Lauren Dombrowski, at 51; 'MADtv' writer, producer

LAUREN DOMBROWSKI

Lauren Dombrowski found humor in everything from mimicking Boston's ubiquitous college students in her stand-up routines to musing wistfully about an octogenarian uncle's hairdo when her own locks had fallen prey to chemotherapy. And yet she never lost sight of what she wanted to accomplish as she told or wrote jokes.

"You can poke people without cutting them and making them bleed," Ms. Dombrowski told The Hollywood Reporter five years ago. "Usually, your gut tells you [when] you're crossing some line. Generally, [we] don't want to kick somebody just because they're down. It feels a lot better to kick them because they deserve it."

One of the few women who performed regularly in Boston's comedy scene a quarter century ago when it was a fertile ground nurturing the careers of her friends Denis Leary and Steven Wright, she most recently had risen through the ranks of television, becoming a head writer and co-executive producer of the Fox show "MADtv."

Ms. Dombrowski, who learned she had cancer 10 days after her honeymoon in 2001, died Oct. 8 in her Los Angeles home. She was 51.

"The night she died, her house was just full of people," said her twin sister, Lynne DiCristina of Carlisle. "I can't count how many people told me, 'I wouldn't be sober without your twin' . . . 'I wouldn't be working' . . . 'Your sister told me I could write and now I'm a writer.' And on and on it went. I knew her better than anybody and I was amazed."

The baby of her family by two minutes, Ms. Dombrowski nevertheless became the guiding hand in many encounters throughout her life, and she was a commanding presence on stage or in front of a classroom.

She was "a younger, hipper answer to Joan Rivers," a Globe critic wrote in 1985 after watching Ms. Dombrowski perform in the finals of WBCN's Comedy Riot at the club Stitches.

Three years later, another Globe reporter watched Ms. Dombrowski captivate a very different venue when she worked as an alcohol counselor with eight girls at a Cambridge middle school that focused on keeping teenagers from dropping out: "Many students here have had rough academic or personal lives. But these girls were intent on Dombrowski's every word, apparently remembering everything she had taught them the week before."

Though Ms. Dombrowski spent many working hours in front of audiences, the experience was not always pleasant, and she achieved some renown on a few occasions for retiring from stand-up, then returning.

"She had a wicked stage fright, believe it or not," her sister said. "She used to pace, and it really was terrible. I think that was the one thing [that] turned her toward the writing end of things. She just got sick of the fear."

More than a dozen years ago, Ms. Dombrowski moved to Los Angeles, where she steadily rose through the ranks at 'MADtv.'

"She was hysterically funny, truly one of the funniest people I've ever met, and she was funny up to the last day of her life," said Michael Hitchcock, a co-executive producer at 'MADtv' who has acted in movies such as "Waiting for Guffman," "Best in Show," and "A Mighty Wind."

"One of the last things she said to me was that if she had the strength, she would kick Sarah Palin in the butt - and she meant it," Hitchcock said. "She was a lifelong Democrat who watched every debate, and she said she wished she could have lived long enough to vote for Barack Obama."

Along with being an incisive producer for the show and a gifted mimic, Hitchcock said, Ms. Dombrowski also was "very supportive of other women in the entertainment business. She went out of her way to hire female writers on 'MADtv' and support them."

At Emerson College, where she studied acting and graduated in 1979, Ms. Dombrowski performed in a sketch group founded by Leary, who attended at the same time. For years afterward she was a stalwart of the Boston comedy scene, which she and many other standup comics saw as different from other places they performed around the country.

"We're a little quirky here - and Boston crowds like that," Ms. Dombrowski told the Globe in 1990. "It's also an intelligent scene, so the crowds are more open to new material."

About a decade ago, already working in TV, she met a guy in Los Angeles who had grown up in Dorchester.

"I was so smitten by her, and her sense of humor rang so true in my head, that I instantly fell in love with her and knew we were the perfect match," said Marko Babineau, whom she married in 2001. "We grew up about 12 miles apart. We had similar friends and came to find out that we had been at parties when we were probably in the same room and didn't know each other. It's funny how things happen."

As a child growing up in Lynnfield, Ms. Dombrowski launched her stage career in a production that didn't exactly presage the sometimes unprintable material she occasionally used in stand-up: She was the Virgin Mary in a second-grade play. But even then, she was sure what lay ahead.

"I remember when she was really little, she told my sister that she was going to be a comedian when she grew up, and damned if she wasn't," her sister said. "Her idol was Dick Van Dyke. She really emulated him and got a chance to meet him."

And though as a performer she got to rub shoulders with the famous, "my twin was the exact same person with the bag boy at Gelson's, the market where she shopped, as she was with Bob Newhart," DiCristina said. "She never, ever changed who she was with anybody."

In addition to her husband and her twin, Ms. Dombrowski leaves her mother and father, Fran (Coughlin) and Joe, of York, Maine; and two other sisters, Jean of Watertown and Judy of Boston.

A funeral Mass will be said at 11 a.m. Saturday in St. Christopher Church in York, Maine.