Barry Blaustein, the former Saturday Night Live writer who helped Eddie Murphy create some of the show’s most memorable characters, has died at the age of 71. Blaustein was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2017, and had recently been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer.

Blaustein was hired for the famous sketch comedy show in 1980, during a tumultuous period in SNL history. Producer Jean Doumanian had taken over from show creator Lorne Michaels, resulting in extreme tension behind the scenes. Despite the circumstances, Blaustein clicked with another of the show’s new writers, David Sheffield. Together, the two became formidable creative partners.

“We were hired separately. We met on the show,” Blaustein recalled in the book Live From New York. “We were the last writers hired that year, as a matter of fact, and I think we both realized what a tremendous break and opportunity this was for us. We were surrounded by people going, ‘I don’t need this job! I don’t need this job! To hell with this!’ And I was thinking, ‘I do need this job. This is the big break. This is the big opportunity.’”

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At the same time, another new face arrived on Saturday Night Live: Eddie Murphy, the show’s youngest cast member at just 19 years old. Blaustein and Sheffield began exclusively working with the young comedian, helping him become SNL’s biggest star.

Barry Blaustein Helped Eddie Murphy Become an ‘SNL’ Icon

“What happened with our first Eddie Murphy piece was, my dad was always calling me up with ideas for sketches, and they were always terrible, but this was the one time he came up with an idea that was decent,” Blaustein recalled of the first time he worked with Murphy. “He’d read this article about a high school basketball team in Cleveland, where the court ruled that there had to be at least one white player on the team. We wrote something for Eddie based on that, showed it to him, and worked with him on it. It was his first piece. And you could tell the first minute he was on the air that whatever ‘it’ is, he had it. He completely connected with the audience. He just jumped off the screen.”

Together, the three men created such iconic SNL characters as Gumby, Buckwheat, Mr. Robinson and Velvet Jones. They also wrote memorable sketches utilizing Murphy’s impersonation talents, like James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub.

READ MORE: When Eddie Murphy Debuted Gumby on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ Dammit

“Eddie would go full-out on all our stuff. I don’t think we ever wrote a sketch that didn’t make the air that we wanted, or had to say, ‘They should’ve used that,’” Blaustein later recalled. “The show’s at its very best when the writers and the actors are in a room together writing stuff, the way Eddie was with us. Eddie would come in and say, ‘Hey, what about this?’ and then we’d just start writing together. You can’t write in a total vacuum. Pretty good rule of thumb: If you’re laughing when you’re writing it, it will be funny. Eddie was up for everything. That was just one of the reasons for his success. In his stand-up, Eddie used to mention Buckwheat, from the old Our Gang comedies, and every time he did, he’d get a laugh. So we decided to do a tribute to Buckwheat—have Eddie impersonate him.”

Blaustein and Sheffield were promoted to head writers and then to supervising producers before both departing Saturday Night Live in 1983. A year later, Murphy would leave to focus on his film career. Again, Blaustein and Sheffield showed their creative chemistry with the comedian, writing the scripts for such notable Murphy movies as Coming to America (1988), Boomerang (1992), The Nutty Professor (1996), Nutty Professor II: The Klumps (2000) and, most recently, Coming 2 America (2021).

Blaustein’s non-Murphy projects included Police Academy 2 (1985), the Johnny Knoxville comedy The Ringer (2005) and the 1999 professional wrestling documentary, Beyond the Mat.