Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,616
By This is the grave of David Lander.
Born in 1947, David Landau grew up in Brooklyn in a middle-class Jewish family. His parents both taught school. From the time he was a kid, he was into acting and went to the High School for the Performing Arts before attending college at Carnegie Tech (today, Carnegie Mellon) in Pittsburgh and then NYU. Now, he wasn’t trying to hide his Jewish background when he used the stage name of David Lander. The reason he did it is that some high school friend of his for some reason decided to use his buddy’s name to register with the actor’s union, so now he needed a stage name. Granted, Lander is not as obvious a Jewish name as Landau, but in any case, this was past the period in which actors chose to hide their Jewish names, at least generally.
While in Pittsburgh, Lander met another young actor named Michael McKean. They became great friends and loved working together. They developed a bit there with the characters Lenny and Squiggy, a couple of greasers who would use funny voices, yell a lot, and do a lot of physical comedy. Needless to say, as Lander later noted, they were stoned out of their minds most of the time when doing this stuff. But it worked and they moved to Los Angeles together to become part of the comedy ensemble known as the Credibility Gap. Out there, they met another young comedian named Harry Shearer, who would join their bits. McKean and Lander weren’t originally in the crew, but it was pretty unstable early on. They came out there in 1970 and joined and were there for most of the 70s, providing the base for an often-changing group of comedians.
Not surprisingly, this crew got attention from Hollywood. In 1976, Garry Marshall (Penny’s brother) was pushing a new TV show called Laverne & Shirley, starring his sister and Cindy Williams about two young women who worked in a Milwaukee brewery and had various hijinks. Marshall wanted some colorful neighbors for the cast, a common enough move in sitcoms, Liking Lander and McKean’s bit, he hired them. The show leaned heavily on physical comedy, which both could handle just fine. The show was a Happy Days spin-off, with Marshall and Williams having been friends with the Fonz, so the whole thing fit in perfectly with the 50s nostalgia so strong in the 1970s. Since Lenny & Squiggy were 50s stereotype greasers, they made sense in the cast. Lander would enter scenes with his catchphrase “Hellooooooo” in his ridiculous voice. The whole thing was pretty silly, but that was far from uncommon for sitcoms from the era and it made him a lot of money, so hey, all good.
One thing that is funny to me but still mattered at the time is that the name Lander had given his character was Anthony Squiggliano. But Marshall and ABC thought there were already too many Italian names in the show, so even though Lander did not look German at all, they changed the name of the character to Andrew Squiggman. We are a long ways from the world of European ethnicity mattering in the names of supporting characters on sitcoms but we weren’t in 1976!
The show was huge in its middle seasons of the late 70s. Unfortunately, it got even stupider later in the series. They decided to move everyone from Milwaukee to Los Angeles without any real explanation as to why. This was the era when television shows just replaced actors with someone who looked completely different and we were supposed to believe it was the same character, so anything was possible. In any case, in the revamped Laverne & Shirley, Lenny and Squiggy ran a talent agency in Burbank called Squignowski Talent Agency. I have no memory of the show in this era, so I can’t even imagine. It sounds terrible. The show began to fall apart with an unhappy Cindy Williams being treated like crap during her pregnancy. She left the show, it continued one more year, and finally ABC pulled the plug in 1983.
Lander and McKean continued their gig outside of Laverne & Shirley too. They released an album in 1979 as Lenny and the Squiggtones and while I haven’t heard it, it is evidently something of a legitimate album, with covers of 50s rock combined with their bits. On the album? Christopher Guest using the stage name of Nigel Trufnel. They also appeared in various movies as their alter egos, even though they were on the show at the time. They were in Spielberg’s 1941 and Robert Zemeckis’ Used Cars. I wonder if this would be allowed today, using the intellectual property presently contracted with a TV show in completely different productions? Of course, the fact that I am even using the vile if legally necessary term “intellectual property” demonstrates how much this discourse over legal technicalities has overtaken the way we consider art.
Later in life, Lander got a real tough break–multiple sclerosis. That really sucks. We’ve probably all known people with MS and it’s not a lot of fun. While he hid it for years, later he used his relative fame (even if, let’s be fair, he was pretty forgotten by the 90s except for people who remembered Laverne & Shirley and even then, he was Squiggy, not David Lander) to promote attention to the disease. He became the National Multiple Sclerosis Society’s goodwill ambassador. He was actually diagnosed in 1984, but didn’t take it public until 1999, when it began to affect his ability to work. So that’s when he became the ambassador. But at that point, he went all in on the MS discussion. He would travel to conventions to talk about it, which wasn’t easy of course for someone with mobility issues. In 2002, he published his memoir, Fall Down Laughing: How Squiggy Caught Multiple Sclerosis and Didn’t Tell Nobody. Really, it was a brave move to own the disease and do what he could to fight it.
He did as much work in movies and TV as long as he could. Mostly after 2000, this was voice over work, but sometimes he would have small roles in films. His last work was a straight to video release called Green Lantern: First Flight, which he did one of the voices for, released in 2009.
It was in 2020 that the complications from MS finally took him. He was 73 years old.
David Lander is buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Hollywood, California.
One note. For those of you who don’t spend time in cemeteries, this kind of display of the ashes with memorabilia seems to be a growing trend in the world of burials. I see it relatively frequently, though I think this is the first time I have covered someone who chose to be remembered this way in this series. I have no particular thoughts about it, but some of you are more interested in the aesthetic choices of the cemeteries than I am, so I thought I’d mention it.
If you would like this series to visit other people involved in Laverne & Shirley, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Penny Marshall is also in Hollywood, but a different cemetery. So is Cindy Williams. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.