I post this video with the full knowledge that it's going to piss off some people.

COVID Years aside, there's been a Comic-Con International — the early ones had different names — every summer since 1970. Having been to evert one of them, I've seen it grow and change but among the constants is that news reporters wander around with TV cameras and what airs is usually full of errors and sometimes, a good deal of condescension.

What we have here now is a collection of reports over the years from one San Diego TV station. Some of their correspondents kinda understood what they were covering. Some clearly did not…and there's a lot of plain ol' misinformation there. There's also (for me) too much emphasis on cosplay and what things cost but I absolutely understand why a newsperson might think that's what will pique the interest of their viewers.

I wince at some of the "facts" but it is fun to see images from conventions past…and old friends. Among the folks I see in this video who are no longer with us are Bob Beerbohm, Bruce Hamilton, Ernie Chan, Bob Clampett, June Foray, Jim Korkis and Ray Bradbury. So enjoy this if you can. Just don't go believing this is what Comic-Con is all about…

Here's another visit that Charles Grodin paid to Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. As you'll see, Mr. Grodin is playing surlier and surlier. And he was such a good actor that many people believed he was really like that…

Sometimes, you come across a memory in the oddest place. I recently opened a drawer looking for one thing and found two old ticket stubs to the Hermosa Beach Playhouse located, amazingly, in Hermosa Beach, California. They were from October 29, 2002 — a little over 23 years and one month ago.  That was the day four of us — my friend Carolyn, my friend Gordon Kent, Gordon's lovely wife (and my friend) Donna and Yours Truly — went there to see a show I'd heard good things about.  It was called An Evening with Groucho and it starred a gent named Frank Ferrante who, word had it, did an uncanny and respectful impersonation of Groucho Marx.

We had what I recall as a not-very-good dinner at a nearby restaurant, then went to the playhouse and took our seats.  Gordon was, as I am, a staunch Marx Brothers fan and he was probably harder to impress than I was.

The play started…as most plays do.  This Frank Ferrante guy entered and I don't recall the specifics of what he did.  What I do remember is that within a minute or two, I could relax and think, "Oh, this is good."  Because we've all sat through things that weren't and the meal we'd just had was bad enough.  And I recall looking over at Gordon a couple minutes later into the play and he was laughing and obviously very pleased, as well.

And what I really remember is after the show.  Mr. Ferrante, still in full Groucho drag, was out in the lobby posing for photos and also selling and signing CDs.  There was a long line because everyone in the house (it seemed) wanted to at least tell him how much they enjoyed the show. It meant a long wait but we wanted to tell him how much we'd enjoyed what he did on stage.

We were the last ones in that line and we must have talked for twenty minutes. Frank was charming and funny and we've been good friends since that evening. I've probably seen him perform a dozen times, often traveling great distances to do so, and I've always enjoyed what he does. I've even seen him play Pseudolus in a production of my favorite musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. He was terrific and believe me: If he wasn't, I'd be on this blog and friendship or no friendship, I'd say so. I'm very particular about my Pseudoluses.

It made me happy to find those stubs and to realize just how long I've known this guy. He's about to embark on a series of shows in Florida playing one of his non-Groucho identities. If you live down there, here's his schedule. He's funny even when the mustache isn't painted-on.

If you haven't been invited to a great party Wednesday evening, cheer up…because now you have!  Stu Shostak, the genial host of the popular Stu's Show podcast is throwing an online party with his lovely spouse, Jeanine Kasun!  They'll have great guests, songs, jokes, rare videos and almost anything else you could want to kick the year off right.  (Afraid you'll have to supply your own refreshments and funny hat.)

When does this party start?  When you get there, of course, but the official time is 11 PM on the East Coast, 8 PM on the West Coast!

Where can I see it?  Lots of places but especially on Roku, Facebook and Stu's website.  Check out this page on Stu's website to find out your best path to all the fun! In fact, check out this page — the page you're reading right this minute. I'm going to try to stream it here.

Who else is coming?  Well, you'll be there of course but Stu's official guests are radio icon Shotgun Tom Kelly, author Gary Kaskal and author-blogger Mark Evanier! I'll be there. Well, I'll be here at my home but I'll be Zooming in to chat with Stu about guess-what-book and I think I'm his last interview of the night.

So join us as we usher in a year that will be better than last year. Why do I assume that? Because it just has to be.

My mention of character actor Will B. Able the other day brought some e-mails with info about him. Thanks to all of you and especially Jeff Abraham.

I'm not sure why I'm so interested in Mr. Able except that he was in a lot of TV shows I watched when I was younger — and at 6'5" and having a body as malleable as Plastic Man's, he was easy to notice. He was also in one of my favorite movies, The Night They Raided Minsky's. He played "Clyde," whose name was not mentioned in the film nor did he have any lines…but he was the tall, skinny dancer doing anatomically-impossible moves in several numbers.

