Thursday evening, The Tonight Show With Jay Leno is a rerun. The comedy bit after the first commercial involves silly phone callers, one of whom identifies himself as a master magician named "Earl the Magnificent." That's the voice of one of my best buddies, Earl Kress, a multi-talented fellow I met via the late, multi-talented Daws Butler. Earl is a writer (with an Emmy for Pinky & The Brain) and he's an actor and a cartoon expert and a fellow Laurel and Hardy enthusiast, and he even claims to know was much about the movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World as I do. This last claim is, of course, ridiculous…but we sometimes humor him and allow him to believe such a thing.
You can see some of Earl's comic book writing (he does all sorts of things) in recent issues of DC's Looney Tunes book, and you can hear him on Jay's show from time to time, and — most impressive — he and I are having dinner, some night this week. At least, I think it's most impressive. He's probably prouder of some of that other stuff.