And of course, when I say "Set the TiVo!" here, I'm referring to any recording device, be it D.V.R. or V.C.R., you use to capture a program off television to view at a time convenient to you. In any case, you might want to set whatever you use to record Jon Stewart: The Mark Twain Prize, which debuts on PBS next Tuesday.

Previous recipients of this honor include Richard Pryor (1998), Jonathan Winters (1999), Carl Reiner (2000), Whoopi Goldberg (2001), Bob Newhart (2002), Lily Tomlin (2003), Lorne Michaels (2004), Steve Martin (2005), Neil Simon (2006), Billy Crystal (2007), George Carlin (2008), Bill Cosby (2009, rescinded in 2018) Tina Fey (2010), Will Ferrell (2011), Ellen DeGeneres (2012), Carol Burnett (2013), Jay Leno (2014), Eddie Murphy (2015), Bill Murray (2016), David Letterman (2017), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (2018), and Dave Chappelle (2019). For reasons you can probably guess, there were no awards in 2020 or 2021.

This is not a bad list but when I see it, I always think that Mark Twain was known for two things: Writing and contemporary social commentary through humor. Very few of these recipients could be said to have done both, though Jon Stewart comes closer than most.

Comedian Stewie Stone has died at the age of 88 following a long battle with Parkinson's.  There was an online fund raiser for his medical expenses last year.

Stewie was one of the great opening actors and in his day, he opened for everyone.  Back in this post, I had the following to say about him…

In 1978, I was the head writer on a Bobby Vinton special for CBS. The network flew me and two other writers back to meet with Bobby and see him perform at the Mill Run Playhouse in Niles, Illinois. His opening act was Stewie Stone…and Stewie had been doing it for years by then. He was one of those guys — and there have never been many of them — who expertly mastered the art of being an opening act: He kept the audience entertained for a solid twenty minutes and then finished his set right on time without having in any way upstaged the star to follow. That is only meant as a compliment.

Never a big star but he had a very long career and I doubt he was unemployed much during it. If some really famous singer dies in the next few days, let's all pause and think, "Stewie was opening for him…"

The Las Vegas News Bureau, which maintains a huge collection of photos of that city, is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. And to celebrate, they've put up a gallery of 75 great photos from the history of the town Go take a look.

When I go to New York — something I haven't done in quite a while — I have sometimes seen shows at the Palace Theater in the heart of Times Square. It's a great old place, dripping with history, and I once got a fascinating backstage tour that intensified my love of the venue. So I winced a few years ago at reports that it might be torn down.

Well, it won't be — at least not for a long time. But you won't believe what they're doing to it instead…

Bryan Wong (and about nine of you) read this piece here and then wrote to ask…

You said that when you worked on Garfield and Friends, the CBS censor only had about five requests in all the years it was on and you found them reasonable and easy to comply with. Do you remember what any of them were?

Yeah. One of them was to not choke anyone by the neck. Another was not to electrocute anyone, especially by having someone stick something like a screwdriver or wire into an electric outlet. There were a couple of those where they had some reason to believe that kids might either imitate such actions and be hurt or they might do it on their own and then the cartoon would be blamed.

There were one or two others in this category and I don't recall clearly if these things had happened or if there was some good reason to think they might. On the other hand, it was fine to drop a sixteen-ton safe on someone because impressionable children were not likely to do that. I thought these were reasonable requests.

Another was to make sure that when the characters were driving somewhere, they wore their seat belts. Okay, fine.

More than once, I wrote a joke that mentioned Tabasco Sauce and at least one wasn't noticed before the Standards and Practices guy called and said, "That's a brand name. Would you mind switching it to hot sauce?" I decided that was better for the joke because (probably) more kids today know the term "hot sauce."

In 1991 when "Operation Desert Storm" was suddenly in the news, he called me and said, "We've been asked to make sure none of our childrens programming has any reference to war or combat." He explained that CBS News was occasionally cutting into programming at all hours — yes, even Saturday morning — with "Special Reports" about the conflict. Someone high up at the network was concerned that when one of those reports ended and they cut back to regular programming, there could be cartoon characters making light of war.

I suppose one could debate whether that was a silly thing to care about…and it is. But there are times when you think one of those silly things is an even sillier thing to spend time arguing about.

