A Classic Honeymooners Producer/Writer Passes

Leonard B. Stern was the writer and producer who helped bring The Honeymooners, Get Smart, McMillan And Wife, and Mad Libs into this world has died of heart failure. He was 87.

One of Stern's first episodes was the classic episode "Pal O' Mine." Stern penned several features before his long stint in television, including a couple of Ma And Pa Kettle films, Abbott And Costello Join The Foreign Legion, and the 1952 Danny Thomas version of The Jazz Singer. He transitioned to TV with gigs on The Phil Silvers Show and The Steve Allen Show before hooking up with Gleason. On the comedian’s eponymous The Jackie Gleason Show (in both its ’50s and ’60s runs), as well as its standalone series, Stern wrote many episodes of The Honeymooners, helping to develop its characters and early sketches into one of the most seminal sitcoms in TV history.

He would go on to create and direct episodes of his own shows: I’m Dickens. He’s Fenster. Run Buddy Run. He And She. And he produced and wrote many episodes of Get Smart. In 1971, Stern had his greatest solo success with McMillan And Wife.

The son of a New York City auctioneer, Mr. Stern began submitting jokes to Mr. Berle while studying journalism at New York University. After writing for Dinah Shore, he came to the attention of Abbott and Costello, who hired him to write their 1950 film "Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion." From there Mr. Stern moved to the relatively new medium of television, where his prolific writing found a market for decades.

"If we knew the shows were going to become classics we would have written them better," he told the Los Angeles Times in 2003.

My friend, your work WAS perfect. R.I.P.