Garry Shandling, comedian, actor, writer and producer, dead at 66

LOS ANGELES -- Garry Shandling, the influential comedian, writer, actor and producer whose biting wit was always lurking right behind a winning smile, has died, Mashable confirmed Thursday. He was 66.

Shandling died at a Los Angeles hospital, according to TMZ, which first reported the news and said he had not been known to be suffering from any illness. The LAPD confirmed to Mashable that paramedics responded to a medical emergency at his Los Angeles residence. 

Shandling's comedy career ran the gamut, from stand-up to sitcom writing to acting and producing -- though younger audiences may best remember him as Senator Stern, the duplicitous politician in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, who was introduced in Iron Man 2 and exposed as a Hydra operative in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

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But the peak of Sanders' career was the dazzling HBO original The Larry Sanders Show, the behind-the-scenes look at a fictitious network late-night host. As Sanders, Shandling was really just playing himself in an alternate universe; one in which he actually got the job replacing Johnny Carson, which at one time seemed like a real possibility.

Shandling's stand-up killed on Carson in the early '80s, to the degree that he was invited to be a guest host from time to time. But the job eventually went to Jay Leno, and as a result, we got The Larry Sanders Show.

Larry Sanders was an unprecedented look at the absurdities of the late-night game, but was also a groundbreaking subgenre of reality-bending adult pathos comedy, the likes of which would reverberate for years in shows like 30 Rock, The Office, Arrested Development, Community and beyond.

But Larry Sanders always kept a foot in reality: The guests all played themselves, the characters referenced real late-night "rivals" and much of the show was ... well, the show. Larry Sanders ran from 1992 to 1998 on HBO, winning three Primetime Emmy Awards along the way. 

Shandling was very recently on Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, a reunion of contemporaries whose careers were inseparable. The title of the episode: "It's Great that Garry Shandling is Still Alive."

Said Seinfeld in introducing his guest: 

"My very special guest today is my dear old friend Garry Shandling. ... We have been very good friends for a very long time and our careers pretty much paralleled most of that time. We started at the Comedy Store in LA at the same time, we were on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson at the same time, we did our TV series in the '90s on the same lot at the same time, right across the street from each other ... we were a pair." 

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Early in the episode, Shandling tells Seinfeld that he had recently been diagnosed with a hyperparathyroid gland, the overactivity of a hormone-producing gland in the neck. Though Shandling did say he was symptomatic, the condition itself is not considered to be life-threatening, especially when treated.

Sanders was born in Chicago, grew up in Arizona and moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, where he got his start writing episodes of sitcoms like Sanford and Son and Welcome Back Kotter. Frustrated with the TV stale formula, he started doing standup; then in 1985 co-created It's Garry Shandling's Show, an early inkling of his meta-comedy leanings.

It's Garry Shandling's Show completely upended the sitcom formula that frustrated Shandling -- its characters knew they were in a TV sitcom, they addressed the audience, and even became aware of their studio surroundings, sometimes incorporating them into the storylines. The show ran on Showtime through 1990 and was nominated for an Emmy Award.

Neither It's Garry Shandling's Show nor The Larry Sanders Show was a huge commercial hit; these were boutique offerings at a time before the "Golden Age" of television, when cable was the second-class to networks and not the other way around. But from Louis CK to Judd Apatow to Lena Dunham to Aziz Ansari and many points between, Shandling's influence will reverberate in television comedy for many generations to come. 

Mashable Senior TV reporter Sandra Gonzalez contributed to this story.