And now, they've posted the Programming Schedule for Sunday so it's all up. Go over it, make notes, decide in advance what you want to try to get into. I will help the process by posting a list of the panels I'm hosting in just a few minutes.
Here is Mark's Fearless Weather Forecast for Comic-Con. I say it'll be 70° with a few thin clouds the entire time. And for those of you who think the con should relocate to Las Vegas, it will be 108° and quite humid there on the same dates. I rest my case.
Dan Rather — who does not seem to grasp the basic concepts of comedy — conducts a relatively serious interview with Don Rickles…
Jay Emmett, an important "behind-the-scenes" person in comic book history, died last Monday in West Palm Beach. He was 86 and the cause was given as heart failure.
Emmett was the nephew of Jack Liebowitz, one of the owners of DC Comics and the guy who called the shots there for years until he moved upstairs to assume a seat on the corporate Board of Directors. And he had another uncle on the other side of his family who was involved with DC. That was Ira Schnapp, the amazing letterer who was responsible for the iconic logos for most of DC's covers from around 1938 until 1968. Emmett started in the firm's mailroom as a young man and eventually moved upward. He was one of the founders of DC's merchandising division, Licensing Corporation of America. There were years there when the licensing folks brought in a lot more revenue than the publishing department.
As our friend Paul Levitz noted in an online tribute, Emmett "…was the last member of the founding families of DC to be actively involved with the company, serving as the Warner Communications 'Office of the President' exec responsible for both the publishing division and the Warner Bros. movie studio at the time of the first Superman movie." He also negotiated the famous settlement with Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster that gave them pensions and restored their credit to the property they created.
Emmett left the company in 1981 after pleading guilty to charges of fraud in connection with a bribery scandal. He became a powerful figure in the world of professional sports, including time working in the excecutive branches of the Baltimore Orioles, the San Diego Padres and the Boston Red Sox. He was also instrumental in the founding of the Special Olympics. It has been announced that a public celebration of his life will take place this summer at Fenway Park, and that in lieu of flowers, his family requests memorial donations be made in his name to the Special Olympics.
Earlier today, I linked to a video of President Obama's moving eulogy for the Reverend Pinckney who was gunned-down in that Charleston church. On the wise advice of Steve Bacher, I have swapped out that link for this better one.
As I said, I think it's a great speech and the following is a very minor quibble, not with the speech but the spaces between its sentences. I once attended a funeral for a friend at a black church and was a bit surprised at a custom they have. Every time the person at the lectern says something you like or agree with, everyone is supposed to mutter "Yeah" or "Right" or "Amen." A woman seated near me kept saying "So true, so true." I don't get that. I think it makes it harder for the speaker to speak and harder for the listeners but, hey, who am I to quarrel with what I'm sure is a long-standing tradition?
The thing is that at one point during one of the eulogies for my friend, the person at the podium was talking about some of the obstacles that the deceased had overcome to achieve some success. The speaker said, "The first editor he showed his work told him to give it up and that he was absolutely lacking in talent!"
And the woman near me, who was half-asleep and agreeing by rote, said "So true, so true…"
I talk a lot about talk shows here and it's time I talked about John Kerwin's talk show. You may or may not get it on your TV and it may or may not be where this listing says it is. It says I should be viewing it on Channel 177 but I find it on Jewish Life TV, which is 469 on my cable lineup. (177 is the Pacific feed of GSN, which they ought to just rename The All-Family-Feud Network.)
John is a stand-up comic who I've never met but I used to see him up at the Improv and I think other local comedy clubs. He's a clever, personable guy who knows how to interview people — a skill not evident in everyone who's ever starred in a talk show. He does his with no pre-interviews or semi-scripted exchanges…you know, the way talk shows used to be. Some of his guests are folks you've heard of — I just watched an old, funny interview he did with Jonathan Winters — and some are, quite honestly, people unknown to me. Kerwin is pretty good at making them interesting so I've learned not to not watch just because I don't recognize the guest's name.
He does this show on a budget which I would guess is about the same as what Jimmy Fallon's program spends on bottled water for its green room. Given what he has to work with, he does a nice job. Tune him in sometime. That is, assuming he's tunable on your TV. You might enjoy what he does there.
