When you have a moment, you might want to read Aja Romano on the subject of comedians who say their only real goal is to be funny…but who are in some ways competing with news commentators and political pundits and (boldface "and") faulting those folks for spreading misinformation.

As much as I love so much of what Jon Stewart did on The Daily Show, I never fully bought into his claim that since comedy was his main goal, certain standards of journalism did not fully apply to him. That wasn't a huge issue since his program did pretty solid fact-checking and rarely got things wrong. But now you have Joe Rogan offering much the same defense with a lower level of accuracy along with the evasive rationale of "Well, I'm just posing questions." And of course, dispensing faulty medical advice is a lot more serious than misquoting one senator.

Stewart's current show on Apple TV is very good and I really love the podcasts he's doing which are just a bunch of smart, witty people discussing issues with a candor that is rare on Ye Olde Internet. I initially skipped this conversation with NBA Coach Steve Kerr because I have close to zero interest in basketball. But a friend told me a lot of it was about race relations and both men said some smart things about how we, as white people, don't always understand the problems from a non-white perspective.

I'm going to watch all of what Stewart does for Apple but I hope he's not going to try hiding behind "I'm not an activist" when he has moved more clearly into that role. I do like that he's not selling himself as an expert on all the topics he discusses. Too many people think they are one because they have a microphone and a following.

• I'm going to guess that every single person who was outraged that Hillary Clinton didn't preserve all her e-mails is fine with Donald Trump ripping up documents that were supposed to be preserved under the Presidential Records Act.

After a long hiatus from YouTube — he's been touring — Randy Rainbow is back…

• Joe Rogan seems to be busy today so the CEO of Spotify is doing his daily apology for him.

Ten years ago on this blog, we were talking a lot about a stage musical version of the Jerry Lewis movie, The Nutty Professor, which Jerry himself was directing. He was also making bizarre announcements about how it would open on such-and-such a date at such-and-such a theater…and it would turn out that such-and-such a theater had not been booked or informed.

Finally, the musical — with music by Marvin Hamlisch and a book and lyrics by Rupert Holmes — had its world debut on July 24, 2012 at Nashville's Tennessee Performing Arts Center. Reviews were rather good and Jerry announced that nothing could stop it from moving on to Broadway where it would be a smash hit. But since it closed in Nashville, the show was not been seen — on Broadway or anywhere.

When Jerry died in 2017, it was widely assumed that was the end of the musical. Not so. The Ogunquit Playhouse in Maine has announced a production to start July 1. This is the same theater that in 2018 hosted a production of Grumpy Old Men: The Musical, a show with lyrics by my friend, the late Nick Meglin.

I'm thinking that as it gets around that The Nutty Professor is available for regional productions, it may become one of those shows that is often performed here and there, even if neither here nor there is Broadway. It would be nice to see it some day. And maybe…just maybe Jerry's musical will finally make it to The Great White Way.

Thanks to Galen Fott for telling me about this new chapter in the story of the show. And here are some scenes from the production in Nashville…

As we've been saying here, there's no way to know how many comedy teams popped up in the fifties trying to be "The next Martin and Lewis" even while America was still loving the original duo.  The list of just the match-ups that made it onto Ed Sullivan's show was pretty long and it was probably less than 1% of all the acts that tried to emulate Dean and Jerry.

The team of Tommy Noonan and Peter Marshall made it to Ed's stage…and yes, that's the same Peter Marshall who hosted the Hollywood Squares game show for a long time. The clip below is from December 16, 1951 and the show was then called The Toast of the Town. It didn't become The Ed Sullivan Show until 1955.

Noonan and Marshall were related. Tommy's half-brother (the actor John Ireland) was married to Peter's sister (the actress Joanne Dru). The team started in the late forties about the time Martin and Lewis were getting big. Dean and Jerry, by the way, performed on the first episode of Toast of the Town in 1948.

Noonan and Marshall didn't appear together all the time. Both pursued separate careers on and off throughout the fifties and the best surviving example of their work as a pair is probably The Rookie, a 1959 movie directed by George O'Hanlon (the voice of George Jetson). It was supposed to be the first in a string of Noonan and Marshall comedies and the string ended with that one film. If you ever see it, you'll know why…but don't ever see it.  Even the presence in the cast of Julie Newmar and Joe Besser couldn't save it.