Garfield and Friends was in reruns at the time but I went over the scripts of the episodes that were scheduled for repeating and found one joke which could be construed as a reference to combat. I think it was Garfield and Odie pretending they were in a war movie, sneaking up on some enemy to try and capture their lasagna. Something like that. We moved that episode out of the rotation so it wasn't rebroadcast for a while…and that was that. That may have been the most the Standards and Practices department ever impacted the content of our show.

Since then, one Garfield and Friends cartoon has been pulled from the rerun packages because of what someone called an Asian stereotype. Folks are more sensitive about that kind of thing than they once were and it does no good to point out that since the series was animated in Taiwan, that alleged Asian stereotype was drawn by Asians.

I knew people who had near-coronaries over this kind of thing back when Standards and Practices was an actual division at every network and had some power. One guy at Hanna-Barbera used to refer to their requests as "pissing on the Mona Lisa," which I thought overstated what they were doing and perhaps (just perhaps) slightly overvalued what they were doing it to. What I learned was that you can't fight over everything. You're more likely to win the battles that really matter if you don't reflexively scream about every little thing. In the case of Garfield and Friends, all the little things were little things.

This is a treasure and one that needs some explanation. In the fifties and sixties, a wonderful songwriter named Billy Barnes wrote a lot of wonderful songs, many of them quite funny and the kind of thing that performers performed in revues and cabarets. He wrote serious songs too. "Have I Stayed Too Long at the Fair?" was one of his bigger hits of a more serious manner. But the funny songs were very funny and they were featured in a number of revues called things like The Billy Barnes Revue, Billy Barnes' People, Billy Barnes' Party, Billy Barnes' L.A. and Billy Barnes' Hollywood.

I think all played at one time or another in Los Angeles and at least one was on Broadway for a while and there were a few touring companies. They led to Billy being hired often to do what they call Special Musical Material for TV shows, including the entire run of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. The revues also led to many of the performers in them being hired for TV shows.

(If any of this is sounding a bit déjà vuish, it may be because I wrote about Billy and one of his later shows here.)

Anyway, my pal Kliph Nesteroff alerted me to an amazing 51-minute video of numbers from The Billy Barnes Revue. It stars Joyce Jameson, Bert Convy, Patti Regan, Ken Berry, Ann Guilbert, Jackie Joseph, Len Weinrib and sketch writer/director Bob Rodgers. All of those folks went on to other things. Ann Guilbert, for example, became a regular on The Dick Van Dyke Show and I can't resist pointing out that Jameson, Regan, Berry, Joseph and Weinrib all guested on that show — and most of them, more than once.

I am not altogether certain just what this video is but it would seem to be an episode of Playboy's Penthouse, a syndicated TV series that Hugh Hefner hosted from 1959 to 1961 and which was taped in Chicago. It looks like whoever had this video lopped off the opening and whatever Hefner did until the final segment and credits.

But it seems real odd — not impossible but odd — that Hef abandoned his show's usual format for a week to devote the hour to Billy Barnes' show. And here's another interesting thing to consider and I am here quoting Wikipedia…

Following its three-week run at the Lyceum Theatre [on Broadway], rather than closing down for good, the show [The Billy Barnes Revue] moved off-Broadway again to the Carnegie Hall Playhouse on October 20, 1959. Producers George Cayley, George Brandt and Samuel J. Friedman acquired the rights from [Producer George] Eckstein, who remained with the production as stage manager and performed the role vacated by Bert Convy.

A controversy erupted when Barnes, Guilbert, Berry, Joseph, Regan, Rodgers, Weinrib and Eckstein flew to Chicago to tape an episode of ABC-TV's Playboy's Penthouse, produced by Hugh Hefner's Playboy Magazine, and failed to make their flight back to New York in time for the Tuesday, October 27 performance. As a result, the Tuesday night performance was cancelled and $800 had to be returned to the ticket holders.

Eckstein sent a telegram to the producers stating that the cast had made a "frantically conscientious effort to return to New York by curtain time as numerous impartial witnesses can testify; a dispatching error resulted in misconnections," but rather than simply recognizing the value of the network television publicity, the management filed a complaint with Actors' Equity Association and the American Federation of Musicians (of which Barnes was a member). "There's no excuse for missing a show," declared the producers' lawyer, Benjamin Schankman. "They shouldn't have gone to Chicago if they could not arrange to get back in time. An agreement is an agreement."

