Monthly Archives: December 2019

Here's a promo for John Mulaney's upcoming special. It looks suspiciously like a movie I've seen…

Glenn Kessler, who fact-checks for the Washington Post, reviews some of the biggest whoppers of 2019. They're not all from people named Trump but an awful lot of them are.

"Andrew B." wrote me to ask…

Who would you say is the greatest comic actor of all time, living or dead?

Oliver Hardy…with Stan Laurel a close second. I can watch Oliver Hardy in anything — even the worst Laurel & Hardy movie (and they made some awful ones late in their careers), even that dreary John Wayne movie Hardy appeared in without Laurel.

The best way I can explain what I love about "Babe" Hardy (his friends called him that) is like this: Harold Lloyd made a lot of great comedy films in roughly the same era but in Lloyd's films, the situations were risible and the gags were clever but he himself was not all that amusing. Reportedly — and this is easy to believe if you've seen his movies — if a scene called for him to walk across the room and open a door, he'd turn to the director and writers and ask, "What do I do to be funny?"

That was a question Oliver N. Hardy never had to ask. He was actually funny just walking across a room and opening a door. He also had a great sense of scale. Early comedy films drew a lot of their performers from the stage — shows we might now think of under the general heading of vaudeville. A lot of these folks were used to playing to the second balcony, making their reactions and movements too extreme for the camera. Other performers were literally learning to be comic actors before the cameras, never having done it before. They tended to underplay. But Hardy was always just right.

Once sound movies came along, a lot of comic actors were more interested in talking funny than in being funny with their gestures and actions. Among those who came around long after Stan and Ollie and who moved funny were Dick Van Dyke, Art Carney and most of the leads in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. That's one of the things I love about that movie.

The best episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show are ones which give Dick many opportunities to react to situations not just with his face but with every part of him from the neck down. And I love watching Carney on the classic episodes of The Honeymooners where he steals just about every scene he's in — no easy thing to do when you're sharing the screen with Jackie Gleason. The difference between them is that Gleason was a good physical comedian and Carney was a great one.

And I really love Phil Silvers. A few months ago, I watched the 1955 movie of Guys and Dolls for the umpteenth time. I always think what a classic that would have been if they'd cast Sinatra as Sky Masterson instead of Nathan Detroit, and hired Silvers to play Nathan. To me, Sgt. Bilko was the most wonderful comic character ever created for television.

These days, I don't see many comic actors who act with their entire bodies, perhaps because the shows and the scripts do not demand that of them. I'm not talking about a need for more slapstick and pratfalls. I'm talking about "takes" and reactions and adopting postures that reflect the situations…and being funny walking across a room and opening a door. Nowadays, actors do that exactly the way you or I would and if they're supposed to be funny, they say something funny as they walk across the room and open the door. If you don't get what I mean, watch Oliver Hardy, especially in a silent film or a talkie scene where he has nothing to say. He could say so much with nothing to say.

• I'm getting tired of people saying Donald Trump can't win or can't lose. This is the most volatile, unpredictable, nobody-knows-what-will-happen-next presidency of all time. We don't even know what we'll be impeaching him over next time or the time after…

Christmas is coming! This would be a good time to enroll in the Charlie Brown School of Dance…

• How come all the people in politics who complain about "bias" are the ones who themselves have the strongest, set-in-concrete and "anyone who disagrees is an idiot" opinions?

I have Spectrum Cable for my TV, Internet and a few other things. Whenever I need help from their tech support people — which happens way more often than it should — it takes a long time, much of it spent listening to bad hold music and/or waiting and waiting and waiting and then having their computer hang up on me.

I wanted to install a new TiVo to work with the TV feed I get from Spectrum. This should be easy but it never is. When you call TiVo, they tell you the problem you're having isn't their doing and you need to call Spectrum. When you call Spectrum, they tell you the problem you're having isn't their doing and you need to call TiVo. So right there you don't know where to turn.

If and when you can convince the Spectrum folks that they need to do something on their end, they're more than glad to help. But I suspect that when they go to their manuals and look up how to fix things so my TiVo can interface with their service, the manual says something like: "Tell the customer to get rid of his TiVo and rent one of our special DVRs from us."  One of the reasons I got rid of DirecTV some years ago was that no matter what I asked them, the reply was "Junk your TiVo and switch to our wonderful DVR with fewer features and more confusing controls."  One tech support guy insisted to me that all TiVos were incompatible with DirecTV, which was true at one time but ancient history by the time he said it.

