NEW YORK, NY.- Bob Booker, a veteran comedy writer best known for “The First Family,” the 1962 album lampooning President John F. Kennedy and his family, which was such a runaway hit that crowds gathered at record stores to hear it, died July 12 at his home in Tiburon, California. He was 92.

The cause was heart failure, his daughter Laura Booker said.

Today “The First Family,” on which stand-up comedian Vaughn Meader voiced a spot-on Kennedy, is a time capsule of somewhat corny humor and political innocence.

But the Camelot-hungry public ate up its parodies of a whispery Jacqueline Kennedy conducting a White House tour and Meader as the president, in broad Bostonese, insisting that “the rubbah swan” — a bathtub toy — belonged to him, and that he would cross a room “with great vigah.”

Its lines became catchphrases repeated in everyday conversations before the era of internet memes.

“The First Family,” written by Booker and Earle Doud, became the fastest-selling album of the pre-Beatles era, selling 1.2 million copies in the first two weeks and 7.5 million in all, according to The Associated Press. It won the Grammy Award for album of the year in May 1963.

Six months later, on Nov. 22, the president’s assassination rendered it an instant artifact. Meader retired his Kennedy impression, but he remained forever fused with it and saw his career evaporate.

Booker never again achieved the same kind of breakout success, but he went on to have a busy decadeslong career as a writer and producer in the record and television industries.

With a new partner, George Foster, he wrote and produced 14 more comedy albums through 1977. They included “You Don’t Have to Be Jewish” (1965), whose cast was booked for “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and “When You’re in Love the Whole World Is Jewish” (1966).

In fact, Booker was not Jewish. “But I’m attracted to Jewish humor,” he told The New York Times in 1997. “It’s classic. And my wife is half Jewish.”

Booker had married Barbara Noonan, a dancer with the Martha Graham company, in Las Vegas in 1968. The eccentric singer Tiny Tim, who was headlining at Caesars Palace, was the best man.

For television, Booker, sometimes working with his wife, produced numerous variety shows, including 13 episodes of “NBC Follies,” starring Sammy Davis Jr. (1973), and specials for Paul Lynde and Wayne Newton.

In 1984, he created “Foul-Ups, Bleeps & Blunders,” a humorous showcase of movie and television outtakes hosted by Don Rickles and Steve Lawrence, which ran intermittently over two seasons on ABC.

Booker was born Aug. 1, 1931, in Jacksonville, Florida, one of two sons of Robert Henry Booker, a semiprofessional golfer, and Bernice (Ingalls) Booker, a former actress. He graduated from Landon High School in Jacksonville when he was 16.

“I got through high school on laughs — I was the class clown, in my senior year I never went to any class but I hosted or M.C.’d every entertainment event,” Booker wrote in “Behind the Scenes in Hollywood,” a memoir he published himself in 2015.

He began a career in radio in 1958 as a disc jockey at WINZ, an AM station in Miami. He interviewed, often in their hotels, the parade of entertainers who performed in Miami in its golden era as a rival to Las Vegas, including Jack Benny, Tony Bennett, Louis Armstrong, Connie Francis and Ava Gardner.

After Booker moved to New York, he and Doud developed the concept for “The First Family.” They met resistance at first. Major record labels thought the demo they recorded was either unfunny or insulting to the office of the president.

“They’ll love it in Moscow,” James Hagerty, a former press secretary to President Dwight D. Eisenhower who was advising ABC News, said after hearing the demo in the office of the president of ABC Television, who also oversaw the company’s record division, according to Booker’s memoir.

ABC passed on the project.

Booker and Doud ended up signing with Cadence Records, a small independent label.

The cast, which included Naomi Brossart as Jackie Kennedy, recorded 17 skits before a live audience on Oct. 22, 1962. It was the night Kennedy announced a naval blockade at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, but no one in the theater audience knew it at the time, and the laughter pealed forth.

When the record was released in November, Booker and Doud brought a copy to WINS in New York, where Booker had been a fill-in for Murray the K, a popular DJ. The station played “The First Family” nonstop for three hours. Its phones rang off the hook. The two writers hustled copies by cab to other radio stations across Manhattan.

In his memoir, Booker wrote that a White House correspondent for United Press International, Merriman Smith, told him that he had been present when Kennedy played the entire album at a Cabinet meeting on a portable record player. The president laughed repeatedly.

Asked at a news conference on Dec. 12, 1962, what he thought of “The First Family,” Kennedy said, “Actually, I listened to Mr. Meader’s record, but I thought it sounded more like Teddy than it did me.”

Riding the momentum of the album’s sales, the cast recorded a sequel, “The First Family Volume Two,” and played a monthlong gig at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas. Booker and Doud — soon to part ways — cashed their first royalty check, for $1 million.

Booker was at lunch in New York when he heard the news of Kennedy’s death. “I raced back to my office, on the way making the decision that I was not going to profit from the frenzied scramble for Kennedy memorabilia that was already afoot,” he wrote. He called the record company, and the decision was made to withdraw every copy of “The First Family” and its sequel, released that spring, from record stores.

“The records were recalled and broken up at a depot in New Jersey that week,” he wrote. They were not reissued until 1999.

Besides his daughter Laura, Booker is survived by his wife of 55 years; another daughter, Courtney Wilkens; and four grandchildren.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.