• I would like there to be an Internet/Phone/TV provider who makes the following offer: For every 15 minutes their service department keeps you on the phone, including hold time, you get a month of free service. And yes, this is being written while I am on hold with Spectrum.

Having decided not to travel far or get on an airplane until COVID is much less of a concern, I can only follow Broadway from afar, as we did with the revival of The Music Man. I am intrigued that a new musical — Mr. Saturday Night — is currently there in previews with an announcing opening date of April 27.

It's at the Nederlander Theater and it's based, of course, on the 1992 movie which starred Billy Crystal, David Paymer and other folks. The musical version stars Billy Crystal, David Paymer and other folks. The screenplay for the movie, which was by Billy Crystal, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandell has been adapted for the stage by Billy Crystal, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandell. The music is by Jason Robert Brown and the lyrics are by Amanda Green. John Rando is directing.

I liked but did not love the movie and one thing that didn't work for me in it was the makeup jobs done to make Mr. Crystal look younger and then older and then younger again and then older again and so forth. David Paymer as his brother actually seemed to regress and age as per the film's timeline but Crystal, to me, just kept looking like Billy Crystal with stuff on his face. I wouldn't imagine that would be a problem with a stage version. When you do Peter Pan on stage, it's okay if the audience can see the wire because they'll pretend they don't. An audience for live theater can pretend Billy Crystal is whatever age the scene says he is…and he is thirty years older now.

The other night, a lady friend and I watched the DVD of the film and we both enjoyed it a lot…for me, more than when I saw it in a theater, way back when. I again thought that David Paymer was the best thing in it. He's usually the best thing in whatever he does…even a cartoon show for which he did voices, directed by me. A lovely man. A very fine actor. And don't for a minute think I had to give him any sort of real direction.

What makes me wonder about the storyline as a musical is that the character Crystal plays — semi-successful-but-not-for-long comedian Buddy Young, Jr. — is not a very nice guy most of the time. His two defining traits are that and a certain lack of self-awareness. As Paymer's character (Young's brother-agent) tells him in the film, he takes every bad break and makes it worse. Most characters in musicals have a certain understanding of what they want and at the end of the show, they get it. Buddy Young's story is mainly one of self-induced failure and blindness to his own self-destructive nature. Still, these are skillful folks making this show. I hope they pull it off and that it runs long enough for me to get back there and see how they did it.

It's The Muppets on The Ed Sullivan Show for November 30, 1969. And I'll bet most of you know exactly how this goes…

• How odd that the word "hot" in "hot chicken sandwich" means the chicken is very spicy whereas the word "hot" in "hot turkey sandwich" means the turkey has gravy all over it. You'd think we could standardize stuff like that.

I forgot to mention that I got my fourth dose of Moderna Vaccine last week. I did not do this because any politician or talk show personality told me or forced me. I did this because my doctor recommended it. I did not feel any of my personal freedoms were being lost any more than I feel that way when my doctor prescribes some medicine for me and I take that medicine.

Too many people have hauled too much irrelevant baggage into the simple decision to get vaccinated or boosted. It's very simple. You get the shot because the evidence is pretty strong that it will lessen your chance of getting The Disease…or if you get The Disease, you will not suffer or risk death as much.

But don't get it on my say-so. I write comic books and cartoons, remember? And don't get it or not get it because some guy on TV or the Internet says to get it or not get it. Ask your doctor. He or she knows more about this kind of thing than you do. And if they don't, get yourself a better doctor.

If you plan on watching Jimmy Kimmel tonight, you might want to TiVo or DVR Jimmy Fallon's show. Or if you plan on watching Jimmy Fallon tonight, you might want to TiVo or DVR Jimmy Kimmel's program.

Derek Teague wrote to ask…

It's wonderful that you are championing the merits of the rarely revived Broadway show, Li'l Abner. However, I'd like to posit this query: do you honestly think that it would ever be deigned to be Broadway revivable given today's political climate?

Once all of today's social critics do some digging and learn that Abner's creator Al Capp was a right-wing crank, during a late-1960s zeitgeist when it was not politically expedient to be such, there would be nary a chance that a "new Li'l Abner for the twenty-first century" might survive out-of-town try-outs. At least, Mr. Capp was a wooden-legged amputee — that might count for something.

Answer me that, Mister Green Lantern.

Here's an absolutely accurate answer to your question: I don't know. My first thought is just that "today's political climate" (to use your term) is just "today's political climate." It might not be tomorrow's or that of the year after. I wouldn't bet money on anyone's ability to predict that. I would also think that since he personally was not going to profit from a revival — him being dead and all — Capp's personal politics and misdeeds wouldn't be a factor…only what was on the stage.

