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Bruce Jay Friedman, 90, Author With a Darkly Comic Worldview, Dies - The New York Times
Jun 03, 2020 3 mins, 25 secs

Bruce Jay Friedman, whose early novels, short stories and plays were pioneering examples of modern American black humor, making dark but giggle-inducing sport of the deep, if not pathological, insecurities of his white, male, middle-class and often Jewish protagonists, died on Wednesday at his home in Brooklyn.

Friedman, who also wrote the screenplays for the hit film comedies “Stir Crazy” and “Splash,” was an unusual case in American letters: an essentially comic writer whose work skipped back and forth between literature and pop culture and who, after an early decade of literary stardom, seemed almost to vanish in plain sight.

His first two novels, “Stern” (1962) and the best-selling “A Mother’s Kisses” (1964) — tales of New York Jews exploring an America outside the five boroughs — and his first play, the 1967 Off Broadway hit “Scuba Duba,” a sendup of race relations that is set in motion when a Jewish man fears his wife is having an affair with a black spear fisherman, made him widely celebrated.

Friedman “The Hottest Writer of the Year.”.

Later that decade he wrote “The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life,” a trenchantly uproarious treatise on adult solitude that began as a series of essays for Esquire magazine and that was adapted by Neil Simon for a 1984 film, “The Lonely Guy,” starring Steve Martin and Charles Grodin.

He took advantage of the social upheaval he lived through in the 1960s and ’70s to write about race and gender relations from the suddenly uncertain perspective of men like, well, himself, gleefully tweaking the white male psyche’s tenderest spots.

In “Black Angels,” a short story often cited as emblematic of his early and most literary work, the main character, Stefano, is a white man left alone, despairing and struggling to keep up the maintenance on his house after his wife takes their young child and runs off with another man, “an assistant director of daytime TV” (a typically arch Friedmanesque detail).

Friedman wrote.

Friedman’s portrait of a lonely, perplexed Jew as a young man, but also to the indomitable Meg, a woman whom Haskel Frankel, writing in The New York Times Book Review and sparing no hyperbole, called “the most unforgettable mother since Medea.”.

Friedman followed up with two novels that changed milieus, imbuing both an urban detective (in “The Dick,” 1970) and a cocaine-addled screenwriter (“About Harry Towns,” 1974) with the signature qualities of bafflement and self-questioning.

Simon, the story became, as the women’s movement was taking hold in 1972, a highly provocative film, “The Heartbreak Kid,” starring Mr.

Friedman said to a Key West, Fla., audience in 2005 after reading the story aloud.

Bruce Jay Friedman was born on April 26, 1930, and grew up, along with his sister, Dollie, in a three-room apartment in the Bronx, much like the crowded one in Brooklyn he described in “A Mother’s Kisses.” His father, Irving, worked for a women’s apparel company; his mother, Molly, a confident woman with a feisty patter and a devoted theatergoer who was described by a friend of Bruce’s as “someone looking like a middle-aged Jewish Rita Hayworth,” was evidently the model for Meg.

(Sample dialogue from “Lucky Bruce,” his 2011 memoir: When a teenage Bruce Friedman contracted gangrene in his left arm, a doctor who had amputated the limbs of soldiers during World War II wanted to saw it off. “I have a better idea,” Molly Friedman said. “I’ll saw off your head.”).

Friedman sold his first short story, “Wonderful Golden Rule Days,” about a boy making his discomforting way in a new school, to The New Yorker.

Puzo was writing “The Godfather,” Mr.

Friedman wrote several more novels, including “Tokyo Woes” (1985), about an American gadabout’s adventures in Japan; “The Current Climate” (1989), a revisit to Harry Towns; and “A Father’s Kisses” (1996), about an unemployed poultry distributor who becomes a hit man.

Friedman often spoke in interviews about the conflict between writing screenplays for the money and the fun of it, and the higher calling of writing novels

“Stories, quite a few of them, got written and published,” he wrote of the later years of his writing life

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