Monthly Archives: February 2014

Allan Sherman became a smash hit when he recorded the comedy record album, My Son, the Folk Singer in 1962. But before that, he was singing song parodies at various events and parties, and sometimes these performances were recorded. Some of his earlier tunes have now been released on a CD called There Is Nothing Like a Lox: The Lost Song Parodies of Allan Sherman.

I love Sherman's work and am glad to have these early efforts of his, even though most of them can be found on the Internet if you look hard enough. But let me warn you of two things. One is that some of the 13 songs on this CD are kinda short. The whole thing runs around 34 minutes. And the other thing is that the audio quality is not wonderful. If you go to this page to order (and I'm not suggesting you not, especially if you're a big Sherman fan), play a few samples so you can hear the quality of the recordings you'll be getting.

Like I said, I'm glad to have them. As I've written here before, Allan Sherman is one of the reasons I became a comedy writer and a big reason why I write poems and song lyrics.

Dick Cavett writes about Sid Caesar.

Chaim Dubin saw yesterday's fine Beatles medley by Raffaella Carrà and wrote in to say, "The video you posted is very close to capturing the essence of the Beatles, but in my opinion the following link contains the very best interpretation." He may be right. Here we have what he linked me to — Engelbert Humperdinck, Bing Crosby, Gwen Verdon, Bobbie Gentry and Dick Shawn virtually channeling John, Paul, George and Ringo. Mr. Shawn's performance even brings a little Lorenzo St. DuBoix into the mix…

Let's blast through a batch of these. Someone who wants to be identified as "Parmenator-X" writes…

I actually attended Hampshire College and made a lot of use of the 5-College Consortium (cross-registration for classes at other schools, doing radio shows at Amherst College, joining the science fiction club at UMass, etc.). While the idea that the Scooby Doo cast was based on the 5 colleges is demonstrably false for the reason you state (Hampshire not having opened until 1970), the mapping of characters to colleges actually works pretty well. Hampshire, a non-traditional college (no grades or formal majors), has a reputation as a "hippie" school while Amherst College is considered more "preppie;" Mt. Holyoke and Smith are women's colleges, with Smith having a reputation for, hmmm, how shall I put this, students that looked more like Velma and less like Daphne. Oddly enough, the only one that doesn't really work is Scooby representing UMass Amherst, a very fine university indeed.

Yeah…but at some point, people began saying that the characters in the show were designed to represent those schools and that's ridiculous. Especially when you look at the cast of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.

This is from Greg Kelly, writing about the parade of cameos on Jimmy Fallon's first night…

If you hadn't listed the Who's Who of celebrity walk-ons, I would not have known who most of them were. I do know that Joe Namath was at the Super Bowl (which I read about, ha-ha. I'm too old to devote four straight hours to a game. It better be a dang good game to go that long). Namath was at the Super Bowl wearing a huge, full length fur coat. He flipped the coin before the game and galavanted on the sidelines with two hot women 1/3rd of his age. So, I could see why he was on the show. To be quite honest, I confused him with an actor who used to play an old guy on Northern Exposure. Then Fallon announced it was Joe Namath and I was like, oh yeah, I was warned via Mr. Evanier's site.

Actually, I shouldn't have made it sound like I was mocking the presence of Joe Namath there. I had a very nice experience with Mr. Namath many years ago when he guested on a variety show I wrote. I didn't think much of him as an actor but boy, he couldn't have been nicer and more professional. The first day, he went up to everyone in the crew and introduced himself as if we all didn't know who he was. This was a long time ago but he was more famous then than he is now and I'd like to believe he's still that gracious.

And this is from someone who signs his e-mails "Alvarado." He or she writes…

You say that Fallon's ratings won't matter until we have a few weeks of "normal" programming. When will they matter? How and when would we know if he's in trouble?

Well, first off, I don't think he's going to be in trouble. He would have to do pretty bad in the ratings for anyone at NBC to panic…and even then, they're not going to even talk about taking him off until they're pretty certain of who they'd put in his place. I do not think the Third Coming of Leno is an option. Now that he's made a pretty graceful exit and now that his old crew and office have been disassembled, I don't think Jay would go back for any amount of money or pleading and I don't think they'd ask.

