Gene Shalit, the Muppet look-alike who reviewed movies and other cultural arts with a whimsical bent and a shtick for puns as the resident wit on NBC’s Today show for four decades, one of the longest tenures on an American television program, died Friday at 100.
NBC reported the death, citing a family statement. No further details were immediately available.
For millions of Americans tuned in to the Today potpourri of news, interviews, entertainment, and weather, a dose of literate, wacky commentary from Mr. Shalit’s “Critic’s Corner,” often with cackles of appreciation for his own incorrigibility, was as much a part of the morning as a cup of coffee.
With his handlebar mustache, bushy hair, black-rimmed glasses, and extravagant bow ties, he was one of the nation’s most recognizable characters, a composite caricature of Groucho Marx, William Howard Taft, and a Jim Henson puppet. His punchy, wry wit may have borrowed from Woody Allen and Mark Twain, but it played well in Peoria.
“Ishtar ish tarrible!” Mr. Shalit concluded in a review of Elaine May’s 1987 comedy about two lounge singers looking for work in Morocco and stumbling into Cold War machinations.
After seeing The Longest Yard, a 1974 flick in which Burt Reynolds organizes a prison football team, he suggested: “This movie should be penalized half the distance to the goal — twice.”
And joining a chorus of critics panning Hudson Hawk, a 1991 Bruce Willis world-domination vehicle, he warned: “This movie is awful, spelled o-f-f-a-l.”
His most controversial criticism came in a negative review of Brokeback Mountain, the widely acclaimed 2005 Ang Lee film depicting the romantic and sexual relationship between two men in the American West. Shalit called Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, Jack Twist, a “sexual predator” who “tracks Ennis (Heath Ledger) down and coaxes him into sporadic trysts.”
The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, now known as GLAAD, accused Mr. Shalit of promoting anti-gay prejudice and demanded an apology. Mr. Shalit, the father of six children, including a gay son, replied with a letter expressing regret, acknowledging that he had “angered, agitated and hurt many people,” and saying that he had had “no intention of casting aspersions on anyone in the gay community or the gay community itself.”
Besides reviewing movies, books, plays, and other cultural offerings, Mr. Shalit interviewed authors and entertainers, including Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty, Robert De Niro, and Sophia Loren. He did cameos of himself in several movies and television shows, and was a familiar figure on television game and talk shows and charity fundraisers.
On Today, a program sensitive to ratings and notable for personnel changes, Mr. Shalit was the durable mainstay in a cast that over the years included Barbara Walters, Jim Hartz, Tom Brokaw, John Chancellor, Hugh Downs, Joe Garagiola, Deborah Norville, Jane Pauley, Katie Couric, Bryant Gumbel, Al Roker, Willard Scott, Matt Lauer, and Ann Curry.
Mr. Shalit joined Today in 1968 as a book reviewer, became a regular in 1970, and was the culture critic from 1973 until he retired in 2010.
His producer, Guy Ludwig, reflecting on Mr. Shalit’s long career in 2010, recalled seeing Mr. Shalit, late in his career, entering a theater for a screening with a look of glee on his face.
“My God, how could you?” he said. “You’ve seen 2 million movies.”
“Yeah,” Mr. Shalit replied, “but I’ve never seen this one!”
Eugene Theodore Shalit was born in New York City on March 25, 1926, to Latvian immigrants, Isadore and Anna (Michelovich) Shalit. He grew up in Newark and Morristown, N.J., where his father owned a drugstore. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1949.
Arriving in New York City in 1951, he was hired by a press agent to attend stage shows at the Paramount and laugh at the comics for $5 a day. “They weren’t funny,” he recalled in a 2012 interview for this obituary. “I couldn’t laugh. One other person was laughing. He got $5 too.” Mr. Shalit quit after one day.
He next landed in the publicity department of Look magazine, doing promotionals with “two other kids” — Lawrence K. Grossman, who became president of NBC, and Marvin Josephson, who founded the talent agency International Creative Management.
Mr. Shalit was married to Nancy Lewis from 1951 until her death in 1978, and they had six children: Peter, Willa, Emily, Amanda, Nevin, and Andrew. Emily died in 2012. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
In the 1950s and early ’60s, Mr. Shalit wrote columns and culture reviews for Ladies’ Home Journal and Look magazine. An NBC executive spotted his writing and, worried about how audiences might react to his mustache and hair, hired him in 1967 for network radio work. A year later, NBC took a chance, and he began appearing on the Today show.
“Once Gene was on, he’d get letters like, ‘Who is this part-time anarchist that you have on television?’” Ludwig recalled. “But what resonated above his unusual appearance was his incredible wit, his remarkable intelligence.”
From 1970 to 1982, Mr. Shalit produced a daily essay for NBC Radio, “Man About Anything,” which was heard on more stations than any other NBC network feature. He was an occasional panelist on What’s My Line?; hosted programs on the Masterpiece Mystery series; and wrote for TV Guide, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Glamour, McCall’s, the New York Times, and other publications.
Laughing Matters: A Celebration of American Humor, a compendium of works by 200 authors, scriptwriters, and cartoonists selected by Mr. Shalit, was published in 1987. Mr. Shalit loved classical music, played the bassoon, and performed with the Boston Symphony in Boston, at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood near his home in Stockbridge, Mass., and at Lincoln Center in New York. He once conducted the Pittsburgh Symphony in a full concert. He liked to say that in none of these venues was he ever invited back.
In 1974, Jim Henson’s Muppets appeared on the Today show with Bert gussied up in Shalit-style hair and mustache. Side by side, they looked like fraternal twins. In 1983, he appeared in the Great Muppet Look-Alike Contest in Muppet magazine’s first issue, and in 1996 he contributed a recipe for Movie Crumb Cake for the cookbook In the Kitchen With Miss Piggy.
Mr. Shalit wrote many letters to the Times about baseball. In 2003, he suggested help for the New York Mets lineup: Sign Rickey Henderson, then in his last season.
“With his walks, bunts and an occasional extra-base hit, he will get on base far more often than the current troupe,” he wrote. “And when Rickey gets to first, he’ll soon be on second. Sure, he’ll be stranded there, but won’t it be fun to see a Met in scoring position?”
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
