It’s no mystery as to why Alan Alda wrote the preface for Larry Gelbart’s memoir: Laughing Matters. The actor had previously starred in one of Gelbart’s most well-known television projects with M*A*S*H.

The two men worked together for a number of years, and after so much time spent together, Alda had nothing but kind things to say about Gelbart.

“As you bite into a Larry Gelbart sandwich of irony, satire, protest, wit, hate, longing, and lust, crammed between two slices of wry compassion, you may think that you appreciate his work as much as anyone can,” wrote Alda. “But I’m sorry to tell you that you’ll always be a piker at appreciating Larry - unless you’ve sat at the table at nine o’clock in the morning, waiting to read his script for the first time, wondering what he’s come up with during the night.”

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Of course, Alda had ample experience of such a scenario, but he also wasn’t alone in his reverence, as he acknowledged that Gelbart was well-admired by a number of people, actors and writers alike.

“Our admiration wasn’t just for the high-wire of it,” wrote Alda. “Or even the brilliance of it. It was also that someone who could do this, someone who could go into the void and steal a whole finished script and get out before the gods knew it was gone, a script that would probably still be funny fifty years from now - that this person with the nerves of Jesse James could at the same time be so affable was extremely annoying. Who could match it?”