A couple of you have reported a problem playing my video embed of John Oliver's segment last Sunday about the Supreme Court. It's working for most folks but if you're not most folks, try this link.
Hey, remember the fuss I made when the Souplantation restaurant chain — known in some states as Sweet Tomatoes — went outta business? Well, Devlin Thompson has pointed me to this article saying that a Sweet Tomatoes is or was about to reopen in Tucson. Let's hope it did or does and that it's a big success and they regrow the empire!
Yesterday, I showed you four versions of the same Marty Feldman sketch, one of which appeared on The Flip Wilson Show.. Kevin Kravitz, a reader of this site, refreshed my memory of something else that happened in that episode…
I loved The Flip Wilson Show as a kid and I am glad you included one of his skits.
You mentioned a surprise cameo and it obviously was Howard Cosell. However, at the very end of the show when Flip had Marty take his final bow, Marty came out with that same box and decided to show what the monster looked like…AND IT WAS JACK BENNY!
As I recall, Jack had an NBC TV special that week. As soon as the lid came off, Jack started telling the audience to watch his upcoming special at 9pm and then Marty & Flip put the lid back on to shut him up. When the show was repeated in the summer reruns, music played over Jack's speech since the promotion for Jack's special would have been moot.
Thank you for running those monster skits, Mark.
Yeah, I do remember that. I don't see a clip of it anywhere online but if/when it turns up, I'll share it with everyone. Thanks, Kevin.
A couple of folks asked me to speculate on who/what was actually in the basket when they did those sketches. I would assume a stagehand with a smoke machine and other special effects…and he and Marty must have rehearsed the physical moves like it was a gymnastic competition. Then again, it may just have been Jack Benny. He'd do anything for a buck.
We recently looked at how a sketch that was originally performed by John Cleese and Marty Feldman turned up in several forms and with several different performers on both British and American television. Today we have for you four (count ‘em — four!) versions of a sketch Marty F. did during his travels through both nations.
In case you're wondering, "Does Evanier really expect people to watch the same comedy skit four times?," the answer is Yes. Feldman gives a helluva great performance and I found it fascinating to note both the consistencies and the variations.
I don't have dates on all of these but I think I have them in chronological order. The first of these may be the first time he did it — on some British show, possibly It's Marty!…
Now, this next one was from a British show that was also an American show. In 1970, Dean Martin's popular NBC show (produced and directed by Greg Garrison) here was replaced for a number of weeks in the summer by Dean Martin Presents The Golddiggers In London (produced and directed by Greg Garrison). It was shot over there with The Golddiggers, Charles Nelson Reilly, Tommy Tune, Marty Feldman and others. Garrison later recycled some of the material from the London show and ran them on Dino's program…
A few years later, Marty guested on The Flip Wilson Show and the thing in the basket guested along with him. Wait'll you see who they have doing the punch line…
And finally —- and it wouldn't surprise me if Feldman did it on other programs —- here's the version done on the show Fridays in 1981. He died the following year so this was probably the last time he performed it. If you watch all four, I hope you laughed all four times. I sure did..
Among my happiest memories of some years in which I commuted a lot to Las Vegas was watching (and hanging out with) one of my favorite comedians, Pete Barbutti. You may remember him from his eighty trillion appearances on Johnny Carson's show…that is, assuming you remember Johnny Carson.
Seeing Pete perform these days is a rare treat but not impossible. He's currently touring as part of a troupe of comedians billed as The Four Jokers. The other three Jokers are Mark Schiff, Scott Wood and ventriloquist Jay Johnson. Their next gig is March 2 down at the La Mirada Theater down in La Mirada, California. I'd go if I could but it's my birthday and I already have other plans.
But also — and this intrigues me — Las Vegas is about to get its first-ever production of the musical Follies with its score by Mr. S. Sondheim. You'd think a show about aging showgirls would be a natural for that town, right? Well, it will be staged there for the first time for six performances only in April and Pete is in the cast! Details can be found here.
I dunno what part he's playing but if I were in charge, we'd cut a few numbers to give Pete time to do his stand-up act. If anyone reading this goes, let me know how it is.
I "discovered" one of my heroes, Stan Freberg, in the early sixties when he was still making comedy records and also making a name for himself with innovative and funny commercials. His spots for Chun King Chow Mein were especially infamous…and one of the few times that the public was ever aware who was responsible for an advertising campaign.
