I never met the man but I had the privilege to see Martin Mull perform here and there, now and then. I recall him popping up as an unbilled opening act at times for someone I went to see…and he was usually better than the someone I had gone to see. He was laid-back, calming, very much audience-friendly and extremely funny. In one appearance — at the Ice House in Pasadena, I think — there were some folks in the crowd who'd come to see just him, not the headliner, and had brought along Martin Mull albums to get them signed.

That was the first time I knew he'd done record albums and I rushed out and bought them. They were very good and quite original. Someone had a real good idea when they cast him for the show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and then brought him back to play his twin brother for Fernwood Tonight.

In 1997 when actor-announcer Bob Ridgely died, I attended what was easily the most hilarious memorial service I've ever been to. Mel Brooks spoke. Thom Sharp spoke. Chuck McCann spoke. A long list of hilarious people spoke. Martin Mull stole the event with the funniest speech I've ever heard at one of those events. If they have a memorial service for him, I hope one of his friends gets up there and plagiarizes that speech. I think he would have loved that.

This A.M., I awoke to the present challenge, which is how to get on with the work I must do and the problems I must solve without devoting too much of my energy and grey matter to a problem I cannot even vaguely affect. The news makes Armchair Advisers out of all of us. I have a friend who works at a plant back east that bottles energy drinks and he spends a lot of every day thinking about how to fix the situation in Gaza. Cynically, I'm not sure there is a solution and realistically, I don't think that if there is, he's going to be the person to formulate it and put it into place.

I can dope out what I'd do if I were Joe Biden or a close adviser to Joe Biden but all I can really do with any idea I have is post it here on my blog where, so far, I haven't even achieved the first step in the abolition of cole slaw. I can also remind myself that if I were Joe Biden or a close adviser to Joe Biden, I'd have a lot more information (tons of it) that might help me shape my thinking. For one thing, I'd have a good answer to the question, "How often is he like that?" If the answer to that question is "Most of the time, lately," it's a very different problem from if the answer is "Never. He was sharp as an X-Acto knife Wednesday evening."

I read a number of interesting articles this morning including this one by David Kurtz. Here's a piece of it that I thought I'd share with you…

For their part, many partisans tend to observe debates and campaigns like sports fans, rooting for outcomes over which they have little or no control. I don't recommend that approach for your mental health, but it also sucks up an enormous amount of human and emotional capital, like spending all day on the sofa watching sports on TV instead of getting out and exercising yourself. The partisan-as-sports-fan risks becoming more deeply invested in their preferred outcomes and the roller coaster of emotions along the way than in the underlying cause.

I've never been able to get into sports. Once upon a time, I cared if the Dodgers won but only because it made my father so happy. I (of course) noted how unhappy it made him when they didn't and it didn't strike me as a fair trade-off. Maybe if he'd had money on the games and got a big payoff when they won, okay. But I don't care who wins the World Series or the Super Bowl because I don't get anything — monetary or otherwise — out of it. I don't even get the satisfaction of pretending I had something to do with the victory.

Following politics is a little different — who wins can affect my life and the lives of others around me — but I still don't have anything meaningful to do with the victories. I vote…that's about it. In the 2020 Presidential Election, the Biden/Harris ticket got 81,282,632 votes. Without mine, they would have gotten 81,282,631. Maybe, giving myself way more credit than I deserve, I also did the cheerleading that helped get a dozen other folks to go out and vote. Don't get me wrong: I'm still going to do everything I can to prevent Donald Trump from getting a second term and turning the United States into a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Trump Organization, an American privately-owned conglomerate owned by Donald Trump who is, in turn, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the highest bidder.

But I think right now, the most meaningful contribution I can make aside from donating cash is to trust that Biden and the people around him will do the right thing. I dunno if that will involve Joe Biden stepping up or stepping down. But I do know I have things to do where I can make more of a difference. I think I'll go do one of them.

They're popping up all over. Here's one from PBS. Here's one from NBC. Here's one from CNN. Here's one from the Associated Press. Here's one from The New York Times. Here's one from ABC. Here's one from USA Today.

There's an awful lot of duplication in them.

Obviously not a good night for Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. He gave much aid 'n' comfort to those who want to argue that he's too old to have a second term and he failed to counter a flood of outright lies from his opponent. (Here's a quick, incomplete fact check.) It disappoints me that The Truth doesn't matter to so many people in this country. There were moments in what I watched where I wish they had a rule that Gavin Newsom could tag in for Biden.

