Written by: Jennifer Kathleen Gibbons

The laughter the New York-born Peter Scolari gave came from a painful past.

His parents were unhappily married and his mother drank too much. He would later tell the Toronto Star, “They stayed together for the kids and also because they were hopelessly in love with each other, but they were totally incompatible.” His first big break came in 1980 when he played Benny Loman in the mid-season replacement sitcom The Goodtime Girls. The show was set in the forties and he played an entertainer who could ride a unicycle and juggle. The show didn’t last long, but the producers remembered him when they were casting a new show called Bosom Buddies.

The premise for Bosom Buddies was a bit silly: two guys Kip and Henry who are best friends find themselves out of a home when their building gets condemned. Wait! Their friend Amy says there’s a vacancy in her building! One catch: her building is all women. No boys allowed. So in their words, they made “one small adjustment.” They dressed up in drag and became Buffy and Hildegarde. But the women also knew them as Kip and Henry as well because they were Buffy and Hildegarde’s brothers! Of course! And the show had a great supporting cast—Wendie Jo Sperber as Amy, Donna Dixon as Sonny, Kip’s love interest, Telma Hopkins as Isabelle, and the sublime Holland Taylor as Ruth, the boys’ boss. Add a Billy Joel soundalike singing “My Life” and bing! You have an early eighties sitcom!

The show was loaded with the usual tropes: they were snowed in a cabin one weekend. They went to a dating service. Henry got jealous of Kip when he hung out with another friend (played by fellow Goodtime Girls actor Adrian Zmed.) And of course, lots of jokes about dressing up as a woman and seeing things from their point of view.

But what made it work was the fact Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari had chemistry. They could play off each other and the viewer had the feeling they truly were friends. Later when their identities were revealed, they made fun of the drag element. When someone knocked on their door, they would say in high falsetto voices “Who is it?” then relax when it was a friend of theirs. I’m still surprised the show was only on for thirty-seven episodes before it was canceled in 1982. Hanks moved on to do a little movie called Splash. Scolari did several TV movies, but then struck gold again on another comedy, Newhart.

Newhart was retooling itself in the second season by getting a love interest for Stephanie (Julia Duffy) the self-centered maid working at the Strafford Inn. Enter Scolari’s Michael, who produced Dick Loudon’s (Bob Newhart) TV show Looks at Books. Michael was shallow and self-absorbed, Stephanie was shallow and self-absorbed. It was a match made in heaven. He called her ‘cupcake’ and said things like, “Oh, Steph. I don’t want ‘kind’. I don’t want ‘nice’. I want you.” Again, there was chemistry. Scolari and Duffy made their coupling funny and endearing, plus even though they were the most self-absorbed characters to ever grace television (of course this was before the Kardashians) they were still likable. They brought out the best in each other.

When Newhart ended in 1990, Scolari ended up doing a lot of guest roles. Hanks gave him a cameo in That Thing You Do, a movie Hanks wrote, directed and starred in. He also did a role in a Hanks-produced miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. But it wasn’t until his late forties that he had to face his own alcohol and drug addiction. Add to this the fact that he was bipolar. He decided to face his problems head on and got sober. He went to 12 step groups and took medication. As he got better, roles started coming up again. A voice over for another Hanks movie, The Polar Express. A short term role on Gotham. But he was introduced to a new generation when he played Hannah Horvath’s dad in the HBO show Girls. Tad Horvath tried to understand his self absorbed daughter, but he had his own problems. Namely, he was gay and in the closet and still married to Hannah’s mom. This layered role led to Scolari winning his first Emmy.

Before his death last week, Scolari’s most recent projects were appearances on Evil, Blue Bloods and Lisey’s Story.

The past year and a half I’ve turned to comedies for comfort. While everyone raved about White Lotus last summer, I loved the new animated sitcom House Broken. I watched old episodes of M*A*S*H and wondered what Frank Burns would’ve thought of Trump. There are times we need laughter. I’m glad Peter Scolari was around to give us a dose.