to Larry David bombing at The Improv, Lorne Michaels recognizing his gift and hiring him in the very first wave of Saturday Night Live, where Alan’s collaboration and friendship with Gilda Radner yielded iconic characters and moments, week after week, year after year, the trajectory of their relationship thru till her untimely end, where he wrote for her, yet again… his collab with Garry Shandling and their multiple Ace Award-Winning co-creation, It’s The Garry Shandling Show, and the evolution of them… to writing Lunatics with Dave Barry and then For This We Left Egypt with Dave and Ada Mansbach, the definitive Haggadah in my house, to Alan’s Bunny Bunny, his love letter to Gilda from page to stage, and his latest, Laugh Lines, My life Helping Funny People Be Funnier, which spans 50 years of fab stories, one after another… my favorite tonight, and it’s such a Sophie’s Choice with the wealth presented, is Alan’s college poetry “recital.” I was crying. In the good way. 

This time with Alan was chicken soup with noodles, matzah balls, and latkes, for the pandemic, crazy-world weary soul. Warm, flavorful, sizzling, and delicious… with a side of hysterically funny. Perfection! 

Alan Zweibel on Game Changers With Vicki Abelson

Wednesday, 5/124/22, 5 pm PT, 8 pm ET

Streamed Live on my Facebook

Replay here: