Jack Burns, who found fame as the hilariously pompous half of Burns and Schreiber, one of the best-known comedy teams of the 1960s and '70s, then made another mark as a television writer, died on Monday in Toluca Lake, California. He was 86.
Patti Lawhon, the executor of Burns' estate, announced the death. He learned he had pancreatic cancer in 2017.
Burns was a popular comic presence for nearly 40 years, beginning with a brief but successful stint as a partner of George Carlin (and at one point showing up for a brief but less successful run on "The Andy Griffith Show"). After his long and fruitful partnership with Avery Schreiber ended, he went on to produce "The Muppet Show," writing about two dozen episodes.
He also wrote for variety shows like "Hee Haw" and comedy specials starring Flip Wilson and Paul Lynde. And he lent his brash, booming voice to animated series like "Animaniacs" and "Wait Till Your Father Gets Home" as well as to an ad campaign promoting the use of safety belts. He was the voice of a crash-test dummy.
But it was Burns and Schreiber that cemented his fame. The two comics became known for routines that were flecked with social satire, exquisite timing and rapid-fire repartee, exemplified by their signature "yeah/huh?/yeah/huh?" bantering.
Burns' loud know-it-all persona played well off Schreiber's warm, low-key one, particularly when Schreiber, as he so often did, punctured Burns' pomposity. That was never more vividly on display than in their best-known sketch, in which a blithely bigoted passenger (Burns) blathers to a world-weary taxicab driver (Schreiber).
They spent parts of a dozen years together, had their own series on ABC-TV in the summer of 1973, and broke up about 18 months after that.
Burns explained their comic chemistry to the Los Angeles Times after Schreiber died in 2002: "He was Jewish. I was Irish. He was mellow and sweet and optimistic, and I was angry and cynical and pessimistic."
John Francis Burns was born on Nov. 15, 1933, in Boston. His father, Garrette, was a military officer; his mother was Mary (Hogan) Burns. After serving in the Marines in Korea in the early 1950s, he was a newsman at a Boston radio station, WEZE. When Carlin went to work there as an announcer in 1959, they struck up a friendship and soon realized that they had each developed a comedic Irish character.
Burns and Carlin, as the act was known, were booked at top nightclubs around the country. After they split, Burns joined the Compass Players, an improvisational troupe, then moved to its successor, The Second City, where he met Schreiber and developed the taxicab sketch.