In 1962, the company that marketed Chun King — which was so Chinese that they also made Jeno's Pizza Rolls — bought Stan a whole hour of network TV to do whatever he wanted to do. In fact, it was the hour on ABC which then usually housed Maverick, one of the highest-rated shows in all of television.
They hoped it would establish him as a television performer…and it did not. Critics called it one of the cleverest things they'd ever seen on The Box but everyone in the country who wasn't a critic or me was watching Ed Sullivan over on CBS that night.
But as you'll see if you click below, it was a unique 60 minutes of television time. Stan lassoed the famous designer Saul Bass to provide the "look" of the show and Billy May to provide music.
Then he brought along his stock company which included lots of people you may recognize, many of whom did cartoon voices. Most of you will recognize Sterling Holloway, June Foray, Shepard Menkin, Patty Regan, Peter Leeds, Mike Mazurki, Jesse White, Billy Bletcher, Frances Osborne, Arte Johnson, Ginny Tiu, Howard McNear, Byron Kane, Naomi Lewis, Max Mellinger, a few others and (briefly) some kid named Frank Sinatra.
Here's the whole show as aired February 4, 1962. You may not find it as brilliant as I did then or I do now but I doubt you'll think it's like anything else you've ever seen…
Devin "Legal Eagle" Stone takes us through the decision in Trump's civil fraud case. There's a tool in the YouTube player to slow the video down a little and that might come in handy for this one…
As promised, here's the segment from this week's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver that exposes or roasts or indicts (or whatever word you want to use) much of the current Supreme Court and Clarence Thomas especially…
The ASK me here yesterday brought this thorny question from Jeff Thayer. I'll try to answer as well as I can…
You mentioned that writing the Welcome Back, Kotter TV show paid you more than John Travolta was paid. I don't expect you'd want to reveal the dollar figure but how did the amount compare to what you made just writing comic books?
Well, I only mentioned the money to explain that it wasn't as much as most people would think. I would say that when I shifted from comic books to TV, the pay was 2-3 times the amount for 4-6 times the hours and at least that much more in stress. If I had given as much of my time, energy and stomach lining to writing comics, I might have made more there.
But! There were other perks of writing for television, a big one of which was writing for audiences. If you write a funny line in a comic book, you don't get to hear anyone laugh at it.
Another was that comics, back when that was my main income, had a hard glass ceiling. There were no royalties, no reprint fees, not much added revenue from the convention circuit. There were folks saying the industry would be gone in 5-10 years.
Even if it survived: If I'd somehow reached the level of making as much as it was possible for me to make writing comic books, that would at the time been as much as it was humanly possible to make writing comic books. Writing TV carried no such limits.
And a big difference for me was this: When I was mainly writing comics, I worked all day at home…and while I liked (and still like) writing alone, I missed the part of life that involved meeting a stream of new and interesting people. I liked spending my days with other writers, other creative people, new potential friends of both genders, etc.
In my twenties, I needed that. It was also a whole new world to explore and learn about.
In hindsight, it was a mistake for me to get so completely outta comics as I did that year but it was an understandable mistake. Kotter was a job that occupied almost every waking minute almost every day. I have not made that mistake again.
But my main point is that I did learn not to judge or make any career choice wholly because of the money. You can profit in non-monetary ways…and there are plenty of them. So comparing one paycheck to another is the wrong way to look at this kind of choice.
There's this new Broadway revival of the show Merrily We Roll Along, see? And they recorded a cast album for it and here's a video of them recording one of my favorite Sondheim tunes…
I raved here Sunday evening about that night's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. A number of you who apparently don't subscribe to HBO or MAX or whatever-the-hell channel it is have written me about this episode, the rudest of whom wrote, "If Oliver's show this week is so good, why the f*ck haven't you posted it so we could all see it?" (The asterisk was his, not mine.)
My answer: Because I couldn't. And Steve Bacher, a loyal reader of this site, snooped about and found an online article that explained why…
HBO is delaying the upload of clips of "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" to YouTube in hopes of encouraging viewers to sign up for subscriptions to its streaming platform.
In a post Monday, Oliver explained that the streaming giant would hold off until Thursdays before posting the clip. "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" airs Sundays.