Although one of the producers, Samuel J. Friedman, denied that their decision was a retaliatory action, two weeks later, the entire cast (except Virginia de Luce, who had replaced Jameson) was replaced by Ronnie Cunningham, Arlene Fontana, Jane Johnston, Larry Hovis, James Inman, Charles Nelson Reilly and Tom Williams.

The cast change proved to be a major mistake and the show closed on November 28, 1959 after just six weeks at the Carnegie Hall Playhouse. Ironically, the promotional appearance on Playboy's Penthouse by the original cast members did not air until Saturday, December 5, one week after the show had closed.

Some of this is a bit confusing. The Wikipedia piece says that Convy and Jameson were in the cast that went to Chicago and was fired for missing a performance. But it also suggests that Convy and Jameson had been replaced by then. Also, I don't think Playboy's Penthouse was ever an ABC network series, though it may have played in some markets on ABC affiliates.

And I really don't get why you fire the actors as if they were responsible for going to Chicago to appear and perform material from the show. They didn't even have the legal right to do that. Someone — the old producers or the new producers — had to arrange that. There's some reason, probably buried deep within the contract with the new producers, that would explain things.

But at least they went and at least we have this video of material from the show. For that, we should be very happy…

With the hearings going on (and on and on…), this is a great time to reflect on the film of the book, All the President's Men. If you were a fan of the movie, as I am, you will want to read Ann Hornaday delving into how it came to be. For some reason, she doesn't mention the character I think is the most interesting part of the whole movie…Hal Holbrook, who didn't know at the time he was portraying Mark Felt.

The 1/6 Committee Hearings for today start in seven minutes…though I wonder if they shouldn't be called "The Committee to Make Ron DeSantis the Next G.O.P. Nominee for President." I shall try not to watch but I haven't done so well not watching so far.

Much, I'm sure, will be offered to prove that Donald J. Trump knew damn well he'd lost a fair and honest election. I don't know how anyone couldn't know that unless they were the kind of person Jordan Klepper manages to find when he goes out to interview clueless people in red hats. I can understand how some people, having lost, have decided that pretending they didn't is more comforting and/or a better position from which to operate.

But the alternative to Trump not believing he lost is Trump believing he lost. He was treacherous or he was and is completely outta touch with reality. Neither is a good qualification to be the leader of our great nation.

Thinking back on Nixon and Watergate: There was a point when even the man's defenders seemed to be losing heart and trying to avoid defending him on camera. If you remember, there was a somewhat adorable rabbi named Baruch Korff, who came out of nowhere — and went straight back there after Nixon resigned — who wound up on the news all the time as "The President's Chief Defender."

Rabbi Korff was a good man with a bad cause…and because he was new to politics and outside Nixon's Inner Circle, he did a spectacularly bad job of defending the president. If I'd been on trial for littering then and Rabbi Korff had been my chief defender, I might have gotten the death penalty. But he got the job of defending Nixon because no one else — certainly no prominent Republican leader — wanted it; not with the slow drip-drip-drip of new revelations. The rabbi changed about as many minds as Mike Lindell has.

I don't think Trump will ever be abandoned by all those in his party — and it is still his party — but I think these hearings may make a lot of Republicans wonder if they might be better off putting some distance between him and them. We'll see.

This is another one of those "Tiny Desk" concerts that NPR arranged at the peak of The Pandemic and which I didn't know about at the time or I would have posted this then.  This is the cast of the current off-Broadway production of Little Shop of Horrors — or at least the cast as it stood then — performing several numbers from the show. An added bonus is the presence of composer Alan Menken who hosts, performs, and has some interesting things to say about the show…

• Simone Biles finally got the most important honor an athlete can achieve. Forget about all those medals. She's on Wheaties boxes coming out later this month.

In response to this post, Roger Green wrote…

You noted: Standards and Practices at ABC had made up a list of racial and ethnic minorities and it was kind of like "Pick one." and "one of the other Standards/Practices rules at that moment…was that every show had to have a female character who was assertive and/or in a position of authority instead of just tagging along as the male characters drove the story forward."

I was wondering if you thought that was a good thing, a bad thing?

Surely having someone other than white people might attract non-white viewers, and help white ones to note, "Oh yeah, there are other people. And having a strong woman (not Nell, or '50s Lois Lane always imperiled) is a good thing for women (and especially men) to see.

