John Mulrooney, a comedian whose career took him around the world and aboard Albany’s airwaves for morning commutes, died suddenly at his Coxsackie home on Dec. 29; the cause of death was not immediately available. He was 67.
“I’m just stunned,” said Steve Van Zandt, who became close friends with Mulrooney after the pair became office neighbors and post-work breakfast companions while working for WROW and The Edge, respectively. “To talk to somebody less than two weeks ago, and he had mentioned what he was doing for Christmas, and he was looking forward to 2026 because he had a pretty full calendar … It’s all so unexpected. It’s still sinking in.”
The Brooklyn-born funnyman was best known in the Capital Region for his time on air with WPYX and WPDH. Beginning in the late 1990s, Mulrooney co-hosted WPYX’s morning show with Bob “The Wolf” Wohlfeld. The pair even briefly experimented with a dual-city broadcast by moving out to Cleveland in 2000. Mulrooney left WPYX to pursue work in California in 2005 and later returned to upstate New York to join the Poughkeepsie-based WPDHin 2010. In 2014, he debuted “Mulrooney in the Morning” on iHeartRadio…