When I was briefly involved in discussions of revising its book for a new production, no one was thinking of setting the show in the present day. It had to be period, had to be set back in the fifties with a looming Red Scare. Maybe being period and so gosh-darned cartoony would give it some insulation. Current events might well render it more or less relevant to our time.

I find the issue of What Offends People to be very inconsistent and unpredictable. For a long period of what some would call "wokeness," the news that Bill Cosby was probably raping women didn't seem to arouse a lot of outrage. Then one day, it suddenly did. I look at routines by guys like Dave Chappelle or Jim Jefferies or any wildly-successful comic in their category and I don't get why people are upset about these four jokes and not hundreds of others told from the same stages by the same performers.

But I'll stick with my answer: I don't know. At the moment, I would think the foremost obstacle to a revival of Li'l Abner is financial. No one is coming forth to put up the millions of dollars it would take to do it for the same reasons no one did it in the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, etc. It just didn't seem like as sound an investment opportunity as the three-hundredth Broadway revival of Gypsy or the six-thousandth Fiddler on the Roof.

One of these years (decades?) when there's someone with the interest and power to put together the deal to remount Li'l Abner, we can take a look and see what the political climate is then. If you and I had gone to see an early preview of The Book of Mormon, we might have worried about protests at the depiction of black people and the ridiculing of an entire, not-insignificant religion. And that show could not have been a much bigger hit than it was and still is.

You can find some fun things on YouTube if you do a little diggin' and searchin'. I love the musical of Al Capp's newspaper strip Li'l Abner and especially the number, "Jubilation T. Cornpone," performed by Stubby Kaye in the original Broadway production and in the movie.

There has been no Broadway production of Li'l Abner other than the original. It's never been revived, though there have been several attempts that never got off the ground. I was briefly tapped a few times by folks who were making those attempts and wanted to have me update the script but those attempts never reached the stage where I started updating.

One of the many factors that worked against its resurrection on The Great White Way is that it requires a large (and therefore, expensive) cast. It can be as large as you like but I would think you'd need at least thirty bodies up on that stage to do it as right as you'd have to for Broadway. Part of my mission, had I been truly engaged to revise, would have been to try and pare that number down a bit.

But the show is revived a lot around the country, especially in venues where the actors aren't paid. I had a telephone friendship with Al Capp's brother Elliott and I think he was the one who pointed out two reasons why colleges and community theaters loved to do the show. One was that in such productions, you want as many people in the cast as possible. The bigger your cast, the more friends and relatives there are to buy tickets. You can put a hundred of any age, shape or size in the cast.

The other reason is that it's a damn cheap show to costume. Right now, if you were cast in a production as a citizen of Dogpatch, I'll bet you could whip up a fine outfit from those old clothes in the back of your closet — the ones you keep meaning to throw away. I've seen it staged with most of the cast barefoot and in rags.

So I came across this video of the "Jubilation T. Cornpone" number from a 2014 mounting of the show at the Eureka Theatre in San Francisco with (apparently) an all-children cast. Mammy and Pappy Yokum, as you'll see, look about eight years old. The gent playing Marryin' Sam who carries the piece is named Tosh Harris Santiago and he looks a bit older than the others but still a kid.

A lot of these videos make me cringe and dive for the STOP button but I thought this was rather well done, given the lack of experience and budget. Take a look — and notice how the "the bigger your cast, the more tickets you'll probably sell" strategy was apparently being employed…

When I watch videos like this, I always think, "At least one person on the stage went on to an actual performing career." And realizing that this is from 2014 and all those kids are a lot older now, I did a search for Tosh Harris Santiago. Sure enough, I found a couple of videos of a seasoned performer by that name singing and dancing. I'm assuming the guy in this number from In the Heights is the same Todd Harris Santiago. I'm also assuming we're going to see more of this man. He's real good…

• A huge peer-reviewed study shows that Intervectin is absolutely useless against COVID. I don't understand. If you can't get sound health advice from Joe Rogan, who can you trust? Oh, if only there around a million people in this country who seriously study medicine…

I have something to do today that's more important than blogging…and like you, I didn't know there were such things in this world but, hey, you learn something new every few years.  Besides, to your delight and mine, I've run out of things to say about Slapgate and I've just plugged Frank Ferrante so I'm all out of conversation.  I'll have more when I return to this page.

Oh — and to those of you attending WonderCon in Anaheim, I wish I could be with you but I'm glad I'm not with you…if you can understand what I mean by that. I'm sure you'll have a very good time as I have at every WonderCon I've ever attended and as I expect to have at WonderCons in the future. Bye for now.