"I know I usually share a link to our main story here on Mondays, but HBO has decided they're going to wait until Thursday to post them to YouTube from now on," Oliver wrote. "I hope they change their mind, but until then, you can see our piece about the Supreme Court on HBO, on MAX, and on YouTube in a few days."
So I'll post the segment when I can and those who are too impatient can go f*ck themselves or buy a subscription. I know one guy who will probably opt for the former.
Hi Mark, Here's a question for you and forgive me if you already answered it – Do you ever contribute (edit) Wikipedia or other crowd sourced online compendiums? If not, is it a question of time, a question of standards or something else?
I did for a while but I gave it up. Either I forgot how to do that or they changed the software and I couldn't figure out how to enter corrections. Since then, I've occasionally asked someone else to that for me…but most of the time, I just let it (whatever "it" is) go.
I submitted a few corrections on topics where I felt I had some authority and too often wound up on some discussion page arguing with someone who thought he knew my work better than I did.
And I'll tell you another problem I had: I was friends with a well-known but older comedian. He didn't understand just about anything about how the Internet — which for some unknown reason, I always capitalize — worked. He called me once, very upset about some bogus (according to him) "info" that had been posted on his Wikipedia page.
I went to Wikipedia, edited out the lines in question and that was that……except that by so doing, I had instilled in him the idea that I could get anything he didn't like off any page on the World Wide Web. Which of course, no one can do. Heck, I sometimes even have trouble editing this blog. But he kept calling and calling…
Here we have one of the funnier episodes (I think) of The Dick Van Dyke Show and it's built largely around my buddy, the late Lennie Weinrib. I suspect it was written around him since Lennie was an obsessive practical joker, especially on the telephone. He owned a green Rolls Royce with a phone in it back at a time when you rarely saw a green Rolls or a phone in a car.
Once in a while, he'd give me a lift in the car and I'd be a captive audience as Lennie, employing the same verbal and acting skills that made him a top voiceover, cartoon and occasional on-camera actor would "hook" someone via phone the way his character "hooks" Rob Petrie in this episode.
I happen to dislike practical jokes about as much as I dislike cole slaw and generally find them about as funny. But even I had to concede that Lennie was a master of that questionable art form…
Boy, John Oliver was good tonight. If you didn't see it, see it.
Hey, if you're bothered by that report that said Joe Biden mishandled classified documents and the Special Prosecutor declined to prosecute him because he was such a doddering old man, read this. It's a piece by journalist Marcy Wheeler and she makes a darn good case that the real reason Biden's not being prosecuted is because the charges against him are so minor. She also argues that the stuff about him being feeble are there because Special Prosecutor Robert Hur is a Republican. Special Prosecutors are always Republicans.
Allen Miller, who knows of what he speaks, sets us straight on a few theater facts…
Man of La Mancha was never "Off-Broadway" in the way we usually use the term. It opened in the ANTA Washington Square theater in November 1965 on 4th Street off the Southeast corner of Washington Square, a sort of prefab construction on land leased by NYU.
The show moved uptown in 1968 when NYU started constructing a monolithic red stone library(?). It continued on the "real" Broadway until 1971. I'm sure the 2000+ performances include the run on Washington Square.
In April 1967, our College Bowl team from Ursinus College were given free tickets to a show and picked Man of La Mancha. I think we were a bit confused by the subway ride and walk to this unconventional theater from midtown. I don't think we appreciated Jose Ferrer as Don Quixote as much as we should have. We had been indoctrinated by the sound of Kiley on the cast album. Jose Ferrer's career and celebrity peaked when we were just children.
By 1971, when my wife and I moved to Brooklyn and I worked in the Village, the ANTA theater was gone. Every great and not so great singer had to do "The Impossible Dream" until Man of La Mancha was fit for only squares.
(I, of course, Wikied the factual information to refresh my elderly, well-meaning memory.)
Well, there must be a lot of us squares around. The show keeps being revived and every time I've seen it staged — at least three times so far — the place is pretty packed and the audience seems really happy to have bought tickets. I suspect that if you can cast the right lead, the show is just about bulletproof.
I once heard Robert Morse address a class of wanna-be actors. He was asked for the best advice he could offer to someone auditioning for a musical and his answer went something like this: "Prepare a song that nobody else will be singing that day. If you open your mouth and out comes ‘The Impossible Dream,' you'll be the ninth one that day, probably not the best and none of you Don Quixotes will get the part, even if the part is Don Quixote." Thanks, Allen.
