Eric Gilliland busted guts, professionally.
He was a sitcom writer for shows including “Roseanne” and “The Wonder Years” and “That ‘70s Show” — to name a few.
His quest for absurdity was never-ending.
An “Roseanne,” griping once filled the writer’s room about the dinner that was being provided: baked potatoes.
In response, Mr. Gilliland, who was head writer on the show, produced a company credit card, and told everyone to place their takeout orders from a fancy restaurant.
The food was delivered and as everyone enjoyed a frenzy of gleeful abundance Mr. Gilliland pulled his dinner from one of the takeout bags. It was a baked potato.
The spud account was one of a tsunami of tales shared online in the week since Mr. Gilliland died from cancer.
He passed away Sept. 1 in New York City. He was 62.
“He was just a fun kid to raise,” said his mother, Sonja Gilliland.
“Once he was working on a show about teenagers and he called me and said ‘Would you send me my diary?’ So I did and he plucked out a lot of things that happened as a kid growing up in Glenview and his time at Springman Middle School and Glenbrook South High School,” she said.
Mr. Gilliland always came home to sing on Christmas Eve with the choir he grew up singing with at Glenview Community Church.
On one such home-for-the-holidays trip, he rang one of his best friends, Mike Bartsch, and the two met at a restaurant to catch up.
Mr. Gilliland’s knee was bothering him, so he asked Bartsch, a nurse, to take a look.
“There were people around so I said, ‘Why don’t we go to the bathroom,’ and then we got to the bathroom and I said, ‘Why don’t we just go in a stall,’ so here’s me on a toilet seat and Eric in front of me and dropping his pants and someone comes in the bathroom and I’m thinking, ‘Oh crap,’ and Eric is thinking, ‘Oh, this is perfect,’ and he started saying things that were completely appropriate for his knee but also had another connotation like, ‘Ooh, ooh. Yea, right there. It hurts. It’s hot.’ ” Bartsch recalled, noting that he almost died from laughing.
“Finally, the person left, and I was, like, ‘You are ridiculous … and your knee is infected. You need to go to the emergency room,’ ” Bartsch said. “If you were a friend of his, you were automatically blessed because it doesn’t suck having a friend who is a comedy writer.”
Mr. Gilliland grew up watching “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and memorized entire episodes, according to his childhood friend Steven Levitan, who also went into entertainment and is the creator of the hit television show “Modern Family.”
Levitan wrote in a Facebook post: “Weird, I know, but I found myself thinking this morning that Eric Gilliland would have taken some perverse pleasure in knowing that, of all people, he was outlived by Dick Van Dyke.”
Levitan told the Sun-Times: “Eric moved west and started working in television while I was in Chicago working at Leo Burnett, and seeing someone I knew doing that made it feel like ‘I can do that, too’ and gave me the courage to do it, and I owe him a debt of gratitude.”
At Northwestern, Mr. Gilliland participated in “The Waa-Mu Show,” a musical, written, performed and presented by students, and “The Mee-Ow Show,” a student-run improv and sketch comedy show.
He was in the Phi Delta Gamma fraternity. Instead of wearing a grass skirt to the group’s Fiji party one year, he opted for a ‘70s leisure suit.
“When he was living in Los Angeles he could have had any car he wanted, but he drove an old, beat-up blue Mustang convertible with a plastic baby arm coming out of an air conditioning vent,” Bartsch said.
“Money wasn’t important; good friends and conversation and laughter were,” he said.
Actors Martha Plimpton and Ryan Reynolds, who were very close with Mr. Gilliland, were among those who shared memories on social media.
Reynolds, who called Mr. Gilliland’s mother to express condolences, wrote on Facebook that he joined Gilliland’s circles after they met at the writer’s “Roseanne” office.
“He introduced me to vaudeville and Jack Benny and welcomed me into his friend circle of impossibly talented writers and performers,” the “Deadpool & Wolverine” star wrote. “He was my university. He helped me grow and find my voice. And he did all of it while finding himself.”
Plimpton wrote: “The world is a less happy and laughter-filled place without my friend, Eric Gilliland.”
In addition to his mother, Mr. Gilliland is survived by his sister, Lisa Gilliland.
Services will be held in New York.