Monthly Archives: May 2018

This may be the only post here today. At the very least, it will be the only post until I finish up a script that is, of course, not as important as blogging for you, dear readers, but it's one of those bits of writing that will pay me money. Wouldst that I could write for you and only you.

Before I go do what I must, let's pause to wonder: What must the conversations be like these days between Bill and Hillary Clinton. I'll bet Bill says a lot of sentences that start with "My God, if there was even the slightest rumor that I'd cheated on you with a porn star and paid her hush money…" And Hillary says things like, "Jeez! That man calls me Lyin' Hillary?" What I'd kinda like to see happen is for Paula Jones to turn up and claim that Trump sexually harassed her. Then we could watch all the Trump supporters turn backflips to explain why in his case, it's different.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has voted to expel Bill Cosby and also, since they can't explain why they're kicking him out when they didn't kick out Roman Polanski, Roman Polanski. I have an e-mail from someone asking me why they also haven't expelled Woody Allen and I think that's, first of all, because Woody Allen has never been formally charged with a crime, let alone convicted of anything. Secondly, a lot of us (and I'm among the "us") think the case against him is very weak. I haven't had the time yet to write that long post (might be posts, plural) explaining why we feel that way.

And lastly, it might have something to do with the fact that Mr. Allen is not and has never been a member of the Academy. It's kinda hard to toss someone out of an organization to which they've never belonged.

Lastly for now:  It's been announced that Conan O'Brien's show on TBS will be trimmed to a half-hour.  I've never quite understood why it was cost-efficient for them as an hour since its ratings have never been spectacular, nor has it spawned a whole turnaround of that channel's image and audience as was once hoped.  But cutting it to thirty minutes will presumably make it more expensive than half of an hour show and make it less dominant and noticeable on their schedule.  Unless they pair it with another half-hour show that will attract a helluva tune-in, it sounds like the prelude to cutting it altogether.

At the same time though, it's been announced that Conan's old NBC shows will become highly available on the web.  I like that.  I thought that was a terrific program for about its first ten years.  If they'd equaled that standard on the current show, they'd probably be making it ninety minutes.

And now if you'll excuse me, I have to go to work.

A duck story with a happy ending…

I don't know what I'm doing up at this hour either but since I am, I might as well write about some topics…like the seeming mess that Rudy Giuliani made last night on Hannity when he began rearranging Donald Trump's legal affairs. I'm thinking his new spins and "facts" will make more sense once we know what Michael Cohen is telling prosecutors or what evidence came out of that raid of his office.

Has Cohen completely flipped? Is he now unloading dirt on Trump to Mueller and Giuliani's trying to get out ahead of some of the revelations? I'm still not sure what the story is now. Trump didn't know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an affair that never happened but he did repay the money to Cohen but he didn't know what it was for? And he fired James Comey because he felt the American public needed to know their president — the one who won't release his tax forms like every other president or tolerate his private businesses being investigated — isn't a crook?

The moment that really made me blink came when Hannity brought up Cohen's assertion that in paying the hush bucks, he acted without Trump's knowledge and Giuliani said that the president "didn't know about the specifics of it, as far as I know." Does anyone think Rudy went on TV and went out of his way to reveal the reimbursement without knowing what his client, Donald J. Trump, did or didn't know about $130,000 of that client's money going to pay off a porn star? "As far as I know" is a phrase you toss into a sentence when you know there's a good chance that statement will be proven false.

Ah, we live in interesting times. And it's going to be like this every single remaining day that Donald Trump is in office and for many years after.

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Various organizations are now recalling and undoing honors for Bill Cosby. Yale pulled his honorary degree. The TV Academy has removed him from its Hall of Fame. Any day now, Jell-O will be denying that he ever sold Pudding Pops for them and NBC will be retaping The Cosby Show with Christopher Plummer in the lead.

A small part of me (about the size of my spleen) feels sorry for the guy. I can't help but feel some sadness for anyone who has screwed up their life that badly, especially a guy who was capable of so much good. How difficult would it have been to think, "As much as I'd like to drug this woman and rape her, I should just be content with all the women who want to have sex with me because I'm rich and famous"?

I keep thinking of the stories one hears occasionally about really, really rich people who go into a store and shoplift candy bars or other small items just because it thrills them to know they can get away with that. It's not enough to have fabulous wealth. They also have to feel that the laws that govern the average person don't apply to them.

I'm sticking with my belief that we'll never really know what motivated Bill Cosby to do what he did and I'm not assuming he even understands it. But it had to be something like that…some feeling that he had to prove to himself that he was powerful enough that he could do the most repulsive, illegal things he had even the tiniest urge to do. If you think you were surprised that he was a rapist, imagine how shocked he must still be that he wasn't allowed to be one without penalty

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I'm lately getting tired of folks who think if I ask, "How have you been lately?" or even "How are you?" what I'm really saying is "Tell me every single thing in your life that hasn't gone the way you wanted it to for the last five or ten years." Even if I really like you, there's a limit to how much I want to hear every negative you can think of.