Another swore that TiVo was going out of business any day now. I told him he was wrong and he assured me he'd just seen a memo that told employees to expect a flurry of calls as soon as the closure was announced. That was well over ten years ago and TiVo is still in business. Not only that but they continue to make much better DVRs than anything DirecTV or Spectrum have to offer. Here's what my new one looks like…

A few days ago, Spectrum sent me a standalone tuning adapter and the cables necessary to allow a TiVo to work with their signal. They said it'd come with all the instructions I needed but it came with no instructions so I called up and spent some time before I managed to reach someone who could tell me what to do. I did as directed and you know what happened. I wouldn't be posting here if it had worked.

So I called up again and bounced around with Spectrum for a lot more time getting to someone who seemed to know something. That person talked me through it again…and it turned out, I'd done it exactly as directed but I still had a blank screen — no sound, no picture. All he could do at that point was tell me they'd send an expert technician over to find out what the trouble was.

The next day, a very nice gent showed up on time, told me he didn't know a whole lot about TiVos and proceeded to prove it. He wound up calling someone at the Spectrum home office…and I had that little moment of smug delight when the Spectrum employee kept being put on hold and couldn't get through to anyone at Spectrum.

When he did get someone on the phone, that someone had him rearrange every connection that I'd made as per instructions. Then my "expert" said to me, quoting the guy on the phone, "Go through TiVo Guided Setup again and it will definitely work." That can take an hour so he left, I went through Guided Setup again and, of course, it didn't work.

I inspected what he had done and among other things, saw that on the tuning adapter, he had the RF In and the RF out connected in reverse. I switched them, did Guided Setup again and guess what! It still didn't work but at least I had the sensation that it was now not working the right way instead of not working the wrong way.

So it was back to the labyrinth of bad hold music and periodic recorded statements that I could have solved all my problems myself on the Spectrum website…and every so often, I'd be connected to the wrong division. At long last, I was able to speak with a gent who seemed to know a lot about TiVos, though not enough to fix my problem. I was on with him maybe a half hour before he gave up…

…and then, with a smidgen of help from me, he figured out what was amiss!  The serial number of the CableCard that Spectrum had sent me to insert in my TiVo did not match the serial number of the CableCard that his computer over at Spectrum HQ showed him was in my TiVo here!  I suspect it was the number from the CableCard in my old TiVo but however it got there, once he typed in the right number, the face of Wayne Brady magically appeared on my TV screen and all was well. After all the hooking and rehooking and rebooting and redoing the Guided Setup over and over here, the problem was on their end all along.

But that wasn't the end of it. I had all my channels but several were in the wrong place. For instance, I switched to what my TiVo thought was CSpan and there, I swear to you, was Comedy Central showing me an episode of South Park! And yes, I could tell the difference.

The gent on the phone who'd solved the CableCard problem couldn't explain this but after I got off the phone with him, I figured it out. When you run Guided Setup on a TiVo, it asks you to select from a list of cable TV sources in your area. The menu showed two that it could have been: Spectrum HD for the City of Los Angeles or Spectrum HD for the Hollywood and Westchester areas. I'd called up (another call!) and reached a lady at Spectrum who'd told me to definitely select the one for the City of Los Angeles. Which I'd done.

Now, seeing the face of Cartman where Jim Jordan's should have been, I ran Guided Setup for about the ninth time, selected Hollywood/Westchester…and when all was done, all my stations were in the right place. Deep exhale.

Each time I dealt with a different Spectrum employee, I received a robocall asking me to use my touch-tone pad and rate the friendliness and knowledge of that person. The friendliness was always fine. The knowledge seemed to only be lacking in terms of insufficient instruction and the Spectrum Knowledge Bank or whatever those folks consult to tell you how to solve your tech dilemma.

What I wish is that the company would ask me to rate the ease of winding one's way through their robotic phone answering maze, how impossible it is to reconnect with the right person if your call is dropped, and whether I think they need to train some of their employees better. I also wouldn't mind explaining to them why I want a TiVo instead of the vastly inferior DVRs they offer. I understand why some people who may know the difference still opt for the cable company's DVR.

• Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) asked in the hearings, "Is it ever okay for a president…to invite foreign interference in an upcoming presidential election campaign?" There was silence because no one wanted to admit their answer was: "Only if it helps us win!"

