Pelham, MA – Chris O’Carroll (Christopher Smith O’Carroll), a poet who also enjoyed careers as an actor, stand-up comedian, and journalist, died at Cooley Dickinson Hospital on June 9, 2026. He was 74 and had been treated in recent years for metastatic cancers of the colon and pancreas.
Born Charles Christopher Smith in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1951, he was the eldest of eight children born to Margaret (Cox) Smith, an early childhood educator who co-founded the Amherst Montessori School, and Francis D. Smith, a teacher, novelist, and Hampshire College’s founding dean of humanities and arts.
In 1972, Chris married Karen Manners Smith, who would become a scholar and author specializing in American history. The couple met in New Orleans as members of The Process, a religious cult founded in England by renegade Scientologists. They left the cult in 1974.
From 1975 to 1980, Chris was a writer and editor for the “Valley Advocate,” serving as that weekly newspaper’s arts and entertainment editor, and briefly as managing editor. Many Valley folk still remember his witty columns and film reviews. He subsequently freelanced for a variety of publications, and worked as a writer and editor for “Contact” (later known by other names), a magazine published by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
He lived for a short time in England during his wife’s graduate student days, and for 20 years in Kansas, where she was a professor at Emporia State University.
He adopted the stage name Chris O’Carroll when he began performing stand-up comedy in 1987, and changed his name legally in 2002. Having done his first professional acting at the Provincetown Playhouse on Cape Cod in 1970, he finally earned his card as a member of the Actors Equity union in 2008. He acted locally at Smith College, UMass, Mount Holyoke College Summer Theatre, and the Majestic Theater in West Springfield, and further afield at Mill Mountain Theatre (Roanoke, VA), Theater at Monmouth (ME), Lost Nation Theater (Montpelier, VT), Horse Cave Theatre (KY), St. Croix Festival Theatre (WI), Jukwaa Mazoa (Portsmouth, NH), and other regional companies. His favorite roles, he said, included Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol,” Friar Lawrence in “Romeo and Juliet,” Frank in “Educating Rita,” and Eeyore in “Winnie-the-Pooh.”
In 2000, he self-published “Take These Rhymes . . . Please: Rude Limericks and Other Crimes Against Literature,” which he sold at comedy club appearances. His other works included the chapbook “Shakespeare’s Marijuana and Other Poems the Authorities Don’t Want You to Read” (self-published in 2002); “The Joke’s on Me” (2018) and “Abracadabratude” (2022), both published by White Violet Press; and “Quantum Creed” (2024) and “Ridiculous Positions” (2026), both from Human Error Publishing. His poems appeared in several volumes of the “Potcake Chapbooks” series as well as in “An Amaranthine Summer,” “The Best of the Barefoot Muse,” “Extreme Sonnets,” “The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology,” “New York City Haiku,” and “Poems for a Liminal Age,” among other collections. He frequently contributed to online poetry journals such as Light and Snakeskin.
He is survived by his wife; three sisters and four brothers; son Noah Smith and his wife, Amanda Atkinson, of Broomall, Pennsylvania; son Abraham Smith and his wife, Jocelyn Christensen, of Los Angeles; and six grandchildren.
Chris donated his body to medical science. A memorial will take place at a date in the near future.
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