Howard Harris (writer)

Howard Harris (February 15, 1912, New York City – March 22, 1986) was a comedy writer whose credits included Copacabana (1947) starring Groucho Marx and Carmen Miranda ([1]), The Jackie Gleason Show, You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx, Gilligan's Island, Petticoat Junction, and other popular television shows.

Howard Harris attended Fordham University School of Law for two years which, according to his family, he hated. The summer before his third and final year he got a job writing humorous anecdotes about celebrities for a trade publication. After that experience he dropped out of law school and started writing comedy for radio for Joe Penner and Fred Allen, among others, according to one account from his family.

Before the Second World War, Harris moved to Hollywood where he was considered one of the hottest comedy writers around, according to his wife Marion Harris Linden. In 1943 he was a screenwriter for Higher and Higher starring Frank Sinatra (see [2]).

In 1947 he was a co-writer for Alfred E. Green's Copacabana. Also in 1947 Harris wrote the story for a comedy called Linda Be Good, according to the Internet Movie Database ([3]). IMDb also reports that Harris was a writer for The Noose Hangs High ([4]), which starred Abbott and Costello.

Harris migrated to television and back to New York where he became a comedy writer in 1952 for The Jackie Gleason Show in which he helped to write a segment which featured Gleason as a loud-mouthed, Brooklyn bus driver known as Ralph Kramden. That segment later became the seed for the comedy series, The Honeymooners.

...
Wikipedia