I think most of us agree on the wonderfulness of Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol, the 1962 adaptation of Charles Dickens' timeless tale. It may also have been the best of the many adaptations of Mr. Dickens' timeless tale and one of the reasons was the great score by Broadway pros Bob Merrill and Jule Styne. I guess it was inevitable that someone would think of putting this version on the stage — which the Actor's Fund did as a special event back in 2014.

And guess what! They're doing it again for one night, that night being next Monday, December 16 at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College. That's in New York, New York. Since I won't be in New York, New York then, I won't be there but if you are and want to go, tickets can be purchased here. Proceeds from the evening will finance some of the programs and services of The Actors Fund, which does many good deeds to aid folks performing in the arts and entertainment.

Gavin Lee, who was so good as Bert in the Broadway version of Mary Poppins, is playing Scrooge. Or maybe he's playing Quincy Magoo playing Scrooge, however it works. Anyway, I'd love to go see this but that ain't gonna happen. You probably won't be there either so we'll just have to settle for a quick video with snippets of the version mounted for the Actor's Fund in 2014. Makes you wanna see the whole show, doesn't it? Thanks to Bob Elisberg for telling me about this video…

First of all, as a proud half-Jewish person, I'm looking at this…

President Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Wednesday to interpret Judaism as a nationality and not just a religion, a move that the Trump administration believes will fight what they perceive as anti-Semitism on college campuses, a White House official said.

I understand neither the reasons nor the possible ramifications for this and as far as I can see on the Internet, that quandary's kind of unanimous. The folks in favor of it are in favor of it because Trump's in favor of it. The ones opposing it are opposing it because Trump's in favor of it. And an insufficient number of Jews seem to have been consulted before the decision was made.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that two articles of impeachment are in Mr. Trump's future. Daniel Larison of the American Conservative explains why they are not only valid but necessary. Here's an excerpt…

The case for Trump's impeachment seemed quite strong more than two months ago, and the evidence provided to the House's impeachment inquiry has strengthened it further. The president's abuse of power is not in dispute. It is clear that he used the powers of his office in an attempt to extract a corrupt favor for his personal benefit, and this is precisely the sort of offense that impeachment was designed to keep in check. It doesn't matter if the attempt succeeded. All that matters is that the attempt was made. It is also undeniable that he has sought to impede the investigation into his misconduct. The president has committed the offenses he is accused of committing, and the House should approve both articles of impeachment.

No, they probably have no chance of passing the Senate…but then the articles voted against Bill Clinton had no chance of passing that Senate and were about a lesser matter and not one Republican thought that was a reason not to go to trial. My guess is this is not the only time this president will be impeached. My guess is the narrative will become "He commits crimes, Republicans protect him, he commits more crimes…" And the 2020 election becomes about only whether the country is fine with that.

As Jonathan Chait points out, when the charges against Trump were first made, prominent Republicans assumed they could never be proven with any certainty so they said, "That would be troubling if true." Now that the charges have been proven with as much certainty as there is about anything in Washington, they've had to switch to "No, that is not troubling."

Meanwhile: The Justice Department has released a 434-page inspector general's report on the origin of the FBI probe into the Trump campaign's possible ties to Russia. It's a something-for-everyone bonanza and everyone's out there spinning whatever they can spin to their advantage. It's amazing how one report could be so right about everything bad it says the other side did and so wrong when it says my side did anything bad. Glenn Kessler straightens out a lot of the spin for us. And so it goes…

The sixth volume of The Complete Syndicated Pogo has been printed and somewhere below, you'll see a photo of another famous cartoonist paging through a copy and enjoying the brilliant work of Mr. Walt Kelly. That's the good news.

The bad news is that many retailers — including probably Amazon — will not have their copies until around this time next month. How could this be? Well, you may not believe this but I'm blaming it on Donald J. Trump. Allow me to explain…

Many of the books that are coming out these days about comic books and strips are printed in China. If you can connect with the right printer over there, you can get great quality at a low, low price…or you could before Mr. Trump began imposing and escalating tariffs on imports from China. I'm not clear on what these fees are supposed to accomplish nor am I clear on how well they're accomplishing that. All I know is that it has thrown sections of the Chinese printing industry into chaos.