And if you want my input on some matter…well, that's fine but remember who you're asking. Like most folks, I have a fair amount of expertise in a few areas and darn near none in most areas. My advice on how to write a comic book script might conceivably have some merit if only because I've done a lot of that. Hearing how I do it might lead you to figuring out how you can do it, even if the path involves doing the exact opposite. But the other day someone asked me about how to swap out the carburetor in a late-model Honda for a new one, which is like asking a poodle how to file for a tax extension.

A writer I often quote, Alan Jay Lerner, once said, "There are people in the world who are brilliant at playing the saxophone and nothing else," meaning that skill in one area does not denote skill in any other. And I can't even play the saxophone. Or explain why I'm up at this hour.

You know what today is?  That's right: It's Unicorn Wednesday.  Every Wednesday from now on is Unicorn Wednesday, the day our friend-enchantress Misty Lee performs a magic trick with sorcery, sophistication and sass over at the Official Unicorn Wednesday website.  Go take a look if you don't believe me.

Back here, I raved about the recent documentary on the great (now, late) entertainer, Rose Marie.  We loved Rose as a performer and those of us who knew her loved her as a person.  One of those who knew her, Shelly Goldstein, was interviewed for the Decades channel about the lady.  Decades, which I don't get on my cable service, is now running that documentary, which is called Wait For Your Laugh.  If you get Decades, watch it.  If you don't get Decades, it's turning up other places so catch it via one of them.

America's best roaster (in the comic tradition) Jeff Ross weighs in on the controversy over Michelle Wolf's speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.  I might quibble with his insistence that the event is a roast.  It's an entertainment that might take the form of a roast but doesn't have to.  Craig Ferguson didn't really "roast" and I doubt Ross would look at whatever it was Rich Little did in 2007 and say, "Yeah, that's the same kind of thing I do."

But when you invite Michelle Wolf to perform, what you get is exactly what she did.  It would be like hiring Frank Ferrante to perform and being outraged when he did Groucho…which, come to think of it, would be a pretty good idea.

I still think the whole premise of the dinner is a bad one but Ross is right.  There is something very wonderful and American about a comedian doing jokes about the President of the United States to his face. Then again, I disagree that Trump would be the same kind of Good Sport he was on those Comedy Central roasts.  On those, Trump was just delighted to be seen as important enough to be the topic for an hour of television.  He's way past that now.  Now, he's too important to let anyone even jest about the crookedness of his tie, let alone his entire administration.

A couple of folks sent me essentially the same question Scott Reboul asks in this message…

Your comments on Cosby all make sense and put the matter into perspective clearly and realistically. And your unspoken words on the matter find their way to the reader through the discerning questions you ask. One thing you haven't mentioned much — but something I believe most of your readers would like to know — is your perspective of Camille Cosby and how she has seemingly stood loyal behind her longtime husband over the many years of their unusual marriage. I recognize that an easy answer to this question is that a wife in that position can put up with a lot of strife to continue living the life of luxury and status that being Mrs. Cosby affords, but I'm wondering if you have opinions beyond the norm on what she must be thinking and how she maintains an apparently sound relationship with her husband. Is this a matter you'd consider addressing on your website? (I surely hope so, but I recognize this subject may be considered "too personal" to suit your site).

I think my answer is that I don't know Camille Cosby…or for that matter, Bill, whom I only spoke to briefly, most recently in 1981. I have however been close (or close enough) to a number of marriages where the husband was "cheating" with the wife's consent.

I put that word in quotes because it's not really cheating if it's with consent. In some cases, the wife was "cheating" (with permission) as well and in some cases, she wasn't but — well, I'll give you three examples…

1. He was a TV producer who at age 55 had a yearning to sleep with young women. His wife of many, many years was not a young woman and not all that interested in sex with anyone any longer. He cheated (no quotes) on her, she found out but (a) she still loved him, (b) he was a great provider and protector who still loved her, (c) he was not going to stop, (d) she didn't want to divorce him and start dating again at her age and (e) she didn't want to be alone the rest of her life. So she proposed a deal: He got his own apartment and could pursue his hobby three days a week as long as he was discreet and didn't embarrass her…too much.  The rest of the time, he slept in the home they made together and was a perfect hubby.
2. He was a famous comic actor who at roughly the same age had a yearning to sleep with young men. His wife of many, many years was unlikely to turn into a young man and she loved him, didn't want to live without him (etc.) so they worked out a similar deal. A couple days a week, he could go out and explore that long partially-repressed end of his bi-sexuality. The rest of the time, it was business as usual.
3. He was a comic book artist, a bit younger than the above. One of the more surprising moments of my life came when the woman who'd been his spouse of around fifteen years (and still was) began coming on to me, assuring me that they had always had an "open" marriage and that he'd be fine with it. And when I politely declined, she had him phone me and assure me that indeed he'd be fine with it and that I'd really, really enjoy it. That was an even more surprising moment…and no, I did not act on his recommendation but I knew others who did.

