Television
May his memory be a blessing.
via Raimondo Borea/Gartenberg Media Enterprises/Getty Images
Gene Shalit didn’t quite make it to a 120, but he came close. The beloved TV personality, NBC’s Today Show critic at large for four decades, known for his big hair, glasses and facial hair and his particular sense of punny of humor, passed away at 100 on June 12.
Shalit was born in New York to Jewish parents, Anna and Isadore, and was raised mostly in New Jersey’s Morristown, where he started writing a humor column for his local Morristown High School paper, The Spotlight, which he helped start. His father ran Shalit’s Drugs in the town.
He went on to have a prolific writing career and radio career before joining the Today Show in 1970, and becoming its most iconic, and biggest-mustached critic. His sharp tongue, delightful way with words, pure exuberance, unique hair-grooming style and eclectic bowties made viewers tune in for Shalit’s reviews of the latest movies on the silver screen.
His opinions may have raised a couple of eyebrows (none as thick as his!) — especially his love for Mel Brooks’ “Spaceballs,” which I believe is vindicated — and he was known to be rather harsh when he didn’t like a film (he famously called Judd Apatow’s “Funny People” — “passable—speaking colonically”), but one could never doubt that he loved the medium he was critiquing, and the people making and starring in movies. Shalit was also known for his very enjoyable and humor-filled celebrity interview — interviews in which he was both interesting and interested, asking serious questions but peppering it all with his signature puns.
He held more than one interview with Barbra Streisand, who rarely let herself be interviewed for TV (in one, she kvelled about her son Jason Gould in “Prince of Tides”), a delightful interview with Kermit the Frog himself (he was a great pal of Jim Henson’s), a 1977 interview with a then unknown Harrison Ford in which he called the actor “one of the only actors named after two presidents” and of course, he was a wonderful interlocutor with Mel Brooks — the two enjoyed some quality Winnebago humor and Brooks shared a Jewish mom joke or two.
So iconic was Shalit that he earned quite a few impressions, though the best, by a mile, was Eugene Levy’s SCTV impression of the star (Shalit, who knew good comedy when he saw it, and even wrote a book all about celebrating American humor, was an obvious fan).
Shalit always had enough humor to poke fun of himself — I’m particularly fond of his appearance on the hit kids’ show “SpongeBob SquarePants” as a punny restaurant critic.
While he worked mostly in an era before hot takes could get you in hot water, he did get in trouble for his opinion about “Brokeback Mountain,” a movie he didn’t like. Specifically, for calling Jake Gyllenhaal’s character in the film a “sexual predator.”
The review drew the ire of GLAAD, and Shalit ended up apologizing for any harm his review may have caused. Among those who rose to Shalit’s defense, however, was his son, who is openly gay and also a nice Jewish doctor (such naches). Dr. Peter Shalit, who has his own Seattle clinic specializing in HIV treatment, gender affirming care and gay men’s care, came out in support of his father.
“My dad has always been completely loving and supportive of me, my life, my partners and my choices. He wrote a piece about me in 1997 for The Advocate (currently posted on their home page) — and agreed to have his picture on the cover of the magazine — because what the piece says is true about how he feels and how he has always acted,” Peter wrote in an open letter to The Advocate back in 2006.
Shalit had six kids with his late wife Nancy (sister of Pulitzer-winning journalist Anthony Lewis), who passed away from cancer in 1978. They raised their children in Leonia, NJ. Nancy is buried, along with Shalit’s parents, at the Jewish Beth Israel Memorial Park in Cedar Knolls, NJ. His daughter Emily passed away in 2012 from ovarian cancer. His daughter Willa Shalit is a successful writer, producer and artist who has served on the board of the American Friends of the Parents Circle, which brings together bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families. Shalit was also a grandfather of five. On social media, Danica Kombol recalled inviting Shalit to his grand-niece’s bat mitzvahs, and while he would famously not board a plane for any simcha, he did send them all letters welcoming them into the “gene pool.”
In a June 12 statement to NBC, Shalit’s family wrote that he “passed away peacefully today after 100 years of an amazing life.”
He certainly made our lives oh-so-much more colorful. May his memory be for a blessing.
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Lior Zaltzman is a senior writer at Kveller.
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