That creates chaos for the American publishers who use those printers and you can expect price increases on many of their books shortly. A number of announced books will be coming out late and some may not come out at all…or at least until things stabilize in this marketplace. If we still had Tom Spurgeon covering the comics industry, he would have done an in-depth report on this by now. You should hear more about this in the fan press after the December 15 announcement about how the tariffs will be modified or extended or whatever that guy in the White House is going to do.

Volume 6 of The Complete Syndicated Pogo — subtitled Clean as a Weasel — was originally going to be printed in China and the materials got to the printer over there in plenty of time. At some point, it became necessary to pull the book from that printer and it was moved to a printer in Korea — the one that handled earlier volumes in the series. They've printed it but when you print over there, most copies get over here via the cheapest/slowest freight. A few retailers have copies and a few more will have them in the next week or two but everyone won't have them until around the second week in January. You have no idea how sorry (and frustrated) we are about this.

But it'll be worth whatever you have to wait. This volume reprints the entirety of the Pogo newspaper strip for 1959 and 1960 — two years where so much was happening in America that Walt Kelly had too much to work with. The book also contains a foreword by Jim Davis of Garfield fame, R.C. Harvey's fine annotations, Maggie Thompson's pull quotes feature, an article on the late Don Morgan (who worked with Kelly on the later strips) by Jim Korkis and — what? You want more than that?

And here's some happy news: Volume 7, which will be subtitled Pockets Full of Pie, will be out sooner than you might expect. We actually have all the strips for that book in hand and we're going to send everything to press way before the release date. I'll announce that date here shortly. Nothing will stop us unless Trump slaps a 500% tariff on books about possums who dress like basketball referees — which, come to think of it…

Well, this is troubling. The Washington Post has a long article up with many supporting sidebars. It's by Craig Whitlock that says — well, here. Just read the first paragraph or two…

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.

I always thought what Vietnam proved was that our wars are sometimes kept going not in the interests of America but because those conducting the war don't want to admit to misjudgement and failure. If that was the lesson of 'Nam, it apparently went unlearned.

John Oliver is on hiatus 'til February but he left this Christmas gift for us…

I do not know if J. Williamson is male, female or "other" but I do know J. Williamson wrote to ask…

You've written about how you went to U.C.L.A. but I'm under the impression you didn't graduate. If so, why? And do you think it was valuable to your career to go to college? Some people think it's a necessity if someone is to have a successful career.

I'm only an expert on me and for me, it was a total waste of time. When I realized how total, I quit and have never regretted it for a moment. I am not suggesting that this move would be right for everyone; just that it was right for me when it was right for me. I'm sure there are professions where college is a necessity. Writing the kinds of things I write, it was not.

Why did I go to college at all? Four reasons, one being that my father desperately wanted that. Given his underprivileged childhood, he felt that merely getting into any college — let alone, one as prestigious as U.C.L.A. — was a major achievement. When I was accepted, he walked around like his kid had just won the Nobel Prize. In my family, we did a lot of things just to please each other.

Another reason was that there was this thing happening then…this war in Vietnam. My father desperately did not want me to be drafted and I wasn't fond of the notion. We didn't have the money to bribe some doctor to write me a medical excuse saying I had bone spurs but there were these things called student exemptions. They might save me.

At the time, I thought those were my only reasons but I later realized there were two other subconscious ones…and one of them was this: I always knew I wanted to make my living as a writer and I'd long figured, "As soon as I get out of high school, I'll start seriously pursuing that." Going on to college was kind of a way to not throw myself immediately into the deep end on a swim-or-sink basis. I would start trying to make my way in the world as a professional writer but if I didn't succeed right away…well, it wasn't a now-or-never thing. Going to college meant I was still in school. Without realizing it, I think I was giving myself an excuse for possible failure.

As it happened, in the few months after I graduated from University High but before I started at U.C.L.A., I began getting work. I wasn't yet writing for television or even comic books. I was writing magazine pieces and press releases and one semi-dirty book and other oddments and my confidence was growing that I could make a living as a writer. Suddenly, college was a distraction from the career I wanted to have, not a help.

What I was learning there was largely useless to me because I couldn't get into any classes that had anything to do with my chosen vocation. My first quarter, I found myself studying Anthropology, Economics and Portuguese. I don't know if I've mentioned it here but on that long, long list of things at which I am terrible, learning a foreign language is not far from the top. You could teach ballroom dancing to a snail before you could teach me more than about two sentences in any tongue other than English.