Judge Richard A. Posner explains what's wrong with two of the four dissents in the Same Sex Marriage case.
The best piece I've read about the Same Sex Marriage decision is this one by Jeffrey Toobin. An awful lot of the arguments against the decision seem to me like folks insisting that they have a right to have Their Country or at least Their State run in accordance with Their Interpretation of Their Religion. They do not grasp that that's not how it works in Our America.
Also, read David Remnick and his overview of the last ten days in this country.
And I've assumed you watch President Obama's eloquent eulogy for Reverend Clem Pinckney, who was murdered in the Charleston shooting. At times, it got a bit too Clergyman for my tastes but all in all, it was a stirring and important address. And as I watched it, I couldn't help but "hear" all the people who try to tell us that this man is a Muslim who is out to destroy Christianity. If you haven't watched it yet, you can see it here.
Here's last night's Bill Maher "New Rules" editorial — a particularly good one, I think…
My pal Ken Levine was once a writer-producer on M*A*S*H. On the series, reference would sometimes be made to a sister that Major Winchester (the David Ogden Stiers character) had. Her name was Honoria. Whenever I heard it, it reminded me of a girl I went to school with named Honoria but I somehow never assumed it was the same Honoria. I mean, there's more than one lady on this planet named Honoria, right?
The other day on his blog, Ken answered a question and revealed that the M*A*S*H Honoria was named after a girl he dated briefly in college.
A friend of mine from my high school days, Bruce Reznick, read this and wrote to Ken to ask if it might be the same Honoria that he (and I) knew from back then. The last names matched. It was.
I do not envy Ken's Emmy awards or his fabulous success as a TV writer and a sportscaster and a playwright. I envy that he got to go out with Honoria. She was real cute.
There's an Honoria in the mythos of Harry Potter, too. Wonder if it's the same one.
The Programming Schedule for Saturday can be read here. If you can't find three events on it you're dying to attend, you have no business even going to the convention.
We journey back to 2/26/07 for this Horrible Childhood Memory. Actually, this is a two-for-one encore because it will be immediately followed by a follow-up…
Above, courtesy of our dear friends over at OldTVTickets.com, we have a ticket for a local, Los Angeles show called Bill Stulla's Parlor Party. The date on this ticket, as you can see, is September 9. I believe the year was 1952.
Bill Stulla was a fixture for years of L.A. broadcasting. His Parlor Party started life on radio and segued to TV…in what year, I do not know. The premise of the show was that it was an on-air birthday party. It was done live, of course, and each day they'd have on a batch of individuals who'd been born on that day. They'd entertain them and play games with them and interview them and serve cake and award prizes. I have a vague idea that at one point in the program's existence, the birthday celebrants covered a wide range of ages. But on the day I made my television debut on the program, the premise was that it was all kids, aged ten or younger. In my case, it was much younger.
I am describing to you one of my earliest memories. I remember being taken to the TV studio — I don't recall where but it was probably Sunset and Vine like the ticket says. KNBH was then the local NBC television affiliate. (In 1954, it became KRCA and in 1960, it was renamed KNBC.) I remember being dressed up, which I never liked. I remember being backstage and my mother furiously combing my hair (which I also never liked) and dealing with the fact that I didn't want to be there and do whatever I was supposed to do. I remember being told that my relatives and neighbors were all watching so I had to go through with it.
I had seen the show. Mr. Stulla, a genial man with glasses, welcomed his young guests as they came in through the door of a little storybook-type house on the stage. I remember being backstage without my mother, waiting on the other side of that door for someone to tell me to go through it and onto live television. Back there, it didn't look like a storybook house. It was all fake and that seemed odd and scary. Everything backstage was odd and scary.
Then someone shoved me out onto the stage. I remember blinding lights and Mr. Stulla sticking a microphone in my face and asking me my name. If he had waited for an answer, we'd still be there today.
