David Freedman (April 26, 1898 – December 8, 1936) was a Romanian-born American playwright and biographer who became known as the "King of the Gag-writers" in the early days of radio.

Israel, a political refugee, immigrated with his young family to the United States in 1900, where four years later, David's sister Sophie became the first Freedman born in the U.S. Freedman graduated from the City College of New York in 1918, the first in his family to complete a formal education beyond high school.

Similarly, Phantom Fame which he co-authored with the impresario Harry Reichenbach (1931) became the basis for the movie The Half-Naked Truth (1932).

On June 2, 2004, this classic comedy about an immigrant Jewish family living in the uncertain times of 1929 of the Lower East Side was read to a packed house at the North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach, California.

Four books by Freedman were translated into Russian and published by Ogonyok in 1926; they enjoyed tremendous popularity for a short period, and Mendel's witty "definitions" were quoted everywhere, but within a year they were eclipsed by the comic writings of Ilf and Petrov and Mikhail Zoshchenko, and soon were forgotten, although Anatoly Rybakov has a character quote Mendel in Children of the Arbat (set in 1933).

[2] His novel Mendel Marantz was republished as an audiobook in Russian in 2011, narrated by noted actors Klara Novikova, Leonid Kanevsky and others.