Today's Video Link

The late Orson Bean was a great teller of jokes. One night, he told one on Johnny Carson's show about a horny parrot..a joke that absolutely killed. I, of course, helped myself to it and told it many, many times to many, many friends. I don't know if any video exists of that appearance but many years later when he returned to Johnny's guest chair, he told it again. That's the clip below.

I'm about 95% certain that in the first telling, he repeatedly used the word "horny," which was one of those words that was sometimes on the forbidden list of the Standards and Practices people and sometimes was not. I think what happened was that Saturday Night Live used it a few times on the air and then Carson used it and it was bleeped and he threw a fit over the double standard for shows in the same time slot. So they let him say it for a while.

If someone wrote a good, in-depth book about NBC in those years, it would include some stories about how wet-your-pants terrified most of the executives there were at the prospect of getting Johnny mad. If he got really pissed-off, that could be the end of your career in broadcasting and you might spend the rest of your days polishing hub caps at the Burbank Car Wash. After Johnny left — and maybe even before — much of that terror was redirected to the notion of angering Lorne Michaels.

So for a while there, Johnny and his guests could say "horny" and a few other words that couldn't be used later on The Tonight Show. I believe the clip we're about to see is from a period when they'd dialed the randy vocabulary back. Mr. Bean had certainly been cautioned by someone not to use the "h" word and its absence diminishes the joke by about 50%. You can see Johnny, well aware Orson can't use the word, trying to help him work around it.

Today, you could probably say "horny" on any late night show but they might delete the rest of this joke as sexist…

Monday Evening

Thanks to all for the birthday wishes. No, I don't feel like I'm 68 but I also don't deny it. I just deny that 68 is as old as some people think it is.

Last night, a friend of mine and I went out to Vitello's, a fine Italian eatery in Studio City. Upstairs there, there's a showroom operated by Michael Feinstein's company that features great cabaret-style entertainment. Last night, for one night only, my pal Bruce Kimmel was hosting a tribute to the late Jerry Herman — six performers of fine voice singing his well-known hits and some that were not so well-known but should be.

The six were Daniel Thomas Bellusci, Brittney Bertier, Jason Graae, Kim Huber, Kerry O'Malley and Robert Yacko, with Jeff Rizzo at the piano. Great songs, great talk, great response. Jerry Herman wrote the most optimistic songs of any major Broadway composer. Even his sad ones have an underscore of survival and persistence about them. But it was fun and at the end, everyone in the room sang "Hello, Dolly!" because you can't sing anything else after you sing "Hello, Dolly!."

Photo by Howard Green

I got to talk with a lot of great people and one of them was a great composer who was not Jerry Herman but was, in fact, Richard Sherman, who with his late brother Robert gave us all the songs in Mary Poppins, all the songs in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, all the songs in many other films and shows, and about half the songs in Disneyland.  We always enjoy running into Richard and reminding him of some song of his that no one else ever mentions…like "Miracles from Molecules" or "Pineapple Princess."

Apart from his musical accomplishments, Richard's an inspiration.  He's 91 and he's still writing songs.  I want to be writing something when I'm his age even if it's only notes to my gardener to cut the grass in front of Lydia's house in the backyard.

My Latest Tweet

  • I don't know what this means but people working for Mike Bloomberg have stopped ringing my phones and flooding me with paper mail, e-mail and text messages to vote for Bloomberg…and people working for Bernie Sanders have started.

My Latest Tweet

  • ‪If you're in charge of any facet of the entertainment industry and you say no to everything, you"ll be right about 50% of the time. And that would put you way ahead of everyone else.‬

Moose Mystery

Here's a still from an episode of Get Smart.  The man playing Oliver Hardy is E.J. Shuster, the man playing Stan Laurel is Jim MacGeorge and the fellow who looks remarkably like W.C. Fields is Bill Oberlin.  Playing Mr. Fields was a sideline for Mr. Oberlin who was mainly an art director and jack-of-many-trades for cartoon studios and puppet shows.  He did the sets for Time for Beany, the TV puppet show produced by Bob Clampett.  Later, he became a handy person around the Jay Ward cartoon studio. (Jim MacGeorge also worked on Time for Beany as a puppeteer and for Jay Ward as a writer.)

