I don’t know about you, but the first Mel Brooks movie I laughed so hard at I almost wet myself was Young Frankenstein. (Frahnkensteen?) I was a huge monster movie fan as a kid, always staying up to watch Creature Feature on WGN and then Elvira when we got her on UHF. I’m not sure which hurt worse, watching Gene Hackman almost kill him with kindness or the tap dancing.

I wasn’t a huge Ray Ramano fan but again, Boyle made that show for me. He will be missed.

(CBS/AP) Peter Boyle, the tall, prematurely bald actor who was the tap-dancing monster in “Young Frankenstein” and the curmudgeonly father in the long-running sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond,” has died. He was 71.

The veteran character actor died Tuesday evening in New York after a long battle with multiple myeloma and heart disease, his publicist, Jennifer Plante, told The ShowBuzz Wednesday.

A Christian Brothers monk who turned to acting, Boyle gained notice playing an angry working man in the Vietnam-era hit “Joe.” But he overcame typecasting when he took on the role of the hulking, lab-created monster in Mel Brooks’ 1974 send-up of horror films.

The movie’s defining moment came when Gene Wilder, as scientist Frederick Frankenstein, introduced his creation to an upscale audience. Boyle, decked out in tails, performed a song-and-dance routine to the Irving Berlin classic “Puttin’ On the Ritz.”