Gay Writer/Comedian Bob Smith Enters 'Treehab'

The comedian is best known for being the first openly gay male comedian to star in his own 30-minute special on HBO.

Bob Smith, the pioneering gay comedian and award-winning writer, died Saturday in his New York City home from complications from ALS, his rep told The Hollywood Reporter. He was 59.

The comedian is best known for being the first openly gay male comedian to star in his own 30-minute special on HBO, which he did in 1994, and to perform on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. 

After Smith's groundbreaking 1994 appearance on HBO's HBO Comedy Half-Hour, he performed sets on ABC's Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher in 1998, MTV's Wisecrack in 2005 and Regent Entertainment's Hot Gay Comics.

Smith was also a prolific and decorated writer, penning the autobiographical essay collection Openly Bob (1997), which won the LAMBDA Book Award for humor. In 1999 Smith was nominated for another LAMBDA for his second collection of essays, 1999's Way to Go, Smith. In 2016, Smith published his last collection of essays, Treehab: Tales from my Natural Wild Life, which he wrote in the midst of battling ALS and using his one functional hand on an iPad. Smith also wrote the novels Selfish & Perverse (2007), a finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and Remembrance of Things I Forgot (2011), nominated for a LAMBDA for Best Gay Fiction and shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize. 

As a television writer, Smith wrote for The MTV Video Music Awards, Dennis Miller, Roseanne and MADtv. His sketches for MADtv include "Zapruder Home Movies," a sketch about the 8mm home movie that is "the only known footage of the Kennedy assassination," and "Antiques Roadshow," which spoofed the long-running PBS show by showing the host digging up dark family secrets through antique items such as a flask.

Smith also performed at Montreal's Just for Laughs Festival several times and headlined gay pride parades in the U.S. and in Canada. 

Born in Buffalo, New York, Smith participated in the Greenwich Village comedy scene in New York City in the early '80s but first became well-known as a member of the "Funny Gay Males" trio of comics, also including Danny McWilliams and Jaffe Cohen, which toured internationally and at the the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation in 1993. "Funny Gay Males" became the first openly gay comedians to appear on national television when they appeared on The Joan Rivers Show. 

Smith is survived by his mother Sue, his brothers James and Gregory, his partner Michael Zam — the co-creator of FX's Feud: Bette and Joan — and his children Madeline and Xander.

Originally Posted on Hollywood Reporter

2016

Gay Writer/Comedian Bob Smith Enters 'Treehab'

Some good news about writer/comedian Bob Smith -- whose brand of humor I fell in love with at the 2007 NLGJA conference -- shared via his writer/comedian pal Eddie Sarfaty:

So proud of my pal Bob Smith. His new book, entitled "Treehab," comes out in a few weeks. For 9 years, he's handled having ALS with dignity and humor, and he's refused to give in to the horrible illness, Bob wrote the entire book, typing with one finger on an iPad!!! He's been in the hospital for months but he's almost ready to be discharged, which means he'll definitely be out in time for the book's launch!

Description:

In this bitingly funny and often surprising memoir, award-winning author and groundbreaking comedian Bob Smith offers a meditation on the vitality of the natural world—and an intimate portrait of his own darkly humorous and profoundly authentic response to a life-changing illness. In "Treehab"—named after a retreat cabin in rural Ontario—Smith muses how he has “always sought the path less traveled.” He rebuffs his diagnosis of ALS as only an unflappable stand-up comic could (“Lou Gehrig’s Disease? But I don’t even like baseball!”) and explores his complex, fulfilling experience of fatherhood, both before and after the onset of the disease. Stories of his writing and performing life—punctuated by hilariously cutting jokes that comedians tell only to each other—are interspersed with tales of Smith’s enduring relationship with nature: boyhood sojourns in the woods of upstate New York and adult explorations of the remote Alaskan wilderness; snakes and turtles, rocks and minerals; open sky and forest canopy; God and friendship—all recurring touchstones that inspire him to fight for his survival and for the future of his two children. Aiming his potent, unflinching wit at global warming, equal rights, sex, dogs, Thoreau, and more, Smith demonstrates here the inimitable insight that has made him a beloved voice of a generation. He reminds us that life is perplexing, beautiful, strange, and entirely worth celebrating.