My friend Harry McCracken wrote to jog my memory that it has always been reported that Bill Oberlin built the statue of Bullwinkle 'n' Rocky we were just talking about here.  Yeah, I remember hearing that…and it's in Keith Scott's superb definitive history of the Ward operation, The Moose That Roared: The Story of Jay Ward, Bill Scott, a Flying Squirrel, and a Talking Moose. If you want to know anything about that studio, that's the book to buy.

Which makes me wonder what I'm remembering. I'm quite sure Bill Scott told me Jay was waiting to restore the statue because he couldn't locate the guy who built it and that I didn't recognize the name he mentioned of that person. But I knew who Bill Oberlin was then. I'd met him. I might even have had his phone number and it's unlikely Jay or Bill didn't.

Also at the time, Mr. Oberlin was like 66 years old and not likely to be getting up on a scaffolding on Sunset Boulevard to sandblast and repaint a 14-foot statue. So I'm thinking they were looking for someone else…someone who'd assisted with the physical labor of putting the thing up and maybe had been involved with maintenance work on it or something. Bill Oberlin died in 1994 so we can't ask him. We may not be able to ask anybody.

Return of Moose and Squirrel

Photo by me of it in its original location after Restoration #1.

Our long national nightmare is over. As this article explains, the statue of Bullwinkle and Rocky, which once fronted Jay Ward's offices on the Sunset Strip, has returned to Sunset. At the moment, it's apparently under a tarp at the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Holloway Drive, awaiting its grand unveiling at a soon-to-be-announced date.

The article says "The statue dates to 1961, but the original creator is not known" and that seems to be true, though one time I heard his name. I worked with the late Bill Scott on a couple of projects back in the early eighties. Bill was, of course, the producer and head writer on that show along with being the voice of The Moose, Dudley Do-Right and a host of others. At the time, the statue was out in front of Jay's office and looking pretty shabby, having gone unrestored since '61. Bill told me that he had to avert his eyes whenever he drove by or walked in and out of the building.

He said he was after Jay to restore it and even volunteered to split the cost with him. Jay, he said, wouldn't let anyone but the original sculptor touch it and the guy had moved and no one knew how to reach him. Bill told me his name but it meant nothing to me and it immediately left my head…which is odd when you consider how much utterly useless information is still in there. A few months later, Bill told me they'd located the sculptor and he had been hired to give Rocky and His Friend a good makeover…and he did. The work was completed not long before Bill passed in 1985.

At the time, a trio of us — the other two being Frank Welker and Bill — were working on the screenplay of a live-action Dudley Do-Right movie. The project died along with Dudley's original voice. But I remember how happy Bill was that he could look at the statue again and I wish he could see it in its new, hopefully-permanent location. But I know that intersection and I'll bet you a round-trip ticket to Moosylvania that within the next few years, some drunk driver's going to plow into it, making for very funny headlines and Restoration #3.

Bye-Bye, Bloomberg!

The subject line is a reference to a great Allan Sherman song parody. It's to the tune of "Bye-Bye, Blackbird" and it's about a traveling salesman named Charlie Bloomberg. If you want to hear it, click this link. But I'm borrowing it to refer to another, real Bloomberg…

Yesterday afternoon, I got a phone call that my elaborate network of spam detectors did not flag as a solicitor. It was a live human being who was calling to try to convince me to mark my ballot for Mike Bloomberg. He started reading from a script about how Bloomberg had taken on the N.R.A. and how Bloomberg had led the nation's largest city through the 9/11 recovery and Hurricane Sandy and how Bloomberg had given zillions to worthy causes…

And when he got to "Bloomberg runs an absolutely transparent campaign with full disclosure and no secrets," I interrupted to ask him…

ME: Could you tell me where you got my phone number?

HIM: It was on a list I was given.

ME: Yes but that list came from somewhere. Can you tell me where? Or can you use some of that absolute transparency you just mentioned to find out where it came from?

HiM: No, I really can't. Listen, just let me finish…

ME: Because you don't get paid unless you get all the way through the script?

HIM: No. Listen, buddy. I get paid either way.

ME: You even get paid if I tell you to eat shit and then I go mark my ballot for Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden?

HIM: Yeah.

ME: Okay. Don't spend it all in one place! Bye!

And with that, I hung up on him and completely ruled out the notion of voting for Michael Bloomberg in the primary. I was already 99% sure he wasn't the guy but it's always nice to get to 100 with things like that.