Franken pursued ambitions as a radio pundit and politician - he’s now a U.S. In 1990, Franken and Davis had a falling out and split up. One of Davis’s best-known sketches was the scene in which culinary doyenne Julia Child tries to remain calm after she cuts the “dickens out of my finger.” She bleeds profusely all over her holiday chicken and shrieks, before passing out, “Save the liver! Save the liver!” “You were found guilty of lying and your tongue was cut out.

“You were found guilty of theft and your right arm was cut off,” Theodoric says. The idea for the “Coneheads” came after a drug-fueled vacation to Easter Island with Dan Aykroyd, where Davis hallucinated that his own forehead had grown 10 inches. They joined “Saturday Night Live” before its debut season in 1975 and shared a single apprentice writer’s salary of $350 a week, where they collaborated on sketches culled from politics, pop culture and the bizarre.ĭavis said he spent a small fortune throughout his lifetime on marijuana, hashish, cocaine, LSD and heroin, and enjoyed the substances with his friends Timothy Leary, John Belushi and Jerry Garcia. He had a metastatic tonsil cancer, said his wife, Mimi Raleigh.ĭavis and Franken began writing jokes together as teenagers at the private Blake School in Minneapolis, making mock announcements over the public address system, including a satirical Ku Klux Klan march called “Superpatrioticanticatholicsegregatious.”

Minneapolis native Tom Davis, the longtime stand-up comedy partner of Al Franken and a writer who created many of the most memorable sketches on “Saturday Night Live,” including the alien “Coneheads,” which he dreamed up while on LSD, died July 19 at his home in Hudson, N.Y.

Minnesota senator and former snl writer