Monthly Archives: February 2003

Jerry Beck is a smart guy but I didn't know he was this smart.  (Note: That link currently redirects to a rave review of my book, Mad Art.  In a few days, that link will probably take you to a review Jerry has written of something else.  He may not be as smart about that.  The guy's watched a lot of cartoons, and we all know what that can do to your brain.)

Lately, my pick for the funniest/cleverest program on television would be The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.  In terms of sheer gutsy comedy, it makes Letterman, Leno and all the other late night guys look like Bob Hope performing in front of a president he just played golf with.  If you haven't watched it lately and you get Comedy Central, give it a peek.  One enormous source of humor has merely been to run clips of our president trying to explain something, and then cut to Stewart looking utterly stunned or aghast.  (Those who wish to convince me this is disrespectful of the presidency will have to show me proof they felt that way when TV comics were playing with that clip of Clinton denying he'd had sex with "that woman.")

All of the correspondents on The Daily Show are very funny, especially Stephen Colbert and Lewis Black.  The latter may well be the best "new" stand-up comedian of the last dozen years.  I laughed a lot at his recent commentary on protest demonstrations.  The Comedy Central website currently has it online but they make it beastly difficult to link directly to a clip.  If you have RealPlayer installed and if I've figured out how to do this correctly, this link should bring it up on your screen.  If it doesn't, go to the Comedy Central website, go to the page for The Daily Show, select "Featured Videos," then look for Lewis Black.  It's worth the scavenger hunt.

Here's an interesting nugget of TV history — a ticket to sit in the audience of the Steve Allen Tonight Show.  The year on this would be 1955 and the location is a building that's no longer at the northeast corner of Sunset and Vine in Hollywood.  It was an NBC studio building that had been built for radio and converted — not very well, some said — for television.  In the late fifties, NBC broke ground on the complex they now have in Burbank.  For a time, they did shows from both locations until they finally finished the new place in 1962.

Above is an old postcard of the NBC building at Sunset and Vine.  You can guess the age of this shot based on the cars passing by.  On the left, you can see just a smidgen of Wallach's Music City, which was the biggest record shop in Hollywood.  Up the street, you can see an ABC facility which later became TAV, the video studio that Merv Griffin later owned.  All of these are now gone.  The NBC complex later became a fancy bank building with a large fountain out front.

In the seventies, Steve Allen was doing one of his many talk shows from the TAV building (I think it had another name then) and for one stunt, Steve put on swim trunks, ran across the street and took a bath in the bank building's fountain, which they had graciously filled with suds for the occasion.  This just demonstrates how much talk shows have changed.  Today, if you worked for Dave or Jay or even Jimmy Kimmel and suggested they do something like that, you'd probably be fired on the spot.  The bank building now at Sunset and Vine is reportedly about to be replaced with something new.  There is also talk that NBC may soon abandon Burbank for a new facility to be built elsewhere.

A couple of other observations about that ticket: Even though the show was live to the East Coast, they apparently weren't too worried about filling the house.  They didn't tell people to get there an hour early, as most shows do these days.  They also weren't concerned about kids in the audience as long as they were over six.  I'm not sure why anyone would bring a ten-year-old to a TV show they'd probably never seen, but it was permitted.  Today, you have to be at least sixteen to see Jay, eighteen to see Dave, and they tape in the late afternoon.

Also, note that the show was not called The Tonight Show.  On the ticket, it's just Tonight, and Mr. Allen's name is not part of the title.  His successors all had their monikers appended to the name of the program but not Steverino.

Bob Ingersoll is an attorney, a writer and a columnist for Comics Buyer's Guide.  You can read some of his columns, which deal with the law — as practiced and depicted in comic books — here.

And he has another, somewhat more fleeting vocation.  He was a "Phone-A-Friend" on an episode of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?  It was taped last October but it appears this coming week.  (This is the syndicated version of the show, which runs at different times on different channels in different cities.)  Bob is aiding a friend of his named Tom Condosta, who was the on-camera contestant.  Tom uses one of his lifelines to phone Bob on the show which airs…

Well, we're not entirely certain when it airs.  Either Tuesday or Wednesday.  But one of those days, you'll get to hear Ingersoll.  I won't tell you whether he gets it right or not, but I think you can assume that Bob wouldn't be telling people about it if he'd cost a friend a bundle.

The infamous Sergio made a cameo appearance in yesterday's installment of the newspaper strip, Non-Sequitur.  Here's what it looked like.  (Thanks to Don Hilliard for the sighting.)

I don't know why we need terrorists.  We're doing a fine job terrorizing ourselves.

Students at Lee College in Baytown, Texas recently set the world's record for gathering together people wearing Groucho glasses.  While I'm sure we can all agree this is a worthwhile and important activity, it had its negatives.  One was the shocking revelation that a lot of college students have no idea who Groucho Marx was.  Read all about it.