In this world — or in my world, at least — one often finds situations that fall under the category of "Doing the right thing for the wrong reason" or maybe "Achieving the proper goal in an improper way." I don't think it's a good thing for, in this case, network functionaries to be dictating creative content because they're afraid of advertisers who are, in turn, afraid of pressure groups.

But I also don't think it's a good thing for police officers to pull you over for speeding. That should not be necessary. You shouldn't be speeding in the first place.

I'm fine with female characters who are strong and assertive. I'm fine with characters not all being white guys. I'm fine with both those things because in real life — or in my real life, at least — a lot of women are strong and assertive and a lot of people are not white guys. Those who felt animation was deficient in representing those kinds of human beings were right.

But the Standards and Practices people we dealt with in the late seventies/early eighties were sometimes very clumsy and tyrannical and creatively insensitive. I wrote one particular ABC Weekend Special where at the last minute, they demanded major (and, I thought, injurious) changes to the script because of some crazed concern of the week. And I was arguing with someone who really didn't care if the changes disfigured the story and betrayed the book being adapted for the special.

It was like if you were adapting Moby Dick (the classic novel, not the Hanna-Barbera cartoon show of that name) and they came to you and said, "We're under fire for not having enough black women in our shows!" You might say in response, "Okay, they're right. After I finish this, we'll come up with some stories featuring black women" and they said, "No, no! This can't wait! You have to make Captain Ahab a black woman! And make sure she's a good role model!"

And then they added, "And although we haven't had any complaints about this, we need to lose the stuff about Ahab only having one leg. Just in case!" Maybe the right long-term goal but the wrong time, place and method to achieve it.

They were also, I thought, often dead wrong about their goals. As I've written elsewhere, some of the "pro-social" messaging they demanded pushed the premise that "the group" is always right; that if all your friends want to do one thing and you think that's a bad idea, you should yield to the majority. I thought that was a dangerous message — that's kind of how The Crips and The Bloods got started — and when I worked on the Garfield and Friends show, I wrote several cartoons refuting that message.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that in (roughly) the years 1977-1986 when I wrote cartoon shows, most of which were on ABC, I battled constantly with the Standards and Practices people — and one lady in particular. Sometimes, I lost. Sometimes, I won. Often, I won but the producers of the show made the requested changes anyway because they were afraid that even if ABC would let a certain joke or action in now, they might not a few years down the line and would not then buy the show for reruns.

When I started doing Garfield and Friends in 1987 (it began airing in '88), all that changed for me. No one ever suggested pro-social concepts to me. No one at the network (CBS) really suggested anything. In 121 half-hours, the Standards and Practices guy had about five requests, all of them minor and reasonable and easy to accommodate. And as noted, I even got to do episodes ridiculing what Standards and Practices had demanded at all three networks in the previous ten years.

These days, very few cartoon shows face anything like what we faced way back when. My friends working on current programs do sometimes complain about notes from someone upstairs about story elements that might lessen a character's merchandising potential. But that's another matter.

The fine folks who run Comic-Con International today announced…

Bob Bolling, Don Rico to Receive 2022 Bill Finger Award

Bob Bolling and Don Rico have been selected to receive the 2022 Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. The selection, made by a blue-ribbon committee chaired by writer/historian Mark Evanier, was unanimous.

"We're excited to be back presenting awards in our original format," Evanier noted. "And we couldn't have better recipients than these two men, whose work in comics never received the recognition it deserved. Too often, they worked in utter anonymity, creating work that is fondly remembered even if those who enjoyed it were unaware of its authors' names."

The Bill Finger Award was created in 2005 thanks to the late comic book legend Jerry Robinson, who proposed it to honor the memory of his friend, Bill Finger. According to Evanier, "At the time, though everyone knew Batman and his supporting cast, not nearly enough knew Mr. Finger and his vital contributions to the creation of that beloved hero. Finger's name now appears on Batman movies and comic books, and we want to keep it on this award, as he's still the industry poster boy for writers not receiving proper reward or attention."