Mr. Able — who, by the way. was born Willard S. Achorn in 1923 — appeared on TV now and then but mostly toured the country in two kinds of plays — fairy tales for children and burlesque shows for adults. The fairy tale roles came about because of his involvement with the Prince Street Players, a group that presented original musical versions of classic stories. Some of these were taped and aired as prime-time specials on CBS.

I don't know how many of them were broadcast but four of them are on YouTube. I won't embed them here because I doubt anyone will watch them but if for some reason you want a peek, you can click on the following shows' names to get one. In no particular order, they were Jack and the Beanstalk (Able played — who else? — The Giant), Aladdin (Able played The Genie), Pinocchio (Able played Antonio) and The Emperor's New Clothes (Able played Emperor Maximillion the Most).

These were all original musicals written by Jim Eiler, Jeanne Bargy and sometimes Richard Hayman. They all featured a lot of the same performers (including Able's wife, Graziella) and I believe the scripts, if not the entire productions, had lives as stage productions, as well. That was one kind of show Mr. and Ms. Able did.

At other times, they toured — or did time in Reno or Vegas — in a burlesque show called the Will B. Able Baggy Pants & Company Burlesque — and I'm going to guess that it started because of the success of Ann Corio's This Was Burlesque, a show that toured for many years and spawned many imitations. Ms. Corio had been a star burlesque performer but as the circuit for such shows disappeared, she made a new one, assembling touring shows that purported to re-create an evening at a burlesque house.

Her casts were drawn from the vast pool of veteran burley-q performers who were now outta work, including my old friend Dexter Maitland, who was also in the Minsky's movie. I recall reading somewhere — or maybe Dexter told me — that theaters and auditoriums could book the Corio shows in two versions: With or without women who removed clothing on stage. Presumably, the ladies who disrobed were too young to have been seasoned, veteran burlesque performers. Dexter starred in burlesque shows, for Corio and others, well into his nineties.

There were several of these traveling burlesque shows and in the early days of "cable channels" (as we called them then) like HBO and Showtime, such shows were taped and aired. Those new networks wanted to offer something you couldn't get on regular broadcast TV and some of what they aired seemed to have been selected for its naughty language or naughty nudity.  A lot of it also did not involve hiring members of The Writers Guild or other labor organizations. That meant comedy could come from stand-up comedians and touring shows like the burlesque ones. The sketches in the burlesque revues were all or mostly old public domain material.

I was going to embed a video of one here but these have not aged well. Some of the content is classic comedy but a lot of it is just embarrassing today. If you absolutely must see one, here's a link to one of Ann Corio's that brought in Morey Amsterdam as a "name." [CAUTION: Contains semi-naked women, cheap sexist jokes and Dexter Maitland.]  Note that in the long, long list of credits at the end, there is no mention of any writers.

The Will B. Able Baggy Pants & Company Burlesque show premiered on HBO on August 27, 1978 about three years before he passed away.  It reran many, many, many times. I recall seeing it on OnTV, SelecTV or Theta Cable — all services which were briefly available to bring "pay" programming to Los Angeles.

I haven't seen Able's show since and I have the feeling I'm remembering it as better than it was.  But I've always had a certain fascination with non-mainstream Show Business. We all know about performers who star in real movies, network TV series and Broadway shows…but there are also performers who spend most months of their lives in touring shows. Will B. Able seems to have been one of them and, like I said, he always stood out.

So is this whole Epstein Files mess going to boil down to Donald Trump insisting that all the mentions of Democrats are absolutely true and those people should all be in prison, whereas all the mentions of him are phony? I dunno how much of the population's going to buy that. I think by now most of the folks who supported Trump know that he reflexively says that about anything and everything that reflects badly on him. They might say he's a great and moral leader. They might tell pollsters that. But I think they just have a lower opinion of the Dems.

In American politics, you don't support the one you like most. You support the one you fear least. And you try to convince others and maybe yourself he's all you want him to be.

That's what I think. At least at four in the morning.

Here's a full episode of The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast so we get to play our little game, figuring out who was there and who was taped at another time and maybe place and edited in. This is a roast of George Burns and it originally aired on May 17, 1978. Let's start by taking note of who enters from the left to sit on the left side of the dais and who's on the right…

• ENTERING FROM THE LEFT: Gene Kelly, Dom DeLuise, Ronald Reagan, LaWanda Page, Jimmy Stewart, Milton Berle, Don Rickles, Orson Welles, Jack Carter
• ENTERING FROM THE RIGHT: Connie Stevens, Red Buttons, Abe Vigoda, Tom Dreesen, Phyllis Diller, Frank Welker.

