Bruce Jay Friedman, darkly comic US novelist and screenwriter behind the film Stir Crazy – obituary

Bruce Jay Friedman, the American novelist, playwright and screenwriter who has died aged 90, was noted for his stories of modern angst.

He wrote more than a dozen books and enjoyed notable success on the stage with Scuba Duba and Steambath. His exuberant film comedy, Stir Crazy, set mainly in a prison and starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, was directed by Sidney Poitier and became the third-highest-grossing US film of 1980.

He was nominated for an Oscar for his 1984 comedy, Splash, concerning a love affair between a man (Tom Hanks) and a mermaid (Daryl Hannah).

Friedman was an exponent of black comedy, creating some memorably dark situations, in which he played on the insecurities of white, male, middle-class, often Jewish subjects.

He established a literary genre in the US through the mass-market paperback, Black Humor, which he edited in 1965, in which he cited the work of JP Donleavy, Edward Albee, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Vladimir Nabokov, Louis-Ferdinand Céline – and himself. He saw how those authors portrayed horrific events in a comic manner, via novels, poems, plays or music.

Much of his fiction evolved from his own experiences. In 2005 Friedman told an audience: “I guess maybe it’s not unusual when people are walking down the aisle for an instant to flash on the possibility that maybe they’re making a mistake. Maybe there’s someone else. I know it happened to me.”

He and his first wife, Ginger Howard, drove to Florida for their honeymoon in 1954. Both were exhausted, and while she fell asleep, he went to the pool. There he was attracted to a very pretty girl. When he told her he was “a little married” she splashed him with water. As a result he remained married, produced three sons, and only divorced in 1978.

From this came his short story, “A Change of Plan”, which was picked up by Neil Simon and turned into the nail-bitingly dark comedy, The Heartbreak Kid (1972), directed by Elaine May and starring Charles Grodin and Cybill Shepherd.

In the film, the husband becomes disillusioned with his wife on the way down to Florida, and while she groans with sunstroke in her room, he meets a blonde midwestern college girl Kelly (Cybill Shepherd) and presently finds himself telling her father that he has made a big mistake (“Radio City Music Hall big”) and that he will divorce his wife and marry Kelly.

The film prompted the critic Vincent Canby to muse on lines from Kelly such as: “How do you expect me to think when I’m listening?”, while he thought not even Scott Fitzgerald would have had the chutzpah to have his heroine say to a man who’d just divorced his wife for her: “Gee! I’m really flattered!”

Friedman also inspired Neil Simon to turn his 1982 non-fiction book, The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life (1978), into the 1984 film, The Lonely Guy, starring Steve Martin and Grodin.

That contained classic Friedman black humour, with ideas such as Grodin obtaining towels wholesale because they had the initials of couples who had divorced. Later Friedman wrote a non-fiction sequel, The Slightly Older Guy (1995).

Bruce Jay Friedman was born on April 26 1930 in the Bronx and attended DeWitt Clinton High School. He wanted to be a doctor but failed his application. At summer camp he met a girl who recommended that the University of Missouri would take anyone for journalism, so he joined.

He then served in the US Air Force, where his commanding officer detected his promise as a writer. An upsetting experience became his story, The Man They Threw Out of Jets. This was rejected by The New Yorker but published in The Antioch Review, while The New Yorker took another of his stories.

He spent a decade editing four men’s adventure magazines, at one point hiring Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather. Having written his 1968 play Scuba Duba, Friedman used to attend parties given by the mobster “Crazy Joe” Gallo at the home of Jerry Orbach, who was starring in his play.

While editing, Friedman wrote Stern (1962), about an urban Jew’s transition into suburban life, and A Mother’s Kisses (1964), a bestseller based on his experiences at college in Missouri in which he created “the most unforgettable mother since Medea”. In Steambath (1970), God is portrayed as a Puerto Rican towel attendant.

In the 1970s, as he began working as a Hollywood screenwriter, Friedman continued to write fiction. He was particularly pleased when 57 short stories were published as The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman (1997), and his non-fiction as Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos (2000).

His novels included Far From the City of Class (1963), Black Angels (1967), The Dick (1970), About Harry Towns (1972), Let’s Hear it for a Beautiful Guy (1980), Tokyo Woes (1985), A Father’s Kisses (1996) and The Current Climate (2001). In 1968 The New York Times Magazine declared him “the hottest writer of the year”.

Friedman was twice married, secondly in 1983 to Patricia O’Donohue. She survives him with their daughter and three sons from his first marriage.

Bruce Jay Friedman, born April 26 1930, died June 3 2020