Bob Bolling was born on June 9, 1928, in Brockton, MA. His parents were scientists, but all Bob wanted to do was write and draw. He drew for his high school newspaper, then did a four-year stint in the U.S. Navy, after which he studied at the Vesper George School of Art in Boston and finally at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he studied under master illustrator Burne Hogarth. Bolling worked briefly on a short-lived newspaper strip called Marlin Keel before a friend recommended him to Archie editor Harry Shorten. Shorten liked the young man's work, and in 1954 Bolling began a 50-year association with the publisher, interrupted only briefly in 1985 when he drew Wally the Wizard for Marvel's Star line of comics for younger readers.

Otherwise. Bolling worked for Archie — at first, mainly on a "Dennis the Menace"–like character named Pat the Brat. His skills at handling kids of that age led to his most esteemed work in 1956, when he inaugurated the Little Archie series, writing and drawing some of the most memorable comics to ever come from that company. It was also one of its bestselling and was quickly promoted from standard to giant-size, with additional spinoffs as well. Later, he also did many stories for the better-known teen version of Archie with work in Life With Archie, Betty, Betty and Me, Sabrina, and others, along with more tales of Little Archie that are avidly collected and treasured. Bolling began painting in the 1980s and turned to that full time after retiring in the early 2000s. He is unable to attend the awards ceremony, but he will be receiving his award plaque before then.

Donato "Don" Rico (1912–1985) was one of the first writer/artists in comic books, starting with a story in Fantastic Comics #1 (Dec. 1939) from Victor Fox's outfit, where so many began their careers. His work soon appeared in publications from Fiction House and from Lev Gleason Publications, where he worked on Silver Streak and on the first comics character to bear the name Daredevil. Many of the stories he wrote and drew there were signed with the name of Charles Biro. Rico joined Timely (now Marvel) in late 1941, in time to work on a back-up story in Captain America #13 and to later contribute many stories of Captain America, The Human Torch, the Whizzer, Sub-Mariner, the Blonde Phantom, Venus, and the Young Allies.

Beginning as a fine artist whose work is still in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other museums, he also wrote novels and screenplays, leaving and rejoining Timely/Atlas many times. He eventually worked there mainly as a writer and editor, contributing to their horror and western comics and specializing in jungle girl comics such as Jann of the Jungle and Leopard Girl, both of which he co-created. In the 1960s, he specialized in paperback novels but wrote three stories for Marvel under the name "N. Korok." In one, an Iron Man tale, he co-created The Black Widow, who would become one of Marvel's most popular characters. His later work was mainly for film and television, but he was a featured guest at many of the early years of Comic-Con, and he co-founded C.A.P.S., the Comic Art Professional Society, with Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier. His Finger Award will be accepted by his widow, actress Michele Hart, and his son, Buz Rico.

The Bill Finger Award honors the memory of William Finger (1914–1974), who was the first and, some say, most important writer of Batman. Many have called him the "unsung hero" of the character and have hailed his work not only on that iconic figure but on dozens of others, primarily for DC Comics.

In addition to Evanier, the selection committee consists of Charles Kochman (executive editor at Harry N. Abrams, book publisher), comic book writer Kurt Busiek, artist/historian Jim Amash, cartoonist Scott Shaw!, and writer/editor Marv Wolfman.

The major sponsor for the 2022 awards is DC Comics; supporting sponsors are Heritage Auctions and Maggie Thompson.

The Finger Award falls under the auspices of San Diego Comic Convention and is administered by Jackie Estrada. The awards will be presented during the Eisner Awards ceremony at this summer's Comic-Con on Friday, July 22.

Angelo Torres began drawing comic books in the mid-fifties and he's still at it. He worked for EC Comics and other firms, often collaborating with folks like Al Williamson, George Woodbridge and Frank Frazetta. In the late sixties, he went to work for MAD and drew 282 articles for them, making him the mag's ninth most-prolific contributor. (In case you're interested, Al Jaffee holds the title of Most Prolific MAD Contributor, though some guy named Sergio Aragonés is on target to bypass him in the next year or so.)

If you are at all interested in the work of Angelo Torres, get thee over to this page on his website and spend 36 minutes watching My Dinner With Angelo, a delightful film that was made in conjunction with a recent exhibit of his work in New York. I could embed it here but I'd like to see his site get all the hits…and while you're over there, browse around a little. The length and breadth of this man's talents have not been properly recognized. Nice guy, too.

