Louie Anderson, Family Feud host and Baskets star, dead at 68

Some truly sad news has come out today across the comedy community. Louie Anderson, a famed stand-up performer turned big-time TV star, has died following a battle with cancer. He was 68 years old.

The news was first confirmed today to Deadline by Anderson’s publicist Glenn Schwartz, and it comes the same morning that we lost another entertainment legend in Meat Loaf.

Anderson’s appeal was cross-generational, and he is a performer who meant different things to you depending on when you first saw his work. In the mid-nineties his animated series Life with Louie proved to be an enormous success. From 1999 until 2002, he served as the host of the syndicated version of Family Feud. Ironically, he later appeared on the Steve Harvey-hosted Celebrity Family Feud, which is what the picture above is from.

His most recent credit of note, though, comes from his role on Baskets alongside Zach Galifianakis, which is what won him an Emmy Award back in 2016. It was a role he inhabited and one that showed some acting chops that for many years, producers missed on when it comes to their various castings.

Anderson was unpredictable, self-deprecating at times, and of course almost always funny. He had an atypical role to becoming a star but in the end, that’s a part of what made him so compelling. We do think there are a lot of memorable tributes that will come out over the next couple of days.

In general, the past month has been incredibly hard for the comedy community. It began with the loss of Betty White on New Year’s Eve and then after that, the news came in earlier this month about Full House star Bob Saget. All of them brought something unique to this world; they also brought us joy, which is something that we can never take for granted.

Our thoughts and condolences go out to Anderson’s family and all who loved him during this difficult time.