Tommy and Peter stopped appearing together a few years later. Marshall continued his singing/acting career and did quite well.  Noonan produced and starred in a couple of B-Movies that got attention because "name" actresses like Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren appeared in them, sans wardrobe. He also became a punch line in a lot of jokes about how many times he was married. The actual number, often inflated for comedic effect, was five.

Noonan passed away in 1968. Marshall is still going strong at the age of 95. Here they are on with Ed…

• I haven't seen the daily public apology from Joe Rogan so far this morning but it's only 10 AM. He still has plenty of time.

Cartoonist Sergio Aragonés has been my best friend (Male Division) for many decades and we collaborate on a whole mess of things including but not limited to Groo the Wanderer comic books. A great many people seem to be under the impression that I am his agent or secretary or that I have nothing better to do in life than forward messages to him.

A large percentage of these e-mails to me are from folks who want to pay him money to do drawings that they can frame and treasure forever. In the past, the answer to such inquiries was "Sorry but he only does sketches at conventions" but for reasons you just might be able to guess, he's not going to conventions these days.

To make up for this and not disappoint those who are craving a piece of Sergio art, he is now taking commissions via e-mail. To contact his representative, check out this Facebook page. And don't pester me.

I'm fascinated by the inner workings of Costco. If you are too, you might like this article about the history of the Kirkland brand.

For a couple of years a long, long time ago, I wrote a weekly column for a newspaper called The Comics Buyer's Guide. Quite a few of those columns appear elsewhere (like, here) on this site but a lot don't. This is part of a column that doesn't. It appeared in that paper on 3/23/01…

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When I was going to University High, an annual event was a morning of sexually-segregated assemblies.  All the girls would file into the school auditorium while all the boys went out and filled the bleachers of the football field.  In each locale, there would be a guest speaker holding forth on a topic that was notionally of interest only to that gender.

I'm not certain what transpired in the girls' assemblies.  We heard they were all about cooking and sewing, but we guys had our suspicions.  There was one year there, I was sure they were all voting to not go out with me —

"Okay, Becky, you'll lead him on…make him think there's a chance.  Then, just when his hopes are up, you dump him and take up with the dorkiest guy you can find…

"Sandra, you sit in front of him in Algebra, right?  Okay, so you wear that real tight little skirt — the blue one — and when he asks you for a date, you don't say anything.  Just giggle a lot, whisper to your friends and point at him…"

My first year at Uni — 1967 — the Boys League assembly featured a talk by one of the gents who had designed the Ford Mustang. For about an hour, he told us that the only car in the world worth owning was the Ford Mustang.  Not only that but the only job in the world worth holding was designing and/or selling Ford Mustangs.  His message to the Youth of America was that if we wanted to amount to anything in our lives, we should all buy Ford Mustangs and then work for the Ford company for whatever wages they deigned to pay us.

My last year there, the guest speaker was professional wrestler Freddie Blassie — and in calling him a speaker, I'm being a little loose with the language. So was Mr. Blassie, who spent the hour trying, without a whole lot of success, to formulate complete sentences. Still, he made a lot more sense than the guy from Ford.

For the assembly in-between, we had an actual professional baseball player…though not a particularly exciting one. He was a pitcher who had only been in the majors for a year or two, and I believe he'd sat out most of the previous season with an injury. He was with the New York Mets and he was in-town to throw against the Dodgers. Given his then-current earned run average, the odds favored him losing.

I recall that the crowd liked him a lot. He was charming and funny and obviously quite serious about The Game.  But he wasn't Sandy Koufax or Don Drysdale, the recent superstars of Dodger pitching.  He wasn't even Ron Perranoski, who was the guy they usually sent in for the ninth inning to save Sandy and Don when they got weary.  Our guest speaker was just an undistinguished Met.  That made it somewhat absurd when, during the Q-and-A segment, a member of the audience asked him: "Who's the hardest-throwing pitcher in the game today?"

And the undistinguished Met didn't ponder his choices for even a moment.  He said, "I am."