One of the many differences now from the Jay/Conan handoff is that NBC seems committed to Fallon in a way they never were with O'Brien. They made that deal to give The Tonight Show to Conan but by the time it kicked in, they weren't as thrilled with the notion and they reportedly had internal debates over whether it made sense to try and buy Conan out of the deal and keep Jay on. They thought in that waiting period that Jay's ratings would go down and Conan's would go up and that did not happen. If anything, the opposite did. But the current deal was made with eyes wide open and no one trying to guess ratings five years down the line.

They may not know how well Fallon would do but they have a pretty good idea of how poorly he won't do. They know he won't get below a certain number and they're probably okay with that. It wouldn't surprise me if Fallon has a firm two-year on-air guarantee with one of those wicked penalty clauses…like if they take him off before 104 weeks are up, he gets a million for every week he isn't on. Or something like that. (You can bet he has a time slot guarantee and they won't try moving his show to Midnight.)

But I don't think any of this is going to be an issue because I think he'll do fine. The suspense is whether his ratings will be at the low end of expectations or the high. How will you know if he's in trouble? When good sources start mentioning actual names of possible (and feasible) replacements. Until there's a name out there, he's fine. And I think he'll be fine anyway.

My cousin David Evanier is currently in the middle of writing a biography of Woody Allen for a major publisher…and was when the latest eruption of the Woody/Mia/Dylan matter hit. Good luck to him on sorting all that out for the book. Anyway, David sent me this link to an obit on Sid Caesar that ran in the Jewish Daily Forward. It does, of course, write of his life from a slightly different vantage point than most other newspapers.

I will take issue with one statement in the obit, though. Writing about the writing room on the Caesar shows, the author says…

The interactions of all these verbally gifted Jews with chips on their shoulders was as inspiring as the product they created, and Reiner offered a version of the experience in his classic 1960s TV sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show, with Reiner himself playing the role of vainglorious star, modeled after Caesar.

No. Reiner got the idea to write about a comedy writer from his experiences working for Sid and perhaps a few episodes were based on things that happened to writers working for Caesar. But there was nothing Jewish about Rob Petrie or Sally Rogers and apart from one episode where he was Bar Mitzvahed and one or two other quick jokes, nothing all that Jewish about Buddy Sorrell.

And apart from being stars of TV variety shows, there was nothing of Sid Caesar in Alan Brady. Sid didn't wear a rug. Sid didn't have a flunky brother-in-law as producer. Sid didn't have an outsized ego and always brag about his greatness. Sid's writers all thought Sid was a genius. Alan's writers said that but they feared him more than they respected him.

There's one episode of the Van Dyke show — the one about the snail — where Alan Brady visits the writers' office and much is made of the fact that it's the first time he ever set foot in there. Sid lived in the writers' office on his shows and was in there constantly, participating in the writing…something Alan Brady didn't do. The way The Alan Brady Show worked, the three writers would write a script, send it to Alan to read and it could sometimes come back crumpled and therefore rejected. Sid Caesar never did that. Jackie Gleason, on the other hand…

That's actually what Gleason did. He didn't see his writers very often, either. Some came and went without ever even meeting him. Alan Brady is an amalgam of stories Carl Reiner heard from writers who worked for Gleason and also Milton Berle and Red Buttons. It's pretty obvious…and Reiner also said that on several occasions. He said it a few months ago when he was interviewed by Stu Shostak and Vince Waldron on Stu's Show.

Reiner would probably have folded Red Skelton into the mix except that Reiner was working on the east coast when he created The Dick Van Dyke Show and wrote much of the first season, and Skelton was on the west coast. There are actually a lot of stories about stars of variety shows keeping their writers at a distance and crumpling scripts. Sid Caesar was close to unique in that the writers felt he was one of them and genuinely liked the man. That's probably the main way he was unlike Alan Brady.

Some new postage stamps have been announced…

A postage stamp honoring Johnny Carson? Great. But it only works three days a week.

A postage stamp honoring Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera? Great. But if it has Fred Flintstone on it, it's going to have to be chiseled out of stone.

A postage stamp honoring Charlton Heston? Great if you want to shoot off a letter to someone.

A postage stamp honoring Jimi Hendrix. It had better be self-adhesive 'cause I ain't lickin' one of them.

No, but I wanna tell ya…

I happened to be rewatching this clip from Jimmy Fallon's first night and it struck me that it was a good example of something you see too often in TV comedy routines — performers who either don't understand the bit they're in or don't care. And by the way, I think this was a funny, clever segment in spite of what I'm about to point out.

