Barry Blaustein, a comedy writer who had a long collaboration with the comedian Eddie Murphy, helping to develop Buckwheat, Gumby, Mister Robinson and other characters on “Saturday Night Live” and working on the screenplays for movies like “Coming to America” and “The Nutty Professor,” died on May 12 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 71.
His wife, Debra Stricklin, said the cause was pancreatic cancer, diagnosed last month. Mr. Blaustein had also been living with Parkinson’s disease since 2016.
“Barry was ferociously funny,” David Sheffield, his longtime writing partner, said in an interview. “He was funny when he got up in the morning, and he stayed that way all day long.”
When Mr. Blaustein and Mr. Sheffield were hired at NBC’s “S.N.L.” in 1980, they formed a bond that would last 46 years. And in Mr. Murphy, they found a 19-year-old muse whom other writers on the show had been ignoring.
“I don’t know why other people didn’t write for him,” Mr. Blaustein said in “Live From New York: An Uncensored History of ‘Saturday Night Live’” (2002), by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. “They’d go, ‘You write for him a lot,’ and we’d say, ‘Yeah, well, he’s the best guy there, why not write for him?’”
Buckwheat, a Black character played by the child actor Billie Thomas in the “Our Gang” films in the 1930s and ’40s, became a recurring character on “S.N.L.” The first sketch introduced him as a grown-up, with electrified, Don King-like hair, hawking an album (“Buh-Wheat Sings”) of tunes he sang in his amusingly garbled voice. One, a riff on the Commodores’ song “Three Times a Lady,” had Mr. Murphy singing, “Unce, tice, fee times a mady.”
Eventually, he tired of playing Buckwheat. “He was shooting ‘Trading Places,’” Mr. Blaustein told a film podcast in 2021, referring to Mr. Murphy’s 1983 hit movie, “and he said: ‘I’ve got an idea. Let’s kill Buckwheat. Let’s have him assassinated.’”
Working with Mr. Sheffield and Bob Tischler, Mr. Blaustein wrote a three-part story arc. In the first segment, Buckwheat was gunned down as he left 30 Rockefeller Plaza, NBC’s headquarters. The second part was a “Nightline”-like report that included coverage of the assassin’s murder, mimicking Jack Ruby’s killing of Lee Harvey Oswald. In the third part, the talk show host David Susskind interviewed Buckwheat’s bodyguard.
By then, Mr. Blaustein, Mr. Sheffield and Pamela Norris had conceived the “Mister Robinson’s Neighborhood” sketches, a parody of the children’s program “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” Mr. Murphy played a streetwise character speaking to children from his apartment in the slums, teaching them new words like “scumbucket.”
At Mr. Murphy’s suggestion, Mr. Blaustein and Mr. Sheffield also re-envisioned Gumby, the shape-shifting green-clay cartoon character, as a cranky show-business figure whose trademark line was “I’m Gumby, damn it.”
Barry Wayne Blaustein was born on Sept. 10, 1954, in Westbury, N.Y., on Long Island, to Ira Blaustein, who owned an importing company, and Helen (Mandelsberg) Blaustein, an interior designer.
After graduating from New York University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1976, he began looking for a job in show business.
He interned at NBC News and worked as a production assistant on “Circus of the Stars” and the People’s Choice Awards before being hired in 1979 to write for “The Mike Douglas Show,” a syndicated talk show. Then he began sending sketch ideas to Jean Doumanian, who replaced Lorne Michaels as the executive producer of “S.N.L.” in 1980. It would be her only season.
Ms. Doumanian “asked him to please send in more examples of his sketches, and Barry was so convinced that he wasn’t going to get the job, he never submitted more sketches,” Mr. Blaustein’s sister, Lori Garfinkel, said. “Two weeks later, he got a call and was hired.”
Mr. Blaustein, Mr. Sheffield and Ms. Norris were among the few to survive a staff and cast purge when Dick Ebersol replaced Ms. Doumanian as executive producer in 1981. Two years later, Mr. Blaustein and Mr. Sheffield were burned out and left the show.
But they continued to contribute occasionally — as in late 1983, when they wrote “James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub Party,” inspired by an experience they had.
“Barry and I got out of the hot tub and started sliding our feet around on the wet floor like James Brown,” Mr. Sheffield said. “Then one of us — I forget who — stuck a toe in the hot water and gave out a James Brown shout. We made up the lyrics for the song on the spot.”
In the sketch, Mr. Murphy, as Mr. Brown, disrobes as he sings (“Say, say, hot tub / Rub-a-dub in the hot tub / Rub-a-dub with me”) about getting into the tub.
Mr. Murphy left “S.N.L.” in 1984 but maintained his ties with Mr. Blaustein and Mr. Sheffield. They collaborated on the comedy “Coming to America,” one of the most popular films of 1988, about an African prince (Mr. Murphy) seeking a bride in Queens, and its 2021 sequel, “Coming 2 America.” Mr. Blaustein and Mr. Sheffield were also writers for the 1996 reboot of “The Nutty Professor,” starring Mr. Murphy, and its 2000 sequel, as well as “Boomerang” (1992), about a suave womanizer (Mr. Murphy) who meets his match in a female boss.
On his own, Mr. Blaustein spent time in Russia from 2013 to 2014, helping to develop story lines for “Fizruk,” a sitcom about an out-of-work mob enforcer who gets a job as gym teacher. It earned him a TEFI award, the Russian equivalent of an Emmy.
In 2012, Mr. Blaustein began teaching screenwriting at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts in Orange, Calif. He continued to teach there until two months before his death, when his health began to fail because of Parkinson’s.
In addition to his wife and sister, Mr. Blaustein is survived by a daughter, Kasey Blaustein Greener, and a son, Corey — both from his marriage to Lorrie Claxton, which ended in divorce — and two granddaughters.
Although Mr. Blaustein was known for his comedy writing, wrestling was a childhood passion, and he regarded “Beyond the Mat” — a 1999 documentary that he produced, wrote and directed, about three professional wrestlers and the physical and emotional toll the sport took on their lives — as his best work.
Last month, when the film was screened in Los Angeles, he was too ill to attend. But Mick Foley, a wrestler from the film known as Mankind, appeared in his place on short notice for a question-and-answer session with fans. Afterward, he and others visited Mr. Blaustein at home. Even critically ill, he welcomed them happily.
“Barry’s in his wheelchair, skinny, barely there,” Ms. Stricklin said. “I had to kick Mick out at 1 a.m. Barry was beaming, but he was tired and I had to get him to sleep.”
