Actually, I seem to be Norm Crosby Blogging right now as I catch up with my TiVoed recording of the telethon. Jerry seems to have gone away halfway through Hour 4 and Norm is hosting. The corporate donors can't be that thrilled to be making their appearances to donate million dollar checks to Crosby instead of to Jerry…and in the middle of the night, no less. I'm guessing it's a trade-off deal: "Okay, I'll do 3 AM with Norm but you have to give me prime-time with Jerry for my next two checks."
If anyone ever sets up a Wikipedia page to define "tough room," they could link to a clip of Bob Zany's performance.
The local telethon segment is hosting a stunt they do each year that always struck me as a tacky context for fund-raising. Over the last few weeks, we are told, criminally big-hearted folks were arrested by MDA deputies and locked up in hoosegows throughout Southern California. They were given cell phones — I think that's supposed to be a pun — to call out and raise bail to earn their release. They fought the law but MDA was the winner. That's right: It's the MDA Telethon Executive Lock-Up and we see mug shots (most behind bars and in prison garb) of business folks who agreed to be prisoners until they could get their associates to donate some undetermined amount of cash to the cause. The background music for the mug shots is "I Fought the Law and the Law Won." I can sure understand why people want to raise money for MDA; just not why someone thought it would be cute to cast them in the role of crooks trying to save their own skins.
Speech after speech urges us to feel compassion and concern for people — children, especially — afflicted with Muscular Dystrophy…and I do. But there are some TelePrompter readings that also make me concerned for the health of Ed McMahon and, on the local segments in Los Angeles, Casey Kasem.
Six and a half hours in and much of the hosting job passes, without fanfare, over to Bob Zany and Tom Bergeron. They're announcing the telethon has topped the eleven million dollar mark. I'm not sure if my donation, made online at the MDA website, will be counted in there.
I think we need a new telethon to find a cure for Louie Anderson's tie.
Louie's performance, along with Bob Zany's, redirects my compassion to comedians who have to work a cold audience that's heavily distracted and sitting way too far from the microphones. Given the house, he does pretty well but it's sharper material than the laughs we're hearing at home would indicate. A writer friend of mine, the late Gary Belkin, used to point to comedians on TV and say, "Lost eyes," meaning that they were getting no sense of audience response and didn't know where to look, who to play to. We could send out a search party for Louie's eyes…that is, assuming they weren't distracted by the tie.
When Bob Zany (who's lost a ton of weight) comes over to thank Louie, it looks like the after-and-before in one of those Leptopril commercials.
I'm TiVoing rapidly through the charity pitches and watching the acts. There are some pretty good ones even if the live audience doesn't seem to know it. There's nothing deader than a Las Vegas audience that didn't pay to get in. I'll report back later.