He never thought of the era when he wrote TV comedy as the Golden Age. For him that honorific was reserved for the earlier epoch of Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner. But Marty Nadler, staff writer and producer in the 70s and 80s of Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Chico and the Man, The Odd Couple, Perfect Strangers, Valerie, and Amen, was part of a time in Hollywood entertainment that, hands down, is considered Most Funny.

He knew them all. Was friends with them all. Once he and Freddie Prinze worked together on a Chico script. They argued about a joke. Freddie reached into his briefcase, pulled out a gun and laid it on it on the coffee table. “Okay, Freddie, the line stays in the script,” Marty quipped. It was only some months later when Prinze fatally shot himself that Marty realized the display of the gun had perhaps been a cry for help.

In earlier days, Marty at four in the morning, stood on a New York street corner in Hell’s Kitchen after a night of comedy at the Improvisation. He was accompanied by David Brenner, Jimmie Walker, Mike Preminger, Richard Lewis and Steve Landesberg. They were on their way to breakfast before going home to sleep during the day, then to wake up in mid-afternoon to prepare for another all-nighter of comedy. Someone said something that cracked up all the others. A squad car stopped and a typically laconic New York cop leaned out to say, “What are you guys, a buncha comedians?” which made them laugh all the harder.

Marty, now 65, grew up in the Bronx on Mosholu Parkway. He was relentless in his role of class clown. Once when a teacher left the room, Marty borrowed a classmate’s sneakers and dangled them over the edge of the three-story windowsill. When the teacher returned, Marty mimed struggling with the shoes, crying, “Hang on, Herbie, I’ve got you!”

When the time came to gravitate to higher education, he enrolled in the theater arts department at Ithaca College: Humor was his medium and the only business that paid for it was show business. His closest buddy turned out to be Jeff Kramer, grandson of Henry Cronig, who, as legend has it, once owned half the real estate on Martha’s Vineyard. Kramer convinced his classmates to perform summer stock theatre on the Island. The Vineyard Players enjoyed a good run, presenting mostly commercial material such as Neil Simon’s plays and, once, something called Natalie Needs a Nightie on the stage of the old Oak Bluffs School gym.

After Ithaca and the Players, Marty joined the hoards of aspiring actors in New York. He garnered small roles, invariably cast as a scruffy waiter. It was the time of the Viet Nam War, so young men dodged the draft with college, quickie marriages, and jobs for which their bosses could attest to their essentialness. Marty won a position doing dinner theatre, traveling through the South. Once when he performed in The Odd Couple, the stage was lowered by pulleys, and the front cables suddenly snapped. All the furniture and Marty and the other three actors, spilled out onto the audience.

After several years of doing stand-up comedy at the New York Improvisation, Rising Star and other clubs in the city, Marty flew to Cincinnati to perform on a radio show produced by an old buddy from Ithaca, Steve Shifman. Steve told Marty when the show was completed, “I can buy you plane fare back to New York or a ticket to Los Angeles. Your choice.”

Marty chose LA. The only two people he knew in LA from the Bronx were Rob Reiner and Penny Marshall. Penny picked him up at LAX and put him up at her house. In the meantime, Marty wrote material for his old Improv buddy, Jimmie Walker, who’d become a star on Good Times (“Dy-no-mite!” was the exclamation he made famous). Marty also wrote for another comic star of a different show, whom he found unpleasant to the point that Marty fantasized the guy’s obit in the Hollywood Reporter: “[Comic’s Name] Dies, Mourners Hired.”

Eventually Penny Marshall said to Marty, “You’ve got to meet my brother, Garry. He’s doing some television shows.” Marty got hired as an apprentice writer on Happy Days, quickly moving up the ranks to story editor. From there he went on to produce Laverne and Shirley. His future wife met him on the day she arrived at his office and pitched 44 ideas to him. It took three and a half hours. Later she learned producers and story editors preferred that the writer bring in two or three solid ideas rather than 44 crummy ones. Nonetheless she was hired — one of the notions was good; Squiggy helps Shirley with her zipper, they’re observed, and it’s tattled around the factory that they’re an item, after which Squiggy is made to recant over the sound system.

In 1978, Marty and the freelance writer were married on the shores of Seth’s Pond. In 1981 they bought a seaside house on East Chop. In 1984 they had a son, Charlie, and in 1991 when Charlie was ready to enter the second grade, just after Hurricane Bob swept over the Island, the Nadlers moved here year-round.

Marty still works for Garry on his movies as an on-set writer and a cameo actor: Pretty Woman, Frankie and Johnnie, Runaway Bride, The Other Sister, New Year’s Eve and, filming last May in New York, Valentine’s Day, starring a roster of famous actors including Julia Roberts, Ashton Kutcher and Jon Bon Jovi. For some reason Garry usually casts Marty as a scruffy pervert.

For years now, Marty has been focusing his funny take on Island antics in his one-man show, Very Vineyard. Every winter in Florida he receives the Island papers and takes his cues from our admittedly hilarious, scary, unique and absurd goings-on.

He’ll he performing on Thursday, August 25, at 7:30 at the Hebrew Center in Vineyard Haven. Go and see Very Vineyard. This guy is very funny.

Holly Nadler is no longer married to Marty but still enjoys laughing with him.