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Gene Wilder made us smile

Most of the time nowadays, the words “comic genius” connote a person who started as a stand-up performer and landed a television show, and maybe a movie every now and then, or an ensemble performer who breaks out to the big screen.

Gene Wilder, who died Sunday of the complications of Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 83, was a comedic genius in the former sense of the term: A screen comedian who could write and perform and be witty without the naturally self-aggrandizing format of the stand-up comedian’s stage.

Thinking of Wilder should make fans smile. His manic on-screen moments in films by Mel Brooks, including “Young Frankenstein,” where he and the late Peter Boyle and the late Marty Feldman made magic as Dr. “Frank-en-shteen” and his monster and his assistant “Eye-Gore.”

Remember, also, his performance as Willy Wonka in the memorable 1970s version of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” where the atmosphere wasn’t about darkness and fear like so many modern re-makes, but of fun and mystery, with a few lessons thrown in for good measure. It was even heartwarming at the end.

And that gentleness that Wilder carried to his various on-screen persona made the roles believable, even as the scheming man conning Broadway in the 1960s version of “The Producers.”

He teamed with the late Richard Pryor for a variety of fun comedies and produced “The World’s Greatest Lover.”

His marriage to another comedic genius, Gilda Radner, was brought to an end by her cancer five years after they were wed.

He was very moving in his mourning of her, becoming an activist in the fight against ovarian cancer, but he lived his life, getting remarried later, noting Radner herself would have told him to get on with living.

His nephew, in announcing Wilder’s death, said Gene Wilder didn’t make his Alzheimer’s public because he couldn’t stand the thought of the world with one less smile.

We’d venture that the world is smiling now, just thinking of Gene Wilder’s warm smile.

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