8 Things You Didn’t Know About Deceased Comedian Gary Shandling!
2 min readJul 7, 2016
- Shandling maintained a decades long letter writing correspondence with Jerry Seinfeld. It began as a pen pal class project when both comedians were in third grade. Upon seeing Seinfeld perform a set in New York, Shandling wrote, “I liked it, but you were still at your creative peak in sixth grade”. Seinfeld begrudgingly agreed with this assessment.
- Shandling briefly owned a late model Pontiac Trans Am that he named “Stacy” after a woman that once escorted Jeffrey Tambor to the 1988 Emmy’s. Shandling fell in love with Stacy that evening, though his only outward expression of this love as to carefully wash and wax the Trans Am late into the California evenings every day of the two months he owned the car.
- The most beautiful thing Shandling ever saw in his life was his tears beading up on the well waxed, black surface of “Stacy”.
- When Stacy (the real one, not the car) died, she’d suffered from years of alcohol and drug addiction, and in the process had squandered all the money she’d earned ghostwriting celebrity memoirs. To alleviate the suffering of Stacy’s two young daughters, Shandling made a sizable anonymous contribution to the pathetically small trust Stacy had set up for her children when times were good.
- Shandling’s favorite book was Geena! In Her Own Words. This was Stacy’s last work, as well as her most ambitious celebrity memoir ever. Geena! told the life story of Geena Davis through a series of time and perspective shifts, including Marquise, Davis’s prized Mastiff, narrating Davis’s famous Oscars speech.
- Shandling single-handily made Geena! the best selling celebrity memoir on Amazon.com from October 2004 until June 2005, despite an average rating of two stars with the most common complaint being that the narrative was “impossible to follow”. In June 2005, Shandling’s efforts were unable to stand up to Red Sox Nation’s massive interest in outfielder Johnny Damon’s book, Caveman Outfielder: Some Poorly Considered Opinions on Matters that Don’t Affect Me (and Also Baseball Stuff).
- Aside from voyeuristic neighbors concerned by the weeping man washing his car at 2 am, Shandling only disclosed his long lasting love for Stacy in his last letter to Jerry Seinfeld. Seeing as both parties were now dead, Seinfeld shared the anecdote on an episode of “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” co-starring Mitch Hedberg. However, shortly before the episode went to air, Crackle realized that the real Hedberg had died years earlier and the man in the episode was an impostor. Thus, the episode never aired and all copies have been destroyed to save all involved embarrassment.
- Although he saved himself some embarrassment, Seinfeld became despondent over the betrayal of his friends trust. He sought solace in the form of a seance, but it was no use. Shandling’s spirit had already gone where all comedians spirits go when they die: Stonehenge.