I was absolutely terrified. I'm not sure of what but I was absolutely terrified. I mumbled something. I don't know what it was but it wasn't my name. Someone off-camera told it to him. Mr. Stulla, who'd done this before, attempted gamely to get me to speak up and answer his questions: How old was I? Did I have any brothers and sisters? Did I have any pets? (There's not a lot you can ask a kid that age.) But it didn't matter what he asked. I wasn't answering. In a very short span of time, he decided I was just one of those children who wasn't going to cooperate and he passed me over to the party area and brought the next toddler out through the phony door.
In the party area, I sat with complete strangers, awaiting cake that would celebrate our mutual birthday. I didn't see the point of that, either. There was a cake waiting for me at home. As I sat there, I went from really, really not wanting to be there to really, really, really not wanting to be there. Well before it was time to bring out the cake and have about a dozen of us make a group effort to blow out the candles, I wandered off the stage, found my parents in the audience and made them get me the hell out of there.
So what year was I on that show? That's what I'm trying to figure out. (In case it's not clear, the above ticket has nothing to do with my being on the program. It's just the only visual evidence I've ever come across that the series even existed.)
I was born in March of 1952. I once thought I was three or four when I made my inauspicious television debut. My mother doesn't remember but one time when I asked her about it, she did recall that my going on the show was at the urging of my Aunt Dot, who thought it would be the greatest thing in the world to see her adorable nephew on the television machine. Parents apparently wrote away in advance and if their kid was selected, they were told to bring him or her down to the studio on the day in question at such-and-such a time. They were also sent some number of tickets to dispense to friends and relatives to come down and watch the festivities.
Research suggests that Bill Stulla's Parlor Party was off the air before my third birthday. All the history I've seen says that in 1954, Mr. Stulla went to work on KHJ, Channel 9 here in Los Angeles, hosting what always seemed like the worst cartoons available. He was the guy who ran Colonel Bleep, for God's sake. He adopted a train motif for his show, called it Cartoon Express and became Engineer Bill. I'll bet a lot of people reading this who grew up in L.A. remember Engineer Bill. He did that series, Monday through Friday, until 1964.
If he stopped Parlor Partying on Channel 4 when he began Engineer Billing on Channel 9, that would mean I must have been two when I made my traumatic appearance. That seems too young to me. A few years ago when I met Mr. Stulla (he's still around, by the way), I asked him what year Bill Stulla's Parlor Party ended and if there was an overlap with his KHJ job. He told me it was probably '52. I told him it couldn't possibly have been '52 because I was on the show on my birthday and I was born in '52. He said in that case, he didn't remember the year but was sure it was "long" before he became Engineer Bill. It couldn't have been too long.
I'll be 55 years old this Friday. Up until I was around 40, I hated being in front of a TV camera. Twice in my earlier career, I was asked to play on-camera roles in shows I was writing. Once on Welcome Back, Kotter, they needed a tall guy to hover over Arnold Horshack and threaten to beat the crap out of him. I was asked to be that guy and I refused. I was willing to beat the crap out of Arnold Horshack but not to go on camera. Later on Pink Lady, they used the whole writing staff as extras (dancing, no less) in a sketch and I couldn't get out of that one. I did it but disliked every second of the experience. In fact, if my parents had been there, I think I would have walked off the stage, found them and forced them to take me home for cake.
I still don't love being on the business end of a lens but I can do it now without fleeing in terror. I do not think, by the way, that when I recoiled from it in my adult life, it was because it reminded me of my bad experience on Bill Stulla's Parlor Party. I think I was born hating to be on television and that like acne, my Snagglepuss t-shirt and thinking fart jokes were funny, I eventually outgrew it.
This has been the first in a series of my Horrible Childhood Memories. I'm not sure if and when I'll post another because I had a great childhood and don't have many horrible memories. But one of these days, I may post another one. (I still can't believe I was two when this one happened…)
Okay, this is now me back in 2015. Not long after I posted the above — on May 14, 2008 — I posted an update. Here's an edited version of it…
If you actually read [my earlier piece], then you know that as a small tot, I made my TV debut on a local Los Angeles TV show called Bill Stulla's Parlor Party. I remembered how much I disliked it but I was unable to place exactly how old I was at the time…two, three, older? You can ignore all the sterling detective work that I did in that post because most of it was wrong. I appeared on the show on March 1, 1955, one day shy of my third birthday.