I wasn't that much better at the Anthropology or the Economics. I might have mastered one of them if I had studied a few hours each night but I'd landed a job working for a firm that did mail order merchandise for Marvel Comics and soon, I began working for Jack Kirby and then writing Disney comic books for the foreign market.

The latter job led to writing Disney comic books for the American market, which meant for Gold Key Comics. Gold Key also published the comics featuring the Warner Brothers characters like Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig, the Walter Lantz characters like Woody Woodpecker, some Hanna-Barbera properties like Scooby Doo and others. Soon, I was writing for them as well, thereby trapping myself in the following conundrum: I was going to college to get an education and degree that might (might!) help me succeed as a professional writer…but doing college right would have meant turning down all this professional writing work I was being offered.

Two things happened in close proximity that led to me quitting U.C.L.A. I do not now recall which came first but I think they occurred in this sequence…

My editor at Gold Key was a lovely (to me) man named Chase Craig. One day when I was delivering scripts to his office, he leaned back in his chair, put one foot up against his desk and said to me, "You know, I could use a lot more scripts from you. I could probably use as many as you can write." It's a big moment in the life of any beginning writer when he hears something like that. All the work I can handle? And on something I love writing?

The other thing: U.C.L.A. was then the scene of frequent protests of the Vietnam War and, at that moment, especially the bombing in Cambodia. On other college campuses, there were general strikes — students and some faculty members declaring they would stop attending or conducting classes and instead demonstrate against U.S. involvement and actions.

I had finally gotten into an English Literature class — a class that had at least something to do with my chosen profession. It wasn't a very good class. I thought the professor was a bore and none of his lecturing was of any more use to me than those classes in Portuguese. But I attended, my mind often drifting off to the Daffy Duck story I would be putting onto paper as soon as I got home.

Then one day, he opened class by announcing he was closing class; he'd decided to go on strike. He would teach no more that quarter, we'd all receive credit for the class — I think he said that — and he encouraged us to use the time he'd freed up in our lives to become more politically active, whatever our views.

Within a week of the second of those two events, I quit U.C.L.A. I took on more assignments from Chase but I also did become more politically active. I think I've written about that here before. Having recently made that long, slow change-of-mind from generally supporting that war in which I did not wish to fight, I began participating in protests against it. Mostly, I became a spokesperson for a group that pushed the non-violent, non-confrontational approach.

My father, who was aware of and thrilled with how well my writing career was going, was kinda okay with me quitting college. He couldn't very well argue that staying in would lead to a better career since I was making more money than he was…and I was a lot happier doing it than he'd ever been in his work. But he did feel I should have waited until I got some sort of degree to do it. To give him hope that that might someday happen, I enrolled for part-time studies at Santa Monica College.

S.M.C., perhaps because it was about five miles closer to the ocean than the U.C.L.A. campus, then felt like going to school in a beach party movie. When it was sunny, students came to class in swimwear with perhaps a t-shirt or caftan covering. It was there that I realized the fourth reason I'd had for going to college at all, a reason that I hadn't explicitly realized before. You could meet a lot more girls going to college than you could sitting home in your bedroom in your parents' house, pounding a typewriter day and night. Call me shallow if you like but that mattered a lot to me at the time.

I went to S.M.C. for about a year and a half. I did not earn a degree of any kind, nor did I learn anything that in any way enhanced my writing career. I did though get some girl friends and I did get the whole idea of college out of my system…so going there was not without its value. Basically though, I learned whatever I learned about writing from on-the-job experience, not by sitting in a college classroom. I didn't even learn one friggin' sentence in Portuguese sitting in a college classroom. But I'm willing to admit and even emphasize that my case may be the exception. Just about everything in my career has been an exception of some kind or another.

This is a message for Caroll Spinney. I don't know what the Wi-Fi is like where he is now but just in case he searches Google for his name and finds this page…

Mr. Spinney, we never met but I admired your work for a long time. Very few people in this world manage to be responsible for even one beloved, iconic character but you gave us two: Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch. And I know you were a humble man and will insist that others created those characters and built them and wrote for them and even assisted you with the physical feats necessary to manipulate them. But they both shared a humanity and a spirit and a sense of humor that could only have come from the warm body inside them. They will live on with talented people doing fine Caroll Spinney imitations but for so many of us, they just won't be the same. Thank you for being so good at what you did. And give our regards to Mr. Hooper.