Screenwriter, Producer, Director. He is best remembered as a comedy sketch writer who wrote for Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, and the Marx Brothers, as well as writing the screenplays for the movie musicals "Meet Me in St. Louis" (1944, which he was nominated for an Academy Award) and "Bye Bye Birdie" (1963). He was born in the Bronx borough of New York City grew up in Yonkers. At the age of 19, after a brief stint covering high school sports for a local newspaper, he took a job as an usher and ticket taker at a Manhattan movie theater, where he learned from a critic for "Variety" magazine that he could earn money writing jokes for comedians. In 1937, he moved to Hollywood and began working on scripts for Mervyn LeRoy, a prominent producer at MGM. He was an uncredited script doctor on "The Wizard of Oz," leading Groucho Marx to call him "The Wicked Wit of the West." He received sole screenplay credit for two Marx Brothers films, "At the Circus"(1939) and "Go West" (1940). He created, produced, and was the head writer of the long-running 1940s radio series "The Life of Riley." In 1949 he turned it into a feature film that starred William Bendix, and an NBC television series in the fall of the same year, considered by some as the first situation comedy on TV, and hired Jackie Gleason for the lead role of the blundering Chester A. Riley. The series lasted only until the following spring. However, in 1953 it was reprised, with Bendix back in the title role (frequently uttering his signature line, "What a revoltin' development this is!"), remaining on the air until 1958. He also created and co-produced the television sitcom "The People's Choice," which aired on NBC from 1955 until 1958. He wrote the screenplay for and directed the comedy film "Sail a Crooked Ship" (1961), based on the novel of the same name by Nathaniel Benchley. Some of his other comedy screenplay credits include "Best Foot Forward" (1943), "Shadow of the Thin Man" (1941), "DuBarry Was a Lady" (1942), and "Yolanda and the Thief" (1945), and "Somebody Loves Me" (1952). He died from a heart ailment at the age of 94. His memoirs, "The Wicked Wit of the West," was published posthumously in January 2009.