Howard Storm, the comedian-turned-director whose career touched some of the most beloved television series of the 1970s and 1980s and who gave Jim Carrey one of his earliest film roles, died on May 26, 2026 at his home in Beverly Hills, California. He was 94.
Born Howard Sobel on December 11, 1931 in New York City, he came to Hollywood the way many of his generation did — through stand-up comedy, the school of hard knocks that teaches timing, audience, and the fine art of reading a room. His father was a comedian in burlesque, so the instincts were inherited as much as learned. Storm toured as Andy Williams’ opening comedian, played Las Vegas, and appeared fourteen times on The Merv Griffin Show — a booking that, in the television landscape of that era, meant you had genuinely arrived.
He parlayed that background into writing, teaming with attorney Paul Lichtman to develop scripts for The Partridge Family and Bob Newhart’s program, and he also worked as Woody Allen’s assistant and collaborator on two of Allen’s early films, ‘Bananas’ and ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)’. That is not a bad apprenticeship by any measure.
His acting credits included The New Dick Van Dyke Show, Rhoda, and Sanford and Son, but it was directing that would define the bulk of his career. Beginning in 1975, he became one of television’s most reliable and prolific episode directors, working on ‘Laverne & Shirley’, ‘Mork & Mindy’, ‘Taxi’, ‘Joanie Loves Chachi’, ‘Full House’, ‘ALF’, and ‘Head of the Class’, among many others. These were not obscure assignments. These were the shows that American families were watching every week, and Storm was behind the camera for a significant portion of their best episodes.
In 1985, he stepped into feature films with ‘Once Bitten’, a vampire comedy starring Lauren Hutton and a young, largely unknown Jim Carrey. It was Carrey’s first leading role in a film, and whatever you thought of the movie itself, Storm clearly saw something in that rubber-faced comedian from Ontario that the rest of Hollywood had not yet fully caught on to. He would be proven right within a few years.
He was 94 years old, and he was still credited as active right up to the end. That is a career. That is a life in show business lived all the way to the final curtain.