Al Franken’s Old Comedy Partner, Tom Davis, Dead at 59

Tom Davis, a writer who with Al Franken helped develop some of the most popular skits in the early years of “Saturday Night Live,” died on Thursday at age 59.

His wife, Mimi Raleigh, said he died of throat and neck cancer at his home in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City. He was diagnosed in 2009.

Davis is best known as the thinner, taller partner in Franken and Davis, the off-kilter comedy duo who performed in the early years of the show. They also were among the first writers hired for the new show in 1975 and helped create memorable work such as the “Coneheads” skit with Dan Aykroyd and what evolved into the “Nick the Lounge Singer” skit starring Bill Murray performing lounge-lizard versions of songs including the “Star Wars” theme.

Raleigh said Davis and Franken “were two of the first writers hired — with one salary.”

As performers, Davis was the quiet guy, overshadowed by the flashier Franken, who is now a Democratic senator from Minnesota. Davis, in a 2009 interview with The Associated Press, said, “If we were Sonny and Cher, he would be Cher.”

Davis met Franken at a suburban prep school in Minnesota, where their first gig was making announcements at morning chapel. They hit it big with “SNL” and stayed there until 1980, then returned a few years later. Davis left the show in 1994, feeling frozen out. Still, he told the AP he would always treasure his time on the show.

“It’s my family. It’s my extended, dysfunctional family, and I love them,” Davis said.

Davis recalled spending his childhood watching “The Mickey Mouse Club” on television while wearing Mouseketeer Ears. He was the older of two brothers. Their father worked for 3M and their mother was the 1950 Queen of the Lakes of the Minneapolis Aquatennial, an annual summer festival.

In his memoir, “Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss: The Early Days of SNL From Someone Who Was There,” Davis also detailed friendships with counterculture legends Jerry Garcia and Timothy Leary, his own drug use and his travel as a young hippie to India in the 1970s.

Davis kept up his quirky sense of humor to the end, writing an essay on his experiences with cancer and the coming end of his life.

“I wake up in the morning, delighted to be waking up, read, write, feed the birds, watch sports on TV, accepting the fact that in the foreseeable future I will be a dead person,” Davis wrote. “I want to remind you that dead people are people too.”