I met screenwriter-producer Larry Gelbart only once – enough to make me wish for much more - but he gave me one of the most memorable and enjoyable evenings of my life. The time was late June 2001. I was coming off of a horrendously difficult period following an eight-month executive-level tenure in Hollywood – a period marked by a premature job loss, economic and emotional strain, the persistent inability to find work and the looming threat of eviction. But on one of my last nights before moving out of Southern California, I impetuously bought a ticket for a master-class screenwriting workshop hosted by Gelbart at an adult education facility in Santa Monica. The evening felt like a breath of fresh air and compensated for many of the difficult weeks that preceded it.

Gelbart did not, by any stretch of the imagination, follow the advertised plan by discussing how to author a screenplay or how to sell a screenplay. Instead, he turned the evening into a kind of low rent, monologued version of Inside the Actors’ Studio, where he gave a deliciously witty overview of his life and adventures in the screenwriting and producing trades, followed by a session where he fielded questions from the audience.

To describe that evening as entertaining could never begin to do it justice. Very few individuals in this life have the precious ability to be so outrageously funny on the spot, in an unrehearsed way, that they can have an audience instantly doubled over in pained laughter, time and again. But that’s exactly what Gelbart did. I wish to God I could remember some of his ad-libbed lines – the majority of which evade me now – but what I do remember was a potentially difficult event that transpired, where a physically disabled and mentally impaired individual in the front row began heckling Gelbart, throwing out lines at right angles to whatever he said – and very, very loudly and disruptively.

This was a challenging situation – it became obvious, from the man’s behavior, that he had little control over what he was doing or saying. An insensitive speaker, in Gelbart’s shoes, would have either grown irritated or, if they had turned his comments into jokes, would have used the jokes to tear this person down. Instead, Gelbart did something truly miraculous and special that simultaneously demonstrated his lightning flash wit and the extent of his compassion: he took nearly every line that came out of this man’s mouth, and turned it into a riotous joke, but never once at the individual’s expense, or in any way that denigrated the speaker – rather, in a way that completed his remarks. The line that I remember the most was a riff on The Sixth Sense: Gelbart commented on how much he admired the final surprise in the script; the individual in the audience yelled out his feeling that the film was too boring, and Gelbart shot back with, “Oh, you would probably want something more exciting – a scene where the character says, ‘I see live people.’” The audience burst into hysterics.

And there was more – much more. Long, colorful monologues on working with Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. Brief reflections on Gelbart’s horrible plight working with John Avildsen (who infuriated him) on the disastrous Neighbors. Fantastic behind the scenes stories from M*A*S*H and Tootsie. Musings on then-current entertainment, such as Gelbart’s feelings about the first two seasons of The Sopranos. His feelings about theater - that it represented one of the most liberating forms, because literally anything is possible on stage. At another point, an audience member asked him why he hadn’t decided to author books in lieu of screenplays and stage plays. “Too many good books already written,” he responded earnestly.

At the end of the night, I approached him and chatted with him for a minute; he gave me a long, firm handshake, smiled, and – when I told him that I was an aspiring screenwriter - responded with the most ingenuous encouragement. Then he complimented me on the intelligence of my questions over the course of the evening… before we said goodbye.

The encounter, though all too brief, convinced me unshakably that Gelbart was one of the warmest and most special people – and lest someone dismiss that given the brevity of the evening, let me add that a very dear friend of mine, a screenwriter who shared a mutual acquaintance with Larry, affirmed all of those sentiments when I described the evening to him in detail several months later – “I’m prepared to believe anything wonderful about Gelbart that I hear,” he said.

The world lost a treasure today when Gelbart died. For his many inimitable contributions to television, film and theater, his brilliant comic mind, and the joy he brought to those around him, he will be missed.