These were all true cases and these were also, insofar as I could tell, arrangements that worked well for those couples. None of them got divorced or separated, and when I was around them, they seemed no less devoted to one another than any married couple I've known, and more devoted than many.

Don't write and tell me you'd never tolerate anything of the sort in any marriage of yours.  This isn't about your marriage.  And don't write me that you can't believe it worked for them.  You don't know them.  I also know a husband-wife duo where the two of them scream throughout all waking hours at each other — and it's not the cute Don Rickles style of insults. It's the kind of attacks where you know the person's areas of vulnerability and you go right for them. I wouldn't put up with that from a mate for five minutes but this one couple I know has been married five decades.

Not that I haven't also seen plenty of storybook happy-ever-after marriages. My parents had one. I'm just trying to make the point that there are many possible arrangements in the union of two consenting adults…and if an odd-to-us one makes those adults happy, I don't think outside opinions matter much, nor do we probably even know enough about them to have opinions.

The temptation is to try and view the Cosby marriage as similar to one of the above configurations…probably #2 except you substitute unwilling, unconscious women for willing, wide-awake men. But the truth is we don't know. We don't know what Mrs. Cosby knew. Since half of show business heard at least rumors of Bill's unfaithfulness, it's reasonable to assume she knew about that and maybe it was a little like Arrangement #1 above. But we don't know. Might she also have known of the drugging and raping? We — and I know I'm repeating myself here — do not know.

My feelings about Dr. William Henry Cosby Jr. (The "doctor" may be surgically removed shortly) are morphing from anger to a powerful, powerful disappointment. I keep hearing Al Pacino's voice in And Justice For All when he yells at the scumbucket judge played by John Forsythe, "You, you son-of-a-bitch, you! You're supposed to stand for something!"

But let's admit this:  We don't know really why Cosby did it or why his wife backed him and I doubt we'll ever know with any true sense of understanding.  Hell, there was a time when we didn't know he did these things at all and wouldn't have believed it if someone had told us. That's why it took fifty women showing the courage to stand up before some people decided maybe they didn't know the real Cliff Huxtable. We know even less about Ms. Camille Olivia Hanks Cosby.

Outsiders, perhaps projecting something about themselves, might assume that the money and the resultant lifestyle made it easy to look the other way about some or all of it. But maybe she just promised to love him in sickness and in health and sees raping as the sickness part.  We — and I'm telling you this for the last time — don't know.

There was a time I never thought I'd type the sentence, "I agree with most of what Jonah Goldberg says in this essay" but I do. And I think it makes more sense to talk about "coalition instincts" than "tribal instincts" because a coalition is something you may join for a short time to achieve one immediate goal, whereas tribalism flows more from religion, race or some other circumstance of your birth.

Hypocrisy aside, two things bother me about the objections to Michelle Wolf's speech. One is the misreporting that makes it sounds like she trashed Sarah Huckabee Sanders' looks. That is a misreporting of facts worthy of Sarah Huckabee Sanders. And then there's this complaint that she was not funny.

About "not funny": First off, even in that badly-miked room with a self-conscious audience that rarely guffaws at anything, Wolf got a lot of laughs. I sometimes go see a performer or film that fails to amuse me but all around me, others are howling. Two of many examples would be the movie Borat and the current Broadway play, The Play That Goes Wrong. With others voting audibly to the contrary, I feel it would be an act of sheer arrogance not to differentiate between "It wasn't funny" and "It wasn't funny to me." It is not the job of any comedian in any venue to make every single person who is watching or listening laugh.

I didn't find all of Ms. Wolf's act funny. I can't think of anyone who ever did the White House Correspondents' Dinner who didn't have some lines land with a thud. I mean, it's not like you can go to other, less visible White House Correspondents' Dinners first and test out your material on other gatherings of prominent politicians and media figures so you can discard or rewrite the clunkers.

When Michelle Wolf says today as she has, "I wouldn't change a word of what I said," that's a bit disingenuous. She would have cut or rephrased a dozen or so of the lines that got the weakest responses. She might have made some of the harsh lines harsher. Heck, now that she's being pilloried for insulting the press secretary's appearance, she might even figure she's got nothing to lose by doing so. She could even steal some of the fat jokes Donald Trump used to make about Rosie O'Donnell. Welcome to the Trump Era, where some people hold comedians to a higher standard of taste than we expect of the President of the United States.

My favorite performers of all time are and probably always will be Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy…and I'm sure you're quite familiar with Mr. Hardy's famous catchphrase. It was "Well, here's another fine mess you've gotten me into!" Right?

No, not right. What he actually said in their films was "Here's another nice mess…" He did say "fine mess" in one radio appearance but you probably never heard that. And they did make one film called Another Fine Mess but even in that one, he said "nice mess." He also said in other films, "Well, here's another nice kettle of fish you've pickled me in" and "Well, here's another nice bucket of suds you've gotten me into."

But the line was "nice mess." Here's a compilation of every time it was said on screen…