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Pun-spouting movie critic Gene Shalit, a fixture on NBC’s Today show for decades in his bow ties and extravagantly bushy hair and moustache, died on Friday at the age of 100, NBC News reported, citing a family statement shared with the network.
No additional details were immediately available.
Shalit started on Today in 1970, according to NBC’s report on his passing, and became its arts editor in 1973, interviewing celebrities and reviewing books as well as films. His role on the show was reduced in his later years and he retired at age 84 in 2010, saying, “It’s enough already.”
Shalit was quick to laugh, and his schtick-laden “Critic’s Corner” segments on Today brimmed with ebullience. With big glasses, dark frizzy hair sticking out several inches from his head and a massive moustache bisecting his face, he looked like a lost Marx brother.
Shalit strove to be as entertaining as the movies he critiqued and did not mind being corny. His reviews were full of pithy comments that a Hollywood studio could easily repurpose for positive advertising blurbs.
For a 2005 remake of King Kong, Shalit said conventional vocabulary would not suffice so he called it “fabularious” and “a brilliantological humongousness of marvelosity.”
Shalit reviews were built on puns that played on a film’s title, such as:
- “Go — don’t forego – Fargo.”
- “Ishtar is tar-ible.”
- “The Silence of the Lambs may be all wool and a yard wide but it makes a terrific yarn.”
- “This movie (The Mummy) is filled with wonders for every family — for kiddies and for daddies and, of course, for mummies.”
- “You know, when it comes to oddball titles, The Men Who Stare at Goats would be hard to bleat.”
The love of wordplay came early for Shalit — his column in the student newspaper at the University of Illinois was called “What Shalit Be.”
Guy Ludwig, Shalit’s long-time producer on Today, said the reviewer always approached a movie with “absolute glee” despite having seen so many.
Shalit stirred controversy in 2005 when he described one of the main characters in the acclaimed Brokeback Mountain — the story of a romance between two cowboys — as a “sexual predator.”
GLAAD said Shalit’s characterization was homophobic, and he apologized.
Before Today, Shalit was a film critic for Look magazine and also wrote for Ladies’ Home Journal.
He also compiled the anthologies Laughing Matters: A Celebration of American Humor and Great Hollywood Wit: A Glorious Cavalcade of Hollywood Wisecracks, Zingers, Japes, Quips, Slings, Jests, Snappers & Sass from the Stars.
Shalit’s on-the-air style and appearance made him easy to caricature, and he was spoofed on Saturday Night Live and the animated sitcom Family Guy.
Shalit and his wife Nancy, who died in 1978, had six children.