That's fifteen people plus Dean and the honoree so they have seventeen people allegedly on the dais. But in the wide shot, there are only fourteen. Rickles, Stewart and Reagan have disappeared. As the show progresses, it's obvious that Stewart and Reagan were taped at another time and place with none of the others present. There's not even a shot of either man with the honoree.

Rickles is only seen on the dais briefly when he's introduced. Ruth Buzzi was not introduced or seated in the opening but later, you see her on the dais occupying a seat.

The way they did these was to first tape the walk-ons. shots of each roaster laughing and shots of most roasters (not all) walking from their seats to the dais. Then as roasters finished their spots at the lectern, they could leave. Frank Welker told me that when he taped his speech, the only folks present were Dean, George Burns and himself — and crew members were surprised Dean stayed as long as he did. Sometimes, director Greg Garrison would record all of Dean's intros at the top in case Dean got bored and wanted to leave.

A friend of mine who's made a careful study of these roasts says that sometimes, they reused footage of someone seated on the dais and laughing from another show. All the men were wearing tuxedos so a shot of, say, Orson Welles laughing at one roast could be reused on another roast.

When I was starting out, I sold five jokes to the show — to Harry Crane, who was then the head writer. Two of them were read off the cue cards by Dean in their roast of Dan Rowan and Dick Martin. I asked Mr. Crane about the others they'd paid me (not much) for. He said they were taped but edited out and he was going to switch them to other celebs and use them in other shows but I never saw them on air. That's how patchwork all these shows were…

Joe Gulick read this piece here (and probably others) and he writes to ask…

I was not familiar with the remarkable work of Western Publishing comics editor Chase Craig before I read about him in your blog, I began my love of comic books with Dell Comics and am very interested in Western, which also later published Gold Key comics. You said Carl Barks' Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck stories were among the many books he edited and wrote how Barks told you when you first met him that you were lucky to be working with Chase Craig.

I would like to know from Chase Craig's perspective about what it was like to work with Barks. I know Walt Disney's Comics and Stories was very popular and would assume Barks comics were among his best selling comics. It is interesting to me that of all the millions of readers worldwide who have enjoyed Carl Barks duck comics that Chase was likely the very first person to read so many of those wonderfully clever, creative and entertaining stories.

A brilliant and prolific creator such as Barks was a great asset to Western Publishing. What was it like for Chase to be his editor?

We talked about this and Chase thought Carl was a true treasure. He felt that way about a lot of the writers and artists who worked for him but he certainly felt that way about a man like Carl who never gave him any trouble. The work would come in on time and it was loved by everyone in the company and — and this may have been more important — almost everyone at Disney. The only exceptions at Disney were a couple of guys who didn't feel that Barks was drawing Donald "right." To them, Al Taliaferro — who drew the Donald Duck comic strip — drew Donald properly and Barks didn't. Chase dealt with this by going over their heads to Walt and getting him to rule that what Barks was doing was acceptable.

Chase said that being Barks' editor was easy. One of Chase's main contributions was to decide what order to print the stories in. The folks at Western worked way ahead of schedule on the ongoing books. A new book — something they weren't yet certain would be published indefinitely — might not get too far ahead but there was nothing wrong with Carl being months and months ahead on stories of Donald or Scrooge. That meant that Chase could swap around stories. If Carl did something that was a little similar to something he or another writer had done that could have come out at the same time, Chase could move stories around and put a little distance between them.

One of the things I learned from Chase was that in most cases, the best editing is the least editing. And it's also about creating the right environment in which the work can be done and to have the right relationship with The Talent.

According to Chase, the biggest problem with Carl was that he kept saying he was burned out on the ducks and couldn't come up with another story. Every so often, he'd ask to be switched to something else. Chase would usually want him to stay right where he was so he'd sweet-talk or maybe give Carl the germ of an idea. But it really was a harmonious relationship and obviously, fine work resulted from it.

I forgot to say something bad about Donald Trump yesterday as I said I would…but don't worry. I'll make up for it before the weekend is over. Today, let's just focus on how CNN fact-checker — yes, they still have one — Daniel Dale has issued a list of what he considers Trump's Top 25 lies of 2025. How Mr. Dale was able to narrow the list down to 25 is unknown to me. Maybe he meant Yesterday's Top 25 lies…between Noon and 3 PM.

Around the age of thirteen, I started getting interested in girls and in silent movies. I don't think there was a connection. But I was reading everything I could find about the era of silent film and especially the comedies. It was not easy to see such films until I began going to a wonderful place on Fairfax Avenue called The Silent Movie Theater. I wrote about that wonderful place here.

