NEW YORK, NY.- Bob Tischler, who was part of the production and writing team that helped revive “Saturday Night Live” after the groundbreaking comedy show fell into a deep creative trough in the 1980-81 season, died July 13 at his home in Bodega Bay, California. He was 78.

His son, Zeke, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.

Bob Tischler did not define himself as a writer when he joined “SNL.” He was best known for his work in audio, having produced “The National Lampoon Radio Hour” and albums by the Blues Brothers.

“I produced a lot of comedy and I did writing, but I wasn’t a member of the union or anything,” Tischler told James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales for their book “Live From New York: An Uncensored History of ‘Saturday Night Live’” (2002).

“SNL” needed a lot of help. After five trailblazing seasons under Lorne Michaels, its first producer, it floundered under his successor, Jean Doumanian, whose only season was widely considered the show’s worst to date.

The show’s “flinty irreverence gave way a year ago to cheap shocks and worn-out formulas,” reporter Tony Schwartz wrote in a 1981 New York Times article.

Dick Ebersol, who replaced Doumanian as producer, hired Tischler as a supervisory producer in the spring of 1981 at the suggestion of the dark and temperamental Michael O’Donoghue, a veteran of the original “SNL" whom Ebersol had brought back as head writer, and who had known Tischler from the Lampoon radio show.

Tischler became the head writer early the next year after Ebersol fired O’Donoghue over a sketch in which he had portrayed Fred Silverman, who had recently resigned as NBC’s president, as Adolf Hitler. The sketch never ran because NBC deemed it potentially libelous.

“For starters, unlike Michael, Bob wanted the show to succeed,” Ebersol wrote in his autobiography, “From Saturday Night to Sunday Night: My Forty Years of Laughter, Tears, and Touchdowns in TV” (2022), “but more than that, he was exactly the leader the writers’ room needed — steady, calm and respected.”

Kevin Kelton, a writer for the show from 1983 to 1985, said in an interview that Ebersol “was a terrific producer, but he was not considered a great comedic mind. Bob was more forceful on the comedy side in terms of determining how to shape material and what material made the show. He mentored me, along with the rest of the writing staff.”

He added, “I’m not sure the show would have survived without Bob.”

The show gradually recovered — in large part because of the star power of Eddie Murphy, who had been underutilized by Doumanian but was championed by Tischler — and found firmer footing in the 1984-85 season with the addition to the cast of established performers like Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest and Martin Short.

By then, Tischler was the show’s producer, and Ebersol the executive producer.

Tischler was born June 12, 1946, in Englewood, New Jersey. His father, Leonard, owned a roofing company. His mother, Florence (Parets) Tischler, was an artist for an advertising agency.

Bob Tischler attended Ithaca College for two years before transferring to Franconia College in New Hampshire in 1966. He did not graduate.

He soon started work as a sound engineer for radio and TV commercials and movie trailers. At the Floyd Peterson studio, he cast Guest in a radio ad for the 1971 Joe Cocker concert film, “Mad Dogs & Englishmen.” Guest brought him into the Lampoon fold by helping to get him hired to produce the comedy magazine’s 1972 album, “Radio Dinner,” according to a 2014 profile of Tischler in Sound on Sound magazine.

In 1973, Tischler became the producer of “The National Lampoon Radio Hour,” which featured future “SNL” performers like Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Gilda Radner and Bill Murray. He went on to produce the Lampoon albums “Gold Turkey” in 1975 and “That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick” in 1977.

As a result of his growing friendship with Belushi, which began at the “Radio Hour,” Tischler was hired to produce “Briefcase Full of Blues,” the first album by Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, his “SNL” castmate, in their musical guises as Jake and Elwood Blues.

“Briefcase Full of Blues” rose to No. 1 on the Billboard album chart.

Tischler told Sound on Sound that Belushi “was more of a performer than a vocalist, and there was more soul and fun in his voice than ability, but he could still sing and the audience could really feel it.”

Tischler produced several more Blues Brothers albums, including the soundtrack for the hit 1980 film “The Blues Brothers,” which reached No. 13 on the Billboard chart, and “Made in America” (1980), which hit No. 49.

“‘Briefcase’ and ‘Made in America’ were all edited out of live footage,” Tom Malone, who played trombone and other instruments in the Blues Brothers band, said in an interview. “There’s no single take in there, so all the songs have as many as 30 edits. This was before digital, so you had to cut the tape with a razor blade. And Bob was dead-on with that.”

Tischler, who hired Malone as the “SNL” musical director, left the show in 1985 when Michaels returned, bringing his own producers and writers with him. Tischler continued to write for television shows, including the sitcoms “Empty Nest” and “Boy Meets World.” An episode of “Something So Right,” a comedy about a blended family, earned Tischler a Humanitas Prize for its exploration of the human condition.

He also produced the Billy Crystal album “Mahvelous” (1985) and reissue compilations of the work of Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin.

In addition to his son, Tischler is survived by his wife, Judith (English) Tischler, and his brother, Jim. His marriage to Belinda Horowitz ended in divorce.

Tischler’s role at “SNL” involved rewriting sketches and collaborating on others with Barry Blaustein and David Sheffield, with whom he fell into an easy rhythm.

“He had a very sharp comedy mind that had been honed during his years with the Lampoon and he knew the history of comedy,” Blaustein said by phone.

The three often wrote Murphy’s sketches, including those featuring his characters Buckwheat and Gumby.

“We had this thing for Eddie,” Tischler was quoted as saying in “Live From New York,” “because Eddie would take what we wrote and make it better every single time.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.