Monthly Archives: April 2007

Ezra Klein debunks the myth that Americans have better health care than Canada, France, Great Britain and Germany. When people say otherwise, I'm never quite sure if it's just the old "we're the best at everything" reflex kicking in or if they actually believe this.

Regis Philbin returns on Thursday to Live With Regis and Kelly following his bypass operation. One of his guests that morning will be David Letterman.

Earlier this morning, GSN ran two episodes of To Tell the Truth in tribute to its longtime panelist, Kitty Carlisle. One was an episode I described here…from memory since I don't think I've seen it since it first aired back in the seventies. Just for the record, I remembered what happened but I remembered them in reverse. The "reveal" of Ms. Carlisle's son preceded the unmasking of Joe Garagiola's son. Either way, it was still a funny segment.

Good night, Internet. I'll see you in the morning.

The career of Bob Fosse. In a little over three minutes.

And after you bail on the Rich Little video, go watch something clever. This is a link to Robert Smigel's cartoon on last night's Saturday Night Live, "Torboto."

I've embedded too many videos today so I won't put this one up here. But here's a link to a YouTube video of Rich Little's appearance at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. It runs about twenty minutes.

Slightly off-topic: I noticed that one weblog (this one) that picked up a link from me on this described me as "a Leno apologist who obviously doesn't care for some aspects of Letterman's comedy." I think "apologist" is the wrong word there but just for the record, I like both Dave and Jay…though I watch them with generous fast-forwarding because I don't think either guy has been at his best for quite a while. And speaking of not being at your best for a long time, go watch Rich Little.

Courtesy of the Trader Joe's market chain, here's a simple PDF file on how to read the Nutrition Facts box on any food product you might pick up.

Speedy Gonzales, the fastest mouse in all of Mexico, is making a comeback. He's still an enormously popular character, especially considering that no one ever liked his cartoons. Thanks to Joel O'Brien for the tip.

I usually try to not put up more than two of these a day but this is the CNN interview from last week with Joe Simon. Joe is one of my favorite human beings and it's great to see him getting attention and still sharp and working at age 93. This only runs a minute and forty-five seconds but it'll give you a brief intro to one of the true living legends of comics…

I've written here in the past about Jim Thurman, especially about his partnership with a gent named Gene Moss. For several years in the sixties, they were top comedy writers in Hollywood and occasional performers. Most notably, they wrote and did voices for the popular cartoon series, Roger Ramjet, and starred in an extremely hip, adult kids' show called Shrimpenstein that ran on KHJ Channel 9 here in Los Angeles for too short a time. You can read more about them in this piece I posted when Mr. Moss passed away.

Alas, this is the piece about Jim Thurman dying. After he and Moss split up, he went on to become one of the main writers of Sesame Street, for which he won many an Emmy. He had a wonderful and wicked sense of humor and the few times we spoke on the phone, it was in full flower. Sorry to hear about his passing. Here are a few more details, courtesy of Variety.

If you have occasion to use public wi-fi connections, this article may be of interest to you. So may this article (and video) from the same source about what you can do to minimize problems like those described in the first article.

Okay, I've watched last night's White House Correspondents Dinner and am officially appalled. There's always something a bit "wrong" to me about reporters and the folks they cover intermingling this way; not that they shouldn't be civil to one another but the unbridled shmoozing makes you wonder about the sincerity of both sides.

Entertainer Rich Little had a rough time of it, especially since his "opening act" was George W. Bush announcing that in light of the tragedy at Virginia Tech, there would be no presidential attempts at humor that evening. I'm not sure I entirely follow the logic of that. Yes, it's awful and sad that 32 young people were killed and scores more were injured there. Would the president have gone out and yukked it up if that hadn't happened because, after all, the recent deaths of dozens of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of Iraqis shouldn't get in the way of a good monologue? Nevertheless, it got Little off to a bumpy start. (When Lewis Black did a similar dinner a few years ago, he had to follow Dick Cheney talking about the death of the Pope. Hey, there's a topic that will always get an audience in the mood to laugh.) It's also an awkward spot when you're brought in to perform with the clear expectation that you'll offend no one on the dais or in the front row.

Still, it could have gone a lot better. Once upon a time, Rich Little was an impressionist of uncanny talent. He did people that no one else had ever done before and when he did the ones everyone else did, he did them better than just about anyone. The impersonations though often carried rather weak or hoary material…and now the jokes are no better but the impressions aren't as impressive. The late Stanley Ralph Ross, who wrote for Little, used to tell people who said the replicas were uneven, "Rich is on target about 50% of the time but no one can tell him about the half that isn't." That was easy to believe last night…though I'm not sure Little wasn't "righter" for the event than some of those they've had in recent years. I have the feeling that after last night's dinner, the person in charge of booking the talent got a lot more compliments than the person who booked Stephen Colbert.