Like everyone else who's projecting what this will mean for the actual election, I have no idea what this will mean for the actual election. I've floated before on this blog and with friends the notion that we may not see one or both of those guys on the November ballot. I've never thought it was likely…just possible. It seems a fraction more possible now.

I'm not watching the first debate between the two old guys running for President of the United States. At least, I'm not watching it live. One of the great things about the Internet (and VCRs and streaming services and some other innovations) is that we're no longer slaves to our televisions. We don't have to be in front of them at 6:00 sharp to watch a program that starts at 6:00 sharp. We can watch it later or the next day or years from now. I have a lady friend who was not born in time to live through the news coverage of the Assassination of John F. Kennedy so one night, we sat here and watched it together, kinda pretending it was "real time" when it wasn't.

I'm not expecting a knockout punch tonight on the debate stage or even anything that makes it impossible for either side to claim an inarguable victory. Trump especially, if you beat him soundly in tic-tac-toe, would still claim it was rigged and he won. But I'll watch it later — maybe — when I feel like watching it if I feel like watching it. I have work to do and besides, MeTV Toons is running Bugs Bunny cartoons and what's happening on that screen is much more realistic.

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

Jo Duffy, Ralph Newman to Receive 2024 Bill Finger Award

Jo Duffy and Ralph Newman are this year's recipients of the 2024 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.

"Since 2005, we have been honoring writers whose work in the comic book industry has not, we feel, received the attention and recognition that their work deserved," Evanier noted. "This year's posthumous recipient wrote hundreds if not thousands of comic book scripts without, as far as we can tell, ever getting his name on any of them. That's about as unrecognized as you can be."

Jo Duffy has written comics including Power Man and Iron Fist, Catwoman, Batman, Wolverine, Fallen Angels, Nestrobber, Glory, Crystar, Elvira, Defenders, Punisher, and Star Wars, as well as the English-language edition of Akira. She has written short stories, essays, the comic book biography of Saint Francis, and an adaptation of Kipling's Jungle Book, and is the co-writer of two Puppet Master movies. She was managing editor of Epic magazine and an editor at Marvel comics, handling such titles as Elektra, Daredevil, Dreadstar, Groo, Doctor Strange, Hulk, and ROM. She co-edited Bernie Wrightson's Frankenstein.

Ralph Newman (1914–1989) was born in Michigan and spent his professional life doing advertising cartooning and then magazine cartooning. His first sale in the latter field was to Amazing Stories, and he later worked as an "idea man" for other magazine cartoonists and as a story-and-gag man for Paul Terry's Terrytoons animation studio. This led to him writing comic books for Timely Comics (now Marvel) featuring Terrytoons characters such as Gandy Goose and Sourpuss throughout the 1940s; when the license shifted to the St. John's publishing company in the 1950s, Newman shifted with them. It is not known precisely when he also began working for the Harvey company, but its longtime editor Sid Jacobson called him the most prolific writer the firm ever had. During his years there, Newman probably wrote for every character who had any kind of longevity, including Casper the Friendly Ghost, Wendy the Good Little Witch, Sad Sack, Little Audrey, Little Lotta, Richie Rich, Spooky, Little Dot, Hot Stuff, The Ghostly Trio, and many more — all without credit. If you read Harvey comics during the company's peak years, you couldn't help but read stories written by Ralph Newman. He left us in 1989.

The Bill Finger Award was created in 2005 at the instigation of the great comic book artist and cartoonist Jerry Robinson. It was his way of preserving the memory of his friend and colleague, the late Bill Finger. Evanier explains, "At the time, Mr. Finger rarely received credit as co-creator of Batman and of the entire, voluminous mythos and supporting cast that surrounded the Caped Crusader. Gloriously, the name of Bill Finger now appears on Batman movies and comic books. That doesn't stop us from continuing to hand out awards bearing his name to other writers who, in the opinion of the committee, have not received sufficient reward or attention for what they have contributed to 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 2024 awards is DC Comics; supporting sponsors are Heritage Auctions and Maggie Thompson.

The Finger Award falls under the auspices of Comic-Con International: San Diego and is administered by Jackie Estrada. The awards will be presented during the Eisner Awards ceremony at this summer's Comic-Con International on Friday, July 26.

From a recent Daily Show: Lewis Black camps it up…

I have a number of questions very much like this one from Lee Grainger…

Reading what you had to say about the MeTV Toons Channel made me all the more unhappy that I can't get it in my area.  What should I do?

Well, first of all, make sure you really can't get it in your area. Use this search engine to check that out. A lot of times, it's on a sub-channel and a lot of people don't know how to get those…or have TV sets so old they can't get them. But check.