Three different friends whose opinions I respect suggested I post, read or link to yesterday's remarks by Senator Robert Byrd about the prospect for war.  I don't have a load of respect for Senator Byrd, but that doesn't mean he's wrong about this.  So I've decided to read and link to what he said…

…and also to this bogus movie poster, courtesy of your friends and mine at MAD Magazine.

Among the many joys of today is that I am no longer subjected to a humiliating ritual of elementary school.  It was that on this holiday, we all had to buy valentines for everyone in our class, even of the same sex.

I guess it was someone's solution to the problem of avoiding the "Charlie Brown" problem of a kid not getting any, or not getting as many as someone else…or something.  But a week before 2/14, the teacher would pass out a list of all the students to everyone, and we all had to go out and buy those boxes of cheapo valentines (usually depicting cartoon characters) and address one to each of our classmates, including the ones whose guts we hated.  One year I remember, we had 36 students in my class, plus I needed one for the teacher and two for the teaching assistants.  I didn't need one for me, so that meant 38.

Unfortunately, the stores I went to that year didn't sell boxes of 38 or even 40.  They all seemed to be multiples of 25 or 30, which meant buying two boxes.  The extras were handy, though.  Not wishing to send another guy a card with the slightest romantic suggestion, I had to reject a lot of them.  If it said, "Will you be my valentine?", I could send it to a girl but not to another boy.  It was just too embarrassing.  If I'd given Louis Farrell the card that said, "Be My Valentine, Cutie," I'd still be hearing gay jokes.

Most of the other guys managed to find (or make) cards that just said "Happy Valentine's Day" to give to others of like gender — but somehow, even the year I bought an extra box, I didn't have enough non-sexual ones for the males in my class.  I had to sit there and decide which guy was going to get the one that said, "Let's Be Valentine Buddies."  It went to the one I figured was least likely to use it against me.  The card makers seem to have gotten hip to this dilemma and most of those I now see in stores are about as non-romantic as they can get and still pass the things off as Valentine's Day cards.

The teacher usually assigned a student to tally everyone's valentines and make sure no one got shorted.  If you were short — say, you didn't fill out one for dumb ol' Sidney Passey — you had to quickly hand-make one.  One year, a student enrolled in our class on 2/13 and everyone had to whip up a card for this kid who was darn near a total stranger to us.  I wrote on mine, "Happy Valentine's Day, Whoever You Are."

I'm glad I don't have to do that anymore.  Now, I look back and marvel at how the school system managed to take a neat idea like Valentine's Day, drain it of all its meaning and turn it into an ordeal.  But then, they did that with just about everything.

About once a week, someone writes to ask what program I use to do the graphics on this site.  Actually, I use several but my favorite — and the one in which I design all the logos and borders and such — is Xara X, which is a vector drawing program that does all sorts of neat things.  Here's a banner ad for it…

The Xara folks make a number of great graphics programs, including one called Xara Webstyle that provides an ultra-simple way to generate logos, backgrounds, menus and other images to jazz up your website.  I used Webstyle to make the first version of this site, and liked it tremendously.  So I've decided to plug them here and, yes, this is another one of those deals where this site receives a commission on your purchases.  But if you know me, you know I can't be bought.  Rented, maybe.  Leased, definitely.  But bought?  Never.

Yesterday, Phil Donahue aired an hour with Dennis Miller, primarily talking about going to war — a topic about which those two men vehemently (but respectfully) disagree.  Not that he'll lose a wink of sleep over this or even read it, but I have to say that my opinion of Mr. Miller has fallen off somewhat since his 9/11 conversion to "Rowdy" Roddy Piper.  There are good, rational reasons for the U.S. going to war against Iraq and maybe a few other hellholes.  I'm not sure I concur that the pluses outweigh the minuses, or that we're getting an honest assessment of either, but I grudgingly buy the argument that certain warlike actions may be warranted if all else fails.

What scares me — and what seems to be the sole mindset behind Miller's rants — is this notion that we have to go to war because we're the Good Guys, they're the Bad Guys, and it's time the Good Guys killed a large group of the Bad Guys and scared the crap out of the rest of them.  If we go to war, let it be because that's our best course of self-defense, not because someone's testosterone deficiency has them jonesing to beat up on a little guy.  (And, though this does not relate to Dennis Miller: …not because someone thinks it'll be good for business and/or their approval rating.)

As with many who feel as he does, Miller did not seem to want to address minor points having to do with things like killing innocent civilians, spending trillions of dollars, encouraging reprisals or that old bugaboo of what we may do to the environment.  He urged that we frighten Korea by conducting a couple of well-publicized nuclear tests and, when Donahue asked what that could do to the environment, Dennis said, "The caribou will have to wait," and Phil, being polite and pressed for time, didn't ask if nuclear testing could conceivably affect, say, human beings.  Or even make someone feel more pressured to nuke us first.

