Richard Belzer is pictured on the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival in New York.

Charles Sykes/Invision/AP

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Charles Sykes/Invision/AP

Richard Belzer is pictured on the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival in New York.

Charles Sykes/Invision/AP

NEW YORK — Richard Belzer, the longtime slapstick comedian who grew to become one among TV’s most indelible detectives as John Munch in Homicide: Life on the Street and Law & Order: SVU, has died. He was 78.

Belzer died Sunday at his residence in Bozouls in southern France, his longtime good friend Bill Scheft told The Hollywood Reporter. Comedian Laraine Newman first introduced his dying on Twitter. The actor Henry Winkler, Belzer’s cousin, wrote “Rest in peace Richard.”

For greater than twenty years and throughout 10 collection — even together with appearances on 30 Rock and Arrested Development — Belzer performed the wise-cracking, acerbic murder detective susceptible to conspiracy theories. Belzer first performed Munch on a 1993 episode of Homicide and final performed him in 2016 on Law & Order: SVU.

Belzer by no means auditioned for the function. After listening to him on The Howard Stern Show, government producer Barry Levinson introduced the comic in to learn for the half.

“I would never be a detective. But if I were, that’s how I’d be,” Belzer as soon as mentioned. “They write to all my paranoia and anti-establishment dissidence and conspiracy theories. So it’s been a lot of fun for me. A dream, really.”

From that unlikely starting, Belzer’s Munch would grow to be one among tv’s longest-running characters and a sunglasses-wearing presence on the small display screen for greater than twenty years. In 2008, Belzer revealed the novel I Am Not a Cop! with Michael Ian Black. He additionally helped write a number of books on conspiracy theories, about issues like President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

“He made me laugh a billion times,” his longtime good friend and fellow stand-up Richard Lewis mentioned on Twitter.

Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Belzer was drawn to comedy, he mentioned, throughout an abusive childhood wherein his mom would beat him and his older brother, Len. “My kitchen was the toughest room I ever worked,” Belzer instructed People journal in 1993.

After being expelled from Dean Junior College in Massachusetts, Belzer launched into a lifetime of stand-up in New York in 1972. At Catch a Rising Star, Belzer grew to become a daily. He made his big-screen debut in Ken Shapiro’s 1974 movie The Groove Tube, a TV satire co-starring Chevy Chase, a movie that grew out of the comedy group Channel One that Belzer was part of.

Before Saturday Night Live modified the comedy scene in New York, Belzer carried out with John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray and others on the National Lampoon Radio Hour. In 1975, he grew to become the warm-up comedian for the newly launched SNL. While many forged members shortly grew to become well-known, Belzer’s roles had been largely smaller cameos. He later mentioned SNL creator Lorne Michaels reneged on a promise to work him into the present.