Just wanted to remind my friends in Southern California that Frank Ferrante's Groucho — the video of Frank's show which even I'm sick of seeing me rave about — debuts this Friday night — 8PM on KLCS with a repeat six hours later at 2 AM. It also run at 9PM on Friday evening on KVCR.

That's in Los Angeles. It's debuting all over the country on different dates on different PBS stations. Some of the other dates 'n' times can be found on this page but do a search on your program guide to make sure. I've seen it and it certainly captures all the joys of Frank's show.

I haven't talked to anyone on the inside but I'd bet that folks at the Motion Picture Academy are having discussions, trying to find some way to discipline or punish Will Smith without offending Will Smith or whatever studio will be releasing his next picture. People in the public debate keep saying things like, "Well, what would they have done if a costume designer had barged up on stage during the Oscars and slapped someone?"

We know what they would have done to that person. The question is what do you do if it's one of the top box office stars who you're probably about to honor with a Best Actor Oscar? It's like: What if you're halfway through shooting a movie and the star starts slapping people on the set, what are you going do to that star? Send him home, shut down production and lay everyone off?

Remember: Even while more and more women were coming forward to say they were raped by Bill Cosby, NBC was offering him a new series.

This morning, the Television Academy released the following statement…

There are an infinite number of unpredictable occurrences that can transpire in a television production, whether it's a series produced on location or a live awards show. But everyone working in television — or any part of the entertainment industry — deserves to work in an environment free from physical violence. The Television Academy supports creative freedom and expression, and no matter your field, you should never be made to experience the fear or threat of physical harm, much less actual abuse, in the course of doing your job — be in telling a joke or lighting a scene.

Okay. That looks nice at arm's length but, first of all, nobody who's not in any part of the entertainment industry should be made to experience the fear or threat of physical harm, much less actual abuse, in the course of doing their job…or walking down the street. The lady who makes sandwiches at my favorite deli has the same human right to not be assaulted as anyone who works in television. She doesn't even have a stunt double.

But what's really missing from this statement is the answer to this question: "So if someone — especially a Big Star on whom many jobs depend — kicks an intern or punches a stage manager, what is anyone going to do about it?" The statement from the TV Academy doesn't address that point, does it?

A good talk host needs many skills and a biggie is being able to build something — anything! — out of the wreckage when things collapse. David Letterman was so good at it that it was often a disappointment on his program when things went right.

Here from The Late Show for 11/4/99, we have The Pumpkin Cannon…

…for those of us in Los Angeles, anyway. My favorite place west of the Mississippi for pizza, Vito's over on La Cienega, has recovered enough from its February 5th fire to be back open and making pies. Yes, yes, I know you know a better place in L.A. for pizza. This is my pick.

Before anyone asks: My favorite pizza east of the Mississippi can be obtained at John's of Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, New York. Yes, I know you know a better place back there. No, I haven't tried every other place on either coast. I just look like I have.

My old pal Pat O'Neill sent the following in response to me writing that "I still couldn't say what should be done now to Will Smith but I think someone ought to do something." What Pat wrote to me was…

And what should be done about Chris Rock — who instigated the whole thing with a rude, tasteless, ad-lib dig at Smith's wife? Is he blameless in all this? Add in the fact that this is not his first go-round at "comedically" insulting Jada Pinkett-Smith and his role in the incident can hardly go unnoticed or undisciplined.

Absolutely nothing official should be done to Chris Rock. There are laws in this country against striking another human being. People get arrested for that and tossed in the pokey every day. We do not arrest people for being rude and tasteless. Pat, you and I have many mutual friends who would be doing hard time if we did.

I mean, you can punish him by never watching him on TV again. I'm guessing you already don't pay money to see or hear him perform but you can also vow to never start doing that. You always have that right.

I don't think his role has gone unnoticed. It may be the most viral video of the century so far and everyone has their opinion of whether he crossed some highly-arguable line and if so, if the proper retaliation to that is being assaulted in front of the whole world.  They may not all agree with you as, for example, I don't. I do not agree that the joke — which was surely planned and not an ad-lib — was as bad as you make it out to be. Her husband even laughed at it before he then decided to be an asshole about it.

As Kareem Abdul-Jabbar put it in one of the best pieces I've read about the incident…

Ok, I can see where the Smiths might not have found that joke funny. But Hollywood awards shows are traditionally a venue where much worse things have been said about celebrities as a means of downplaying the fact that it's basically a gathering of multimillionaires giving each other awards to boost business so they can make even more money.

Read the whole piece Kareem wrote. It's an article called "Will Smith Did a Bad, Bad Thing."

Gee. For a guy who didn't watch or record the Oscars, I sure am writing a lot about that ceremony.