I first posted this here in August of 2009 and gave it its first encore in 2014…so it's time for another reprise of the tale of how one of my idols sorta threatened to sue me when I was barely in my teens. But first, let's kick things off with a video of that idol performing the song in question…
And now, here's the story…
This took place in 1965. I was 13 years old and attending Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High School in West Los Angeles. Allan Sherman had a hit record out called "Crazy Downtown," which was a parody of the Petula Clark mega-hit, "Downtown."
Like Stan Freberg, MAD Magazine, Soupy Sales, Laurel and Hardy and a few others I could name, Allan Sherman was a huge influence on me. Even at that age, I was writing a lot of silly poems and song parodies…and I guess he was my second-favorite writer of the latter. (My fave was Frank Jacobs in MAD. Mr. Jacobs is the gent to whom we gave the Bill Finger Award this year at the Comic-Con International…and I'm currently lobbying to get someone to publish a book collecting Frank's fine work for that publication and to include a CD of gifted folks singing some of his better efforts.)
Anyway, what you need to know is that I was in Junior High and that Allan Sherman was kind of a hero. His son Robert was a classmate and while we weren't close friends, every now and then Robbie would tell me how his dad was going to be on some TV show or had a new album in the works. I couldn't believe that I was even that close to the guy who wrote and sang those funny records I played over and over and over.
So one month, a campus group called the Girls League decided to stage a talent show/benefit with various students and teachers performing to raise money for I-don't-recall-what-cause. The festivities were to commence with an elaborately-staged (elaborate for a show with zero budget) dance number to "Crazy Downtown." The school orchestra knew the tune and some male student who, sad to say, looked a lot like Allan Sherman would be singing the lyrics while everyone did the frug and the pony around him.
That was the plan until two days before the event. That was when Mr. Campbell, who was the school principal, received a call either from Allan Sherman or Allan Sherman's lawyer vowing to sue if Mr. Sherman's lyrics were used. The obvious assumption was that Robbie had told his father about it. Mr. Campbell explained that this was a pretty low-profile event; that the number was to be performed but twice (two shows) in a Junior High School auditorium before, collectively, less than a thousand people, and that the money was going to a worthy charity. This made no difference to the caller.
With a deep sigh, Mr. Campbell called in the organizers of the benefit and told them to drop the number. They said they couldn't drop the number. It was the opening of the show and there was no time to write and stage something else. "Well," Mr. Campbell suggested, "How about dropping the Allan Sherman lyrics and just singing the real lyrics of "Downtown?" The students argued that, creatively, the number they'd staged really cried out for silly lyrics. Mr. Campbell said, "I'm sorry but this is final. You can't use Allan Sherman's lyrics."
The students behind the show didn't want to use the real "Downtown" lyrics so one of them — a way-too-cute girl named Cady — came to me at lunchtime and said, "Hey, you're always writing funny poems and things and reading them in class. Can you write us a new set of funny lyrics to 'Downtown?'" If Cady had asked me to trisect angles, I probably would have been motivated to learn how but this request was in that small subset of things in this world that I think I can actually do. She took me over to a rehearsal for the show and I watched the number. Then the next morning, I handed her a set of parody lyrics to "Downtown" that used none of Allan Sherman's jokes or even rhymes. I no longer have a copy of what I wrote but I can recall the opening. It went…
I'm feeling low
'Cause every radio show
Keeps telling me to go…Downtown.
All of my friends
Say it's the newest of trends
The party never ends…Downtown.
And from there on, it was all about how the singer was such a terrible dancer that he didn't dare go downtown and attempt to join in the fun. I do remember being pretty proud that I rhymed "fugue" with "frug" and that I got in a reference to Mr. Campbell, whose name I happily decided rhymed with "gamble." But what I really remember were a couple of big tingles 'n' thrills, first when I heard my lyrics being sung on a stage in what seemed almost a semi-professional fashion (a first for me) and then getting some decent laughs at the actual performances (another first).
And then I remember the summons, a few days later, to the office of Mr. Campbell. I didn't know what it was about but I knew I couldn't possibly be in any real trouble. My entire time in school, I never got in any real trouble. This was about as close as I ever came.