It was kind of an amazing performance. For his Johnny Carson bit, Little used a very old joke that you heard in high school or before. It was the one about the guy who takes an apparent drunk home — a drunk who can't even walk — and then the wife says, "Thanks for bringing him home but where's his wheelchair?" It's not a bad joke but of course, it has nothing to do with Johnny Carson and left me wondering why Rich Little, who's been replicating Carson for more than a quarter-century, doesn't have material tailored for that impression. Next week, he could do that joke for his George Burns impression or his Jack Benny.

Oh, well. I suspect Mr. Little — who no longer plays his home town of Vegas very often — has earned himself a year or two of bookings from Republican-leaning organizations and auditoriums in more Conservative communities. He'll do the same impressions and in between, he'll talk about the honor of performing for The President and crowds will love him for it. You or I may not have thought he was funny last night but it was probably a great career booster.

One final thing which I must admit baffled me was a video — and here, I'll embed it and you can see if it baffles you, too. It's a David Letterman Top Ten List introduced by, of all people, Presidential Press Secretary Tony Snow. If someone got up in a major public forum and said that Bush was a stumbling idiot who had convinced a large part of America that he didn't know what he was doing, it would be Mr. Snow's job, if not his duty as a supporter, to rebut and denounce that view of his boss. Yet here he is, presenting a video to that effect, endorsing the importance of Dave Letterman, a celebrity who makes it quite clear on a nightly basis that he thinks Bush is a dangerous boob. The video includes no disclaimer. Dave does not say, "It's all in fun" or even "In spite of his gaffes, he's still my president." There are no such niceties…and one even senses a certain air of contempt in the fact that Letterman says so little, as if the clips speak for themselves.

So, uh, why is Tony Snow affording so much dignity to this video? Shouldn't his official position be that Letterman is all wrong about George W. Bush?

Frank DeCaro discusses the TV series, Maude, which has just come out on DVD. I remember liking that series when it first aired and not being able to generate much interest or enthusiasm when it reran. It quickly became one of those "I admire the skill but I don't care about these people" shows. But it's been quite a few years since I've seen one so I oughta give it another chance. Here's an Amazon link to order the DVD if you'd like to. And while you're at it, you might want to order Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, which was the same way for me but from the start.

Clifford Irving discusses the accuracy, or lack thereof, in the new movie, The Hoax, which is all about his infamous Howard Hughes swindle. And by the way: "Sixth wife?"

As is way too usual around these parts, we must report the passing of another fine artist from what some call "The Golden Age of Comics." Artie Saaf died yesterday. The cause of death was complications from the Parkinson's Disease that had plagued him for many years.

Saaf was another of those guys who was in comics practically from the start. Born in Brooklyn on December 4, 1921, he was self-taught when he began drawing comics in 1938, though he later attended Pratt Institute, the School of Arts and Mechanics and the Art Students League. He worked for almost every company publishing out of New York at first but his steadiest account was Fiction House, where he became the main artist for a time on Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, an assignment which somewhat typed him as a specialist in drawing pretty ladies. Fiction House kept him pretty busy but he also ghosted the Hap Hopper newspaper strip for a time and often turned up in the pages of Thrilling Comics, Startling Comics and other books from Better Publishing.

Around 1954, he began working less in comics and more in advertising, particularly in the storyboarding of TV commercials. Most of his comic book work for the next decade and a half involved helping out other artists when he had time. Some of the romance comic art that is usually credited to Vince Colletta in the early sixties was actually pencilled by Saaf, for instance. He did occasional jobs on his own for Western Publishing and Dell but around 1967, he seems to have made a conscious decision to focus more on comics. A flurry of Saaf art began appearing in Western's Gold Key comics like Twilight Zone and Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery, and he began drawing for DC.

For DC, he drew (pencils and inks) the Hunter's Hellcats feature in Our Fighting Forces, but mostly pencilled, mainly on ghost comics (Ghosts, The Witching Hour, The Unexpected) and several that featured those pretty ladies. He did many romance stories inked by Vince Colletta and was the main artist on Supergirl with a few jobs on Lois Lane, Angel and the Ape and even Teen Titans. Illness and age brought a close to his comic book work around 1978…a great loss for us because his art was lively and always interesting. No one drew the female figure in action better than Artie Saaf.

More information on him — though sadly, not enough — is available over at www.artsaaf.com, a site set up by his son, Steve. I had the pleasure of meeting Steve at this year's Wondercon in San Francisco. In the later years of his life, Art was unable to recall many details of his long, impressive career and Steve's been on a mission to research it. At the convention, he had a long conversation with Nick Cardy, who worked for many of the same companies and even inked Art Saaf work on occasion. Nick helped fill in some of the gaps but there are many more and if you have any information, I'm sure Steve would welcome hearing from you. His father was a good and important contributor to the field and that should be properly documented.