Everyone laughed at the sheer audacity of the statement.  Had a Sandy Koufax said it, we might have cheered in agreement but for this unknown…this Nolan Ryan kid to claim to be the hardest-throwing pitcher in the game?  Ha!  What an ego!  What a pretentious, outlandish claim!

Flash-forward just five years: The Guinness Book of World Records certifies Nolan Ryan — now a California Angel — as the hardest-throwing pitcher in recorded Major League Baseball history.  On August 20, 1974, he is pitching against the Chicago White Sox.  There's a three-and-two count against the batter in the ninth inning and Ryan fires one across the plate at 100.9 miles an hour.

Hmm…that claim of his don't seem so outrageous now, does it?

And just so we all have some idea of how fast that is: 100.9 miles per hour is the wind velocity of a moderate-level tornado.  It's also about the speed Californians slow to in a School Zone, especially when driving Ford Mustangs.  Then let's flash-forward to the end of his twenty-seventh season…

That's right: 27.  A seven with a two in front of it.

Nolan Ryan is now the holder of 53 Major League Baseball records.  He has thrown 5,714 strikeouts and won 324 games, including 7 no-hitters.  Most pitchers go their whole careers and don't come within a spitball of a no-hitter.  Ryan threw seven.  (Actually, just lasting 27 seasons in professional baseball is a stunning accomplishment, in and of itself.)

Mr. Ryan, if you're reading this — and I know you aren't — I'd like to apologize on behalf of all the male students who attended University High in 1968.  We all thought you were…well, let's be polite and say "exaggerating."

Oh, hell, let's be accurate and say "full of crap."  In hindsight, it doesn't seem like such an outrageous claim to make.  If he wasn't the hardest-throwing pitcher in all of baseball when he said it, he was darned close.

I awoke this morning to e-mails from several folks asking me to tell them more about Erin Fleming, the controversial lady who managed and stage-managed the last years of Groucho Marx. I was only in the same room with her twice — once on the stage of a TV show and once in Groucho's home — and in both instances, we didn't talk much and she had reasons aplenty to be on her best behavior.

Want to know what it was really like in that house? Read my pal Steve's book. I would imagine you could also wait for the movie based on it but that won't be at the Cineplex for some time and I'm sure won't go into as much depth. I saw enough of Ms. Fleming — and heard things from others I trusted — that I had no problem believing every word of Raised Eyebrows when I first read it…and that was some time before I even knew Steve Stoliar.

The basic answer is that she did some good things and she did some bad things…and you have to wonder what would have happened to Groucho if she hadn't been there to do the good things. That, I can't tell you.

And if you want to get a look at Ms. Fleming, there is video around of her. Here she is being a guest on The Dick Cavett Show who Mr. Cavett clearly could not wait to stop talking with…

• So now what happened in D.C. on 1/6/21 is to be considered "legitimate political discourse?"

Congrats to my good buddy Steve Stoliar. Steve's the fellow who worked as Groucho Marx's assistant in the last few years of the great comedian's life. This placed Steve in the midst of the squabbles and controversy about Erin Fleming, whose role in Groucho's life is hard to explain and harder to assess. Steve wrote a book about those years and it is, as the saying goes, Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture.

Geoffrey Rush will play Groucho, Sienna Miller will play Erin, Charlie Plummer will play Steve and a good third of the Internet is already reviewing it, even though not a frame of film has yet been shot. Give it a break, people. More details here…and if you haven't read Steve's book, you should. Order a copy here.

The Joe Rogan controversy has forced me to have some sort of opinion of Joe Rogan. I saw Mr. Rogan doing stand-up comedy twice, I think, and I was pretty unimpressed both times. Then again, the first two times I saw Richard Pryor doing stand-up, he wasn't very good…so maybe two sets at The Comedy Store is not always a fair sampling.

Before he became the Reigning Podcast King, I think the only place I'd seen Joe Rogan was when I tried watching Fear Factor. I thought it was a pretty ugly, unwatchable program…but nothing I couldn't just ignore and go on with my life. People should probably do that more often with things they dislike but which do them no harm.