Mr. Campbell had someone on the phone when I walked in. My memory is that it was Allan Sherman himself but as I think back, I'm wondering if it wasn't Sherman's attorney who, in turn, had his client in his office or on another line. In any case, Mr. Sherman had heard that most or all of his lyrics had been performed at the benefit and he was going to sue Emerson Junior High, win, tear the school down and put up a Von's Market on the site…or something like that. He was also going to sue all the students involved, including whoever it was who, he insisted, had just "changed a few words" of what he'd written, hoping he [Sherman] wouldn't catch on that his lyrics had been used. I guess that meant me.
Cady and some other Girls League officers were in the office already and they'd explained eleven times that I had written completely different lyrics that had not employed a syllable of Mr. Sherman's work. The person on the other end of the phone refused to believe that.
So it came down to me reciting my lyrics — which I remembered in full then even if I can't today — and Mr. Campbell repeating them, line by line to either Allan Sherman or to a lawyer who was, in turn, repeating them to Allan Sherman. They didn't sound particularly clever that way but eventually, my hero was convinced and he agreed to withdraw his threat. I wish I could report that he also said, "Hey, whoever wrote those may have a future in this business" but no such compliment was voiced.
That was pretty much the end of the story except that it took a while before I could listen to Allan Sherman without getting a tight feeling in my tummy. Years later, I met some of Sherman's associates and learned that I was in good company; that though generally a decent guy, Allan was known to threaten to sue waiters if his soup was lukewarm. Despite that, I still love his work and can probably sing 90% of everything he wrote from memory. That's right. I can remember his lyrics but not my own.
Incidentally: A few years later at University High School, I was called upon again to write last-minute lyrics for a talent show. Students in this one were performing a number of recent hits. The faculty advisor decided that some of the lyrics of these songs, which were played non-stop on the radio, were too "suggestive" to be sung by high school students. I had to "clean up" the lyrics to a number of tunes, including "Never My Love" (a hit of the day for The Association), "Young Girl" (Gary Puckett and the Union Gap) and even the Doors' immortal "Light My Fire." In the last of these, I had to take out the part about lighting the guy's fire.
I did, and the revised lyrics passed inspection by the faculty advisor so the show could go on. But during the actual performance, as all the singers had agreed among themselves, they abandoned my laundered versions and sang the real lyrics. This struck me as the proper thing to do.
We all kept waiting for the faculty advisor to stop the proceedings or haul all the singers out to be shot…but if she noticed, she decided to pretend she didn't. In later years, writing for TV shows, I often employed the same trick of feigned compliance…and you'd be amazed how often it worked. The things you learn in junior high school…
And I can recall when that phrase was synonymous with watching cartoon shows…
My pal Bob Elisberg writes to inform/remind me that…
…though the judgement against Trump was officially for $355 million, when interest was included, it's been reported as $453 – which is pretty close to that "half a billion" you noted in an earlier post. (And the interest keeps accruing until it's paid off, even if he appeals.)
Yeah. I wonder if there will be many or even any Trump supporters who will say, "I'll donate to trying to put him back in the White House but not to paying off fines and legal fees for criminal actions." He seems to be doing a pretty good job of convincing folks that all of his legal problems are just ginned-up Election Interference against the man who used to lead his rallies in chants to lock up Hillary.
Changing Subjects: I got one (and only one) e-mail this A.M. from someone who said that I erred; that when they clicked on the video embed I said was a scene from Man of La Mancha, they instead got a rerun of Laraine Newman Hanging With Doctor Z. In 15+ years of video embeds here, I've only made that kind of mistake once and I knew it within minutes because I suddenly got 70 e-mails pointing it out.What it usually means when you see the wrong video is that you need to flush your browser. If you don't know how to do such a thing, this page will tell you what you need to know.
Changing Subjects One Last Time: I can't be the only Facebook user who's suddenly seeing dozens of posts of photos of women who are so beautiful and physically desirable that you suspect A.I. (or at least, industrialist-strength Photoshopping) has been employed.
These ladies all look approximately the same, they're all posing with and cross-promoting each other, they all have breasts the size of the Louisiana Purchase and most of their accounts are clearly the work of one person or agency. So what's the deal here? Is someone just phishing for info on anyone who subscribes to their feeds or is there something more nefarious afoot?