Almost everything I read about silent comedies told me that the four outstanding comedians of that era were Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon. What I was able to see of the first three validated their presence on such a list but I wasn't able to see anything that convinced me of Langdon's worthiness. A half-dozen other comedians — especially Laurel and Hardy — made better silent comedies than the Langdon flicks that were available. I have since seen what critics said were his best films and I'm still not convinced.

Langdon certainly had the shortest stint at the top, box office-wise. All his best comedies were made in about four years and then things went off the rails. The great director Frank Capra — who wrote and/or directed some of those best films — claimed that the plunge was because Langdon had stopped working with the great director Frank Capra. Well, maybe.

Capra was a Guest of Honor at one of the first San Diego Cons — the one in 1974, the same one where I first met Charles Schulz. I had lunch with both men on different days and it just dawned on me that I should tell the story about My Lunch With Capra. I'll get to it soon. But over that lunch, I asked Mr. Capra about Langdon and from his point-of-view, Langdon was a man of modest talents who only produced great work when he did exactly as Frank Capra told him…and that was also true of Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, Peter Falk, Cary Grant and everyone else who ever appeared in a Frank Capra motion picture. I was more than a little skeptical of Mr. Capra's assertions.

But Langdon did go rather rapidly from being a major motion picture star to being a minor one who also worked as a gagman on the films of others. Here's an early two-reel talkie he made for the Hal Roach studio in 1930 — a considerable comedown for a man who, a few years earlier had been making high-grossing feature films for his own company. This is one of eight shorts he made for Roach in a series that did not merit continuance beyond the eight. If you watch it, I think you'll see why…

In 1951, CBS put on a five-episode series called The Ad-Libbers as a summer replacement show. It was, at least allegedly, an improvised, unscripted show in which a troupe of comic actors were given a premise and then they had to improvise a scene based on it. After the five episodes, it never returned and it's remembered today — when it's remembered at all — because one of the ad-libbers in it was a young actor named Jack Lemmon. Here's a few minutes from one episode…

And speaking of ad-libbing: Here's a short-lived game show from 1959 called Laugh Lines. On it, some comic actors were arranged in a scene and then a panel, comprised of four other funny people, had to make up lines to fit the "human cartoon." On the panel in this episode, we have Louis Nye (filling in for regular panelist Orson Bean), Dorothy Loudon, Mike Nichols and Elaine May. That's a pretty impressive panel.

The host was Dick Van Dyke and as some wise blogger said recently, "It's impossible to dislike anything with Dick Van Dyke singing, dancing and just being Dick Van Dyke." And here, he's just being Dick Van Dyke…and a bit awkward in the position of Game Show Host.

Also worth noting is that the troupe of actors in the "human cartoons" includes Noam Pitlik, who had quite a career later on as an actor and director, and Will B. Able. Mr. Able was a star on Broadway and TV — he was the Reverend Felcher on All in the Family — and had a great career doing eccentric stage dancing with his long, rubbery legs. I remember him being very funny on a burlesque-type revue, one of the earliest specials made for cable TV. But I can't find it or any mention of it anywhere online.

I am fascinated by the videos posted by the Ocean Conservation International. This is the group that sends out crews to help seals in Namibia who have become entangled in trash — mostly plastic — discarded by uncaring human beings. I even donate money to their mission.

There was one video recently which I can't find again. They rescued a seal that was being strangled by an old bikini top. Having once had a dream of that happening to me, I identified with the seal. I'd post that one if I could locate it but here's one where the rescuer really went to lengths to have a seal caught by some sort of plastic packing strip…

Here's a lovely article in the New York Times about Rob Reiner by Martin Scorcese and here's a lovely article in the New York Times about Rob Reiner by Stephen King.

Happy Today! And I hope your Christmas was as free of stress as mine was and that all the unfortunate weather didn't dampen your spirit or keep Santa from making a perfect landing on your roof. A lovely friend of mine spent the holiday here and last night, we watched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which neither of us had seen in a very long time. It's not among my favorite films but it's impossible to dislike anything with Dick Van Dyke singing, dancing or just being Dick Van Dyke. She's coming back for New Year's and so, it would seem, is the rain.

The soup can above is your tip-off that there won't be a whole lotta posting here for the next day or two. I'll post some video links. I'll say something bad about Trump. But you may have to find somewhere else on the World Wide Web — does anyone call it that anymore? — to entertain you. We'll be back full strength before long. Keep the holiday spirit alive until then and even after.

And in the #1 position this year here on newsfromme.com, we have the great commercial by R.O. Blechman who, Wikipedia tells us, is "an American animator, illustrator, children's book author, graphic novelist and editorial cartoonist whose work has been the subject of retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art and other institutions." He also made this terrific commercial for CBS one year…

And here's something I haven't posted before. It's from Saturday Night Live and Steve Stoliar thought I oughta share it with you…

That's it for this year's holiday videos on this blog. Hope you enjoyed some or all of them.