Okay, so here's the premise. Fallon addresses some unnamed friend who supposedly bet him $100 he'd never host The Tonight Show and tells this person to pay up. Then we have a parade of stars, each one coming out to pay off, then exiting. The way this should work — and I'll bet this is how the writer imagined it — is that each one comes out looking annoyed and slaps down the money grudgingly, then walks off. That's probably what they told each celebrity to do: Act like you're pissed off, pay off your damned bet and get the hell off stage.

Some of the people got it. Some didn't. Some thought they had to call a little attention to themselves, buddy-up to the new host of the premiere late night show, act like it's a big deal they did a cameo, etc.

So first, out comes Robert DeNiro. He could have looked madder but he's fine. Then Tina Fey does it right.

Then out comes Joe Namath…and I'm wondering how and why they dug him up. He's the only one Fallon has to identify just in case the audience doesn't recognize him. Anyway, he tries but he kinda looks happy to be there. I guess if I was Joe Namath and someone called me to be on an important TV event, I'd be happy to be there.

Then the next one is Rudy Giuliani, who's grinning — probably because he's on and Bill de Blasio isn't — and he can't resist thanking Fallon for bringing the show back to New York, which is him thinking like a politician instead of as a player in a comedy sketch. Then you have Mariah Carey, who at first doesn't look pissed-off either but she recovers.

Then Tracy Morgan does it exactly right. Then Joan Rivers makes it all about herself, as she does with everything, and even waves to the audience. Then Kim Kardashian does it about as well as you'd expect Kim Kardashian to. Then Seth Rogen does it exactly right and so do Lindsay Lohan and Sarah Jessica Parker.

Then Mike Tyson does it wrong and whispers something the audience can't hear to Fallon and gives him a letter, which I guess means that no one backstage wanted to tell Mike Tyson not to do that. Then you have Lady Gaga who also takes away from the joke by whispering something to him.

Then along comes the payoff, which is Stephen Colbert. When I was watching this on TV, I was wondering who they'd bring out last. The funniest possibility would have been Jay Leno but I knew it wouldn't be him. The Fallon people wouldn't have wanted him there because they want to establish this is Jimmy's show now, not Jay's, and Jay wouldn't have done it because the press would have made it sound like he forced his way onto the show because he couldn't grasp that it's no longer his.

Second funniest would have been Conan O'Brien but he's not that good a sport. Third funniest would have been Letterman or Kimmel but neither of those were going to happen. I guessed it would be Colbert about three seconds before it was. And of course, he played it perfectly, paying off the joke with the passive/aggressive attitude that is so often show business and not showing the slightest affection or congrats for Fallon. That's the way you do it, people.

If you saw it, watch it again with all that in mind. It really is an example of what separates the skilled comic performers from the rest of the herd…

There's this thing called the Five College Consortium which is made up of four liberal arts colleges and one university in the Connecticut River Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. They're all close to one another and they often crossover with events.

Some folks have written to ask me about this, with appears on a Wikipedia page…

A popular urban legend among Five College students holds that the characters on the Saturday morning cartoon Scooby Doo represent the five colleges. The legend has Daphne representing Mount Holyoke College and Velma as Smith College, with Fred representing Amherst College, Shaggy as Hampshire College, and Scooby as UMass Amherst. Hanna-Barbera Productions, CBS executive Fred Silverman, and some of the show's writers have said that this story is false, and that the show was actually based on the radio program I Love a Mystery and the TV sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Regardless, the fact that Hampshire College was founded a year after Scooby Doo's debut calls this folklore's veracity into question.

In other words, it's an urban legend. There's not much of a connection between the characters and the colleges they allegedly represent. Lots of people who worked on the show say the legend is false. No one who worked on the show says it's true. The Snopes site debunked it and the timing of when one of the colleges was opened makes it impossible that the story could possibly be true.

But we'll mention it just in case there might be something to it…

Opponents of Obamacare are touting yet another story of someone who has been harmed by the new program and, once again, the claim falls apart under any sort of scrutiny. This gets Kevin Drum to wondering if there really are people out there who are worse off under the Affordable Care Act. There must be some. Why can't Republicans find any?