Mark Rouleau wants to know…well, here. Read it for yourself…

I was a big fan of The Plastic Man Comedy Adventure Show. (Why not? I was 7 or 8 at the time …) And I understand why they gave him a girlfriend, and I understand why they gave him a baby, but I never could figure out why they changed the Woozy Winks character to "Hula Hula." Especially as the two characters are similar enough to be long lost cousins. Did somebody at S&P not like the word "woozy"? Were the rights to the character in limbo due to a big budget Woozy Winks movie that was in development?

I'm hoping since you wrote some of the episodes you might have some insight, as my Google-fu is failing me, although I suspect the answer might be "that's showbiz."

Two reasons, Mark. One was that everyone involved with the show's development — the studio, the network, the writer and even the folks then running DC Comics — thought the Woozy Winks character from the original Jack Cole comics was old-fashioned and outta date and a relic of the past. Plastic Man, they thought, could be brought into the present day but Woozy…? Nope.

Oh, and I should mention that contrary to what a couple of folks on the never-inaccurate Internet have said, I was not the writer who developed the property for television. That was Norman Maurer, who I've mentioned on this blog before and will mention again shortly. Norman was a former comic book artist, the manager of The Three Stooges, the son-in-law of Moe and a very clever, nice man. He was then among the favorite writers of the folks at ABC who programmed kids' shows.

As it was explained to me, none of them were mad about Woozy…and they weren't really trying to adapt the old Jack Cole comics for television. The mission was to take the idea of this guy named Plastic Man and find a new, modern-day context in which he could operate. I doubt anyone even looked much at the old comics.

So that was one reason Mr. Winks was in absentia. Another was that ABC, respecting certain urgings of parents' groups, then had all sorts of rules about the content of their Saturday morning shows that involved inserting "educational" content and certain pro-social values. And yes, "respecting" is a euphemism for "fearing."

Among the pro-social requirements at that moment was that every show that particular year had to have minority representation. Someone in it had to not be a white guy.

As it was explained to me, Standards and Practices at ABC had made up a list of racial and ethnic minorities and it was kind of like "Pick one." Joe Ruby, one of the producers of the show, looked it over and picked "Hawaiian." He and Norman had previously invented a sidekick for Plas who had perpetual bad luck and whose voice would be based somewhat on Lou Costello's.

They had the fine animation designer (and producer of the show) Jerry Eisenberg convert that character's look to Hawaiian and named him Coconut. Around or about the last minute, someone heard that was an ethnic slur so he was renamed Hula-Hula.

If my Plastic Man history is correct, Hula-Hula's constant bad luck made him even less like Woozy, who in his earliest appearances had constant good luck.  Woozy had encountered some sort of wizard who cast a spell that gave it to him…but I think the folks writing Plastic Man comics eventually forgot about that and I'm fairly sure Joe and Norman didn't know about it.

Also, I should mention that one of the other Standards/Practices rules at that moment (this kind of thing was constantly changing) was that every show had to have a female character who was assertive and/or in a position of authority instead of just tagging along as the male characters drove the story forward. That explains why Plastic Man's boss was a lady.

I was not hugely involved with the Plastic Man cartoons. I wrote several episodes, rewrote someone else on a few more, recommended my pal Steve Gerber to write a few, and also wrote the speech that the announcer read over the opening titles. I don't think the cartoons stand up all that well today but at the time, I felt it was much better than a lot of then-current shows produced under the same restrictions of time, budgets and network constraints.

As noted here, I decided to not follow every moment of the January 6 hearings. I have largely failed to carry out my own decision. I'm not watching live but thanks to TiVo and various online sources, I'm watching almost all of it, perhaps as much to admire good television presentation as for any political reason. They're making a solid case for those willing to listen. Those who won't, of course, won't.

I finally watched the Tony Awards…a very slick, well-produced show. Ariana DeBose was a terrific host and most of the show excerpts made me want to jump on a plane and go east…but I still won't for a while. I really liked the moment at the end of the number from Six: The Musical when Ms. DeBose came out to single out one of the performers as a swing who'd been put into the number twelve hours earlier. That was indeed what much of the telecast was about.

Most of the speeches were memorable and/or fun. Joaquina Kalukango's win for Lead Actress in a Musical (for Paradise Square) gave us what may be the most emotional, crowd-pleasing acceptance speech in Award Show History. The folks who produce award shows have little to no control over when these moments happen but the producers of this one must have been happy they had this one at (almost) the end of the show.