And above, we have incontrovertible evidence. I've recently been having my hard-working assistant Tyler scan all the old family photos my mother could find and in one box, I came across my "passport to the Castle of Dreams" for that traumatic day. (On the back of it, in my mother's handwriting, there's a list of relatives and neighbors I'm supposed to say hello to. As I recall, I mentioned not a one of them. By the way, the Castle of Dreams was a really badly-painted scene flat.)
That's about all I have to say about this. Just thought I'd finish the story and share this nifty little relic.
Stephen Colbert on today's decision…
There are 87,388 essays and articles currently on the Internet about this morning's Supreme Court decision about Gay Marriage. Don't believe me? Count 'em like I didn't.
In my piece on the subject, I made a dumb typo, inserting the name of the wrong Justice. I have fixed it and I would like to thank the 87,388 people who wrote in to tell me.
I've been reading a lot of articles and essays on the subject…and it is worth reading if not the entire decision then at least excerpts. You'll find Scalia saying…
With each decision of ours that takes from the People a question properly left to them — with each decision that is unabashedly based not on law, but on the "reasoned judgment" of a bare majority of this Court — we move one step closer to being reminded of our impotence.
This is an odd position from the guy who was so proud of the court stepping in and making sure George W. Bush became president in 2000 and who told people who thought it was a wrong decision to "Get over it." Then you have Alito writing…
By imposing its own views on the entire country, the majority facilitates the marginalization of the many Americans who have traditional ideas. Recalling the harsh treatment of gays and lesbians in the past, some may think that turnabout is fair play. But if that sentiment prevails, the Nation will experience bitter and lasting wounds.
In other words, the Nation would not experience bitter and lasting wounds if we continued the harsh treatment of gays and lesbians. We have to protect the sensitive feelings of those who don't like the way society is changing. And then Roberts wrote something which has to have pissed off a lot of folks…
People of faith can take no comfort in the treatment they receive from the majority today.
Yes, because we all know "people of faith" are against gay rights. There are no "people of faith" in favor of same-gender marriage — no members of the clergy, no people who believe in God, etc. Depending on which poll you believe, somewhere between 57% and 65% of Americans support Gay Marriage. Apparently none of them are "people of faith." Finally, from Thomas…
Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.
I don't even know where to start…
As you may know, Comedy Central is running every Daily Show since the day Jon Stewart began in a 42-day marathon over on this site. It started this morning and at the moment, Jon (at about age 6) is chatting with John Tesh about his new album. It's 1999 over on that webpage and coming up is a segment about Pat Buchanan throwing his hat in the presidential ring. Same speech as Donald Trump but with better hair and less bragging about how rich he is.
When I heard about this, I wondered for about fifteen seconds if I should try to capture all that video. Then I realized that, first of all, the software I have that captures streaming video records about two hours at a time and then must be reactivated. Since I'm not going to go rushing to my computer every two hours for the next month and a half, that kills that thought.
And Stewart has hosted just shy of 2000 episodes. Even if I had them all, when would I ever watch them? I could perhaps average two a day. That would take 2.7 years. And how many gigabytes would that be? Ye Gods.
Still, I hope they have plans for all those episodes. I'd love to see them set up a website where you could pay a small membership fee and watch 'em at your leisure, preferably with a good search engine so you could search for "colbert nazi retirement village" or "sharpton guest no-show" or other great moments.
Or better still, how about running two hours a night on Comedy Central? I'm thinking three old episodes of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and one Colbert Report. Even as dated as some would be, I bet they'd outdraw most of what's on that network, especially those roasts where the roasters seem to really not like the roastee.
I'm not happy about Jon Stewart going away but I'd be really unhappy if all those great episodes went away. Somehow, I don't think Comedy Central — or someone — will let that happen.
Here's the Programming Schedule for Friday — a day on which I miraculously have no panels. I have business-type meetings and in the evening, I'm presenting awards at the Will Eisner Awards Ceremony…but no panels. If you see me wandering the hall with a pale, disbelieving expression, now you know why. But I'll lose it over the weekend.