The National Weather Service is currently predicting a 100% chance of rain for Southern California…for Friday, February 28. And they say it could be a decent-sized storm.

Obviously, no one storm is likely to yield enough moisture to make much of a dent in our drought but it's very unusual for the N.W.S. to make a 100% prediction more than a day or two in advance, no matter how the weather systems are lining up. This is eight days from now.

In the meantime, AccuWeather — the largest private weather service — is hedging their bets with a 99% prediction for that day and they're talking about an inch and a half of precipitation. The N.W.S. never does quantities this far ahead. Then again, I wonder how often either predicts the chance-o'-rain with such certainty that far in advance.

A lot of different musical artists have given us their interpretations of the songs of The Beatles…but no one has captured the true essence of John, Paul, George and Ringo better than the Italian entertainer, Raffaella Carrà. She is so in sync with the very soul of the music that once you hear her interpretations, you may find yourself thinking that The Beatles themselves got it all wrong. Here is a medley of Raffaella showing us how these songs should be done. Pay close attention, Shelly…

In case you missed or didn't record Conan last night, here's the whole episode — which is mostly Mel Brooks talking about Sid Caesar. I haven't had time to watch it yet.

I have really mixed feelings about Whole Foods Markets. I like their produce and fish. I dislike their prices. I like their willingness to stock the products of small companies. I find that about 90% of their prepared foods are disappointing when inserted into the mouth. I like the mood of the stores and how good all their employees seem to be. I don't like some of the more outrageous things the CEO has said about how he thinks the country should be run and/or how employees should be treated.

But here's one more thing I like. They have this list of ingredients they will not tolerate in products sold in their stores. I might quarrel that a few shouldn't be on there but I like that a company even cares enough to make such a list, whereas a business like Walmart doesn't seem to care.

Ben Blatt matched what's on Walmart's shelves against the Whole Foods list and determined that a little over half of what Walmart sells is unacceptable to Whole Foods. This even includes some bottled water. That's something worth thinking about.

I get most of my groceries at Ralphs but I do read ingredients and don't buy very much that couldn't be sold in Whole Foods. Oddly enough, very few of the things I buy at Ralphs are sold in Whole Foods though they could be. I suspect Whole Foods feels that if you see on their shelves too many things you can buy for less at Ralphs, you'll go there.

Number three hundred and twenty-six in a series…

In the post I wrote yesterday about the Black Bart TV pilot, I erred. I knew it was Andrew Bergman who wrote the original script that morphed into Blazing Saddles but I typed the name of Norman Steinberg, who also worked on the final, Brooksified film. I have corrected the post and I hereby apologize to both men.

My former partner Dennis Palumbo was one of the writers of the wonderful movie, My Favorite Year. (The other was Norman Steinberg and I got it right this time) That film was, of course, inspired by the true-life antics of Errol Flynn and Sid Caesar, and Dennis has some thoughts about the passing of both Peter O'Toole (who played Flynn) and Sid.

Comic-Con International has announced another batch of Special Guests for this year and, lo and behold, I am among them. So is Sergio Aragonés so I guess that means we have to play Quick Draw! again on Saturday morning as we do every year. So I'll be hosting that along with hundreds of other panels. I already know what a few of them are likely to be and am excited…but I'm even more excited about the panels I'll be hosting at WonderCon in Anaheim this April. Details on both to come. And before anyone asks: I have no other conventions scheduled. Remind me one of these days to tell you why I turn down all other invites…and why I may never do another signing at a bookstore.

To answer a question I get daily in my e-mail: No, I still do not know when Cartoon Network is going to air the fourth season of The Garfield Show. It's run in every other country on this planet and C.N. has all twenty-six half-hours and can air them any time they like. I don't know why they haven't and I probably won't know when they will until my TiVo tells me they've been scheduled. You're going to be amazed at the animation on some of these.

I watched Mr. Fallon's second Tonight Show about halfway through and came close to canceling my TiVo Season Pass then and there. Nice guy…but I'm just uninterested in what he has to say. And it does occur to me that I can save a lot of time by not watching the show and then when anyone says "Hey, did you see that great bit Fallon did?," I can look just that segment up on YouTube. Anyway, his ratings were — as would be expected — down a bit from his first night but I don't think they matter much; not until The Olympics are over, Seth Meyers' show is in place and we have a few weeks of "normal" programming.