Perhaps I've mentioned this before but I know a guy who produces "Reality Shows" and he once asked me if I had any ideas for one. I told him that wasn't my kind of program and he told me, "Okay…but if you ever do come up with one, bring it to me and remember the core principle behind Reality Shows. There is nothing you can think of that someone won't do to be on television."

I suspect the guy was right. That is the core principle of Reality Shows…and also, pornography.

Yes, I've listened to The Joe Rogan Experience a few times, nearly always because he was chatting with comedians I liked. If he stuck to that, he'd have me listening more often.  He'd also probably have a lot fewer listeners overall so he's not going to do that.

I'm one of those folks who think it's brain-dead stupid to take serious medical advice from someone who hasn't graduated medical school. There have been people I knew, including a few I've loved, who I'm convinced literally died from amateur/voodoo medical advice. This is not to say Real Doctors are all worthy of the title but I feel fairly sure the failure rate is far greater with those who got their diplomas, if any, at the 99 Cents Only Store.

Rogan does have qualified doctors on his podcasts and he's probably right that the parts of those shows that anger some are in brief clips that do not reflect the interviews as a whole. He's also right that he does present opposing views to what's in those brief clips The problem is…well, there are a couple of problems there, one being that even bad medical advice in a brief clip can do a lot of damage.

And another problem might be solved if those qualified experts were being interviewed by someone who knows a lot more about medicine than Joe Rogan.  And that Joe's audience is listening more to him telling what he thinks he's learned from them.

A lot of people these days seem to have a real problem with experts. They don't like that experts sometimes tell them what they don't want to hear. It makes some people uncomfortable the way certain details of American History make them uncomfortable so they want to change those details.

Lately, I see people say, about topics like COVID, "I've done my own research." They make it sound like they went into a lab and with no knowledge whatsoever of the science involved, performed meaningful testing. What "my own research" usually means is that they did some searching of the Internet and found one site or one message somewhere from someone who told them what they wanted to hear.

I don't think the problem here is Joe Rogan. I think the problem here is people who don't put much value in someone actually knowing what they're talking about.

This is one I can't embed here but I'll give you a link to where you can go and view it, should you be so inclined.

Back in 1983 in the early days of cable TV, one of the best things I saw was a series called Likely Stories. For not-enough episodes, clever filmmakers got together with clever people and had a lot of freedom to produce clever short films. Most of what they did could not have appeared on mainstream television at the time.

The producer of the series was a gent named David Jablin who later became a friend of mine and one of the best of the many good things that appeared on his show was this: A 25-minute ersatz documentary about an ersatz film director named Seymour Z. Fishko who was played brilliantly by the (now, sadly) late Howard Hesseman. It was written by two of the best comedy writers around then or now, Michael Barrie and Jim Mulholland.

David tells me that he sent the script to Hesseman who loved it, agreed to do it and recommended his old friend Peter Bonerz to direct. You may remember that in my obit on Hesseman, I mentioned that he was a member of the innovative improv troupe, The Committee. Well, so was Peter Bonerz, who some of you may also know from The Bob Newhart Show.

The casting of the French reporter who is making this bogus film about Mr. Fishko was even easier. It turned out that Hesseman's lady friend at the time was Caroline DuCroq, who was a fine actress and by a neat coincidence, French. A few years after this film was made, she and Howard married and stayed that way for the rest of his life. She is now an important director and acting coach.

Also in the cast was my dear friend Angela Aames, who we lost at the way-too-young age of 32…and I still haven't quite gotten over that. Angela was a very good actress who in this film did a very good job of playing a not-very-good actress.

We have since seen a lot of what some call "mockumentaries" — emphasis on the "mock" — but this was made just before the most famous of them, This is Spinal Tap. Which come to think of it, also had Howard Hesseman in it.

David wrote me this morning to say that with the recent passing of its star, he's been getting a lot of inquiries about where one could see Focus on Fishko. That prompted him to put a copy online and he sent me the link in case I thought newsfromme readers would enjoy seeing it. I think newsfromme readers — especially those who appreciate mildly "adult" subject matter, would enjoy it so here's that link. I dunno how long he'll leave it there so if you want to see it, don't delay.