But then, I don't get that some of these folks remember that actions have consequences.  At one point on the broadcast, Miller made a reference to having sex with sheep, complete with the "f" word, and then remembering he was on live TV, he turned to Donahue and asked, "We're on a delay, right?  They're bleeping me, right?"  They weren't, at least insofar as the East Coast was concerned.  During the next commercial, someone informed Miller that he'd just said what he'd said on live, non-HBO TV and when they came back from the break, he muttered a slight apology and told his host that it was stupid not to have a tape delay on a show of that sort.

Now, I don't think saying that word on MSNBC is going to matter one bit in the world.  It wouldn't even matter if it was uttered on a show that someone besides me was watching.  But Dennis Miller was live on Saturday Night Live.  Dennis Miller was live on Monday Night Football.  Dennis Miller was even live on Dennis Miller Live.  The man understands the concept of live television and has usually appeared on it without a tape delay.  He has also spent an awful lot of airtime blasting people who don't accept personal responsibility for their actions.  But apparently, it's the Donahue show's fault that he was heard saying something he said but didn't mean to have heard.

And it's also the first time I've ever seen a professional comedian complain about not being censored.

Michael Kinsley explains about the current Congressional battle over seating new judges.

TV Land has been running a great series on Sunday nights — The 60 Minutes Interviews.  It recycles old footage (including some never before broadcast) of interviews done on 60 Minutes with famous folks in the teevee biz.  This coming Sunday is their chat with Johnny Carson.

One of the "new generation" of artists in MAD Magazine is my old pal, Bill Wray.  I worked with Bill when he was just starting out and trying to draw like all the artists he admired.  Most fledgling artists do that and a few enlightened ones have a moment of revelation and begin to draw like themselves.  Bill, happily, had one and blossomed into a unique and imaginative presence in the cartoon/comic world…to the extent that there are probably now fledglings trying to draw like him.  They can get a nice look at his handiwork over on his new website, www.bigblownbaby.com, named for one of his more innovative comics.  Or if you're anywhere near Dallas, he's having his first art show (along with Miles Thomson) from March 1 through April 5 at the Forbidden Gallery there.  If I were anywhere near Dallas next month, I'd sure go.

Effective in 60 days, cell phones and pagers are banned in Broadway theaters.  This article doesn't give too many details but I assume the fine is levied if they catch you talking on one or if yours goes off.  I'd be interested in knowing if this applies to silent pagers or the use of cell phones during intermission.

Like all of you, I've always been annoyed when some audience member's cell phone went off during a performance — and I was especially mortified once when it was mine.  Two years ago, while seeing Follies in New York, I dutifully turned off my phone before the show started but apparently, I accidentally bumped its "on" button and turned it back on.  At a key dramatic moment in the second act, it rang — and I thought everyone for six rows around was going to drag me into the aisle and throttle me.  Which would have been more than justified.

I didn't answer it.  Instead, I ripped the back off and yanked the battery out.  Since then, if I have my cell phone with me at a show, I always remove the battery.  Better that than having someone in the audience remove part of my insides.

Just watched the new DVD of Top Secret!, a movie I (and most people) thought had a rather clumsy storyline and jokes of widely-varying mirth.  It was fascinating to listen to the audio commentary track and hear the film's producers and directors say essentially the same thing.  The tone is along the lines of, "Jeez, why did we do that?"  After experiencing too many self-congratulatory narratives on DVDs, it was somehow refreshing to hear a bunch of talented guys discussing how and why things didn't work, and without trashing their co-workers or blaming the studio.  Actually, a lot of the movie does work, though not as well as Airplane!, which was the previous motion picture most of the same people.

The DVD is well-assembled, with the usual kinds of special features and such.  There's a gallery of storyboard panels, many of which (they don't point out) were drawn by the acclaimed cartoonist, Carol Lay.  There's also an "Easter Egg" special feature that is most welcome.  One of the sillier scenes in the movie is one that runs backwards so that the dialogue sounds like the actors are all speaking Swedish.  If you know where to look, you can access a copy of that scene played forward — i.e., the way it was filmed.

Here's a link if you want to buy this movie from Amazon.Com.  I suggest this not only because I enjoyed the film but because if you buy it through that link, I get money.  And, speaking of me getting money…

Plug time! Yeah, there's another Groo book out by Sergio and Yours Truly.  This one's called Death and Taxes, and it collects a story about war that is becoming sadly relevant to all our lives.  The official promo copy reads: "The three most inevitable things in the world are death, taxes, and another Groo collection from Dark Horse.  This one is about the other two: Groo and his loyal pooch Rufferto encounter a king who is forever raising the cost of living and an undertaker who drives up the cost of dying.  So the kingdom goes to war against…well, they're not exactly sure of that part yet.  But they're definitely going to war.  What a time for Groo to be trapped in a solemn vow not to kill.  And if you think that makes him any less dangerous, you don't know Groo.  He's even worse…as the savage warrior, Odoman the Invincible, finds out the hard way."

While you're ordering it, pre-order The Groo Odyssey, which should be out any day now.