Buck Henry

Henry Zuckerman became Buck Henry on television, writing for Steve Allen in the early 1960s before co-creating Get Smart with Mel Brooks in 1965. That show is the key to everything after it: a spy comedy whose real subject is bureaucracy, where the gadgets fail and the paperwork wins, and where the funniest thing on screen is a man being extremely competent about something stupid.

He carried the register into film. He co-wrote The Graduate for Mike Nichols in 1967 and was nominated for an Academy Award for the adaptation, then wrote Catch-22 for Nichols in 1970 and appeared in it as Lt. Col. Korn. What's Up, Doc? for Peter Bogdanovich followed in 1972. In 1978 he co-directed Heaven Can Wait with Warren Beatty and took a second Academy Award nomination, that one for directing. He also holds an Emmy for comedy writing.

As an actor he was cast, over and over, as the polite functionary: the room clerk who hands Benjamin Braddock his key in The Graduate, Lt. Col. Korn in Catch-22, Mr. Leech in Eating Raoul, Snyder in Grumpy Old Men, Mr. Finlaysson in To Die For. Nobody was better at playing a man who delivers appalling information in a level voice and then waits for you to sign. He did it in Short Cuts, in The Man Who Fell to Earth and in Gloria, three films with nothing in common except that each needed one adult in the room.

He was a regular Saturday Night Live host in the show's early years and kept turning up on television late, in Hot in Cleveland and Franklin & Bash. He died in 2020.