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Saturday, January 09, 2016

The Gary Files # 16: Garry Shandling

(This image is from his Wikipedia page.)

An explanation: Since the name Gary is going extinct, I thought it incumbent upon me to celebrate more notable Garys than myself.  This is the sixteenth of a series!

Garry Shandling is one of America's treasures, a comedian, writer, actor, director, superstar.  If you've never seen The Larry Sanders Show, you've missed out on true brilliance in television comedy.

When did you first become aware of him?  His show on Fox/Showtime in the 1980s, It's Garry Shandling's Show.  It was fun to have a television theme song with my name in it.  It's here..

Wait a second.  What?

He spells his name with two rs.  So?  It's pronounced the same.

It just doesn't seem fair.  If I were named John, & I was mentioning famous Johns, couldn't I use Jon Stewart or Jon Hamm?

It just seems to me that it's kind of cheating.  You remind me of women I used to know whose name was a variation of a regular name - like my sister's name is Karin, while the standard spelling is Karen - so they wouldn't enjoy a song with their name on it unless it was spelled the way they spelled it.  Even though the song itself was singing the name exactly as they pronounced it.  It made it exhausting to play songs for them.

So you don't mind?  Hey, I could do much worse than be lumped in with Garry Fucking Shandling.

Do you think he's a genius?  I think I do.

Was his name really Garry?  It says Garry Emmanuel Shandling on his Wikipedia page.

But there was maybe a difference why he was named Garry, since it's spelled differently?  He had an older brother named Barry, so maybe his parents named him Garry to rhyme.  & to have the same last four letters.  But I have no way of knowing.

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