In Los Angeles, it's on two over-the-air channels, KSFV (27.1) and KAZA (54.3). If you're in L.A. and you get your TV signals via an antenna, can you get Channel 27 and/or 54? If you can, you may need to have your TV rescan for newly-added channels and if you do, MeTV Toons might appear. Instructions on how to rescan are on that page I just linked you to. If it doesn't, use Google, find the phone number of one of the stations that's supposed to carry what you seek and ask them if it's on the air yet (it might not be) and if it is, how to get it.

You may be told that your TV set is too old to get sub-channels. If that's the problem, this might be a good time to consider a new set. They're real cheap these days and you might find yourself getting a much better picture and/or a lot more new channels.

Next possibility: Do you get your TV signals via a cable service? If you do and they ain't got it, here's something you really oughta do and I'll put it in all caps and bold so as to "shout it" a little at you: CALL YOUR CABLE COMPANY AND TELL THEM YOU WANT IT!!!

Do this when you have a little time because if your cable company is anything like the ones I've had and canceled, they may keep you on hold for the life expectancy of a Seychelles giant tortoise. But there's also a good chance you'll reach someone in time to still go out and vote in the November election. Ask for Customer Service and if the person you get there doesn't know if they're planning on adding it or how to pass along word that one of their subscribers wants it, ask to speak to someone who knows something. Who knows? There might actually be such a person on the premises.

If that fails, do you have a Roku TV? One that gets its signals via the Internet? Then you can get MeTV Toons. All you have to do is to subscribe to either frndly or Philo. frndly is cheaper but each service comes with a lot of other channels and you might decide that Philo is worth the higher price.

I used to get my TV from Spectrum but I canceled it for a number of reasons, some of which you may be able to guess from the paragraph above the one above this paragraph. I have great super-fast Internet service — obviously not from Spectrum — so I got a Roku TV and am very happy with it. Those sets aren't that expensive either and you get an infinite number of channels you never heard of.

I just discovered one that airs old episodes of Celebrity Bowling where you can tune in and watch Billy Barty and Dick Martin bowl against John Schuck and Michael Ansara. That is a real channel and real must-see television. Whoever said The Sopranos was the greatest thing ever on TV didn't know what the hell he was talking about.

Disclaimer: I am not an employee of nor do I get paid anything by MeTV Toons. I just like the channel and I have a feeling I'll like it even more as it matures, gets wider penetration into the marketplace and its programmers get a better feel for what its audience wants.

For several hours yesterday I had my TV on and tuned — "tooned" is more like it — to the new MeTV Toons channel. At times, it felt like it should be called the "All Bob Bergen Promos with Occasional Cartoons Channel" but that would be okay as they were wise enough to engage one of the best cartoon voice guys to be their House Voice. (Bob, by the way, will be on our Saturday Cartoon Voices Panel at Comic-Con and he's also on a MeTV Toons Panel which I think is on Friday.)

I'm quite pleased with this channel. Yeah, they run some cartoons that I don't care for…and I never thought I'd see an episode of Go Go Gophers introduced as a "Classic Cartoon." But there are enough goodies there to delight anyone. I'm curious as to how their lineup will change as they get a better idea of what their audience is tuning in to see…or tuning out. I hear they have dozens and dozens of shows that are not part of their current schedule but can be rotated in when the time comes.

I'm also curious about the advertising. I saw almost no commercials that were geared towards kids and a lot that I'd expect to see on a network that targets older folks, including one for an anti-aging creme and one for a law firm that specializes in estate disputes. Is that the audience they're hoping to attract? How will it change as they get more data on who's watching? I do like that they aren't jamming a lot of ads in and that the cartoons I watched all seemed to be uncut — except for one racial gag that in a Tom & Jerry that was trimmed.

I'm watching right this minute. Atom Ant is on and they just had a commercial for Grand Canyon University, followed by one for Tide detergent, followed by one for the GMC Sierra truck, followed by one for the Studio Scent Diffuser from Hotel Collection. That last is a device that will allow your home to smell like a five-star hotel. Are these advertisers likely to get a lot of nibbles from folks who are watching Atom Ant cartoons? I'm not being sarcastic.  This is an honest question from someone who's 72 years old and who at the moment is watching Atom Ant.

Oh no, wait: That's over and now I'm watching "Case of the Missing Hare," a Bugs Bunny cartoon directed by Chuck Jones ten years before I was born. Maybe this is more of an "all ages" channel than some might have thought.

Folks keep asking me if I'm going to watch the Presidential Debate on Thursday evening. This is assuming it happens as planned. My answer? I dunno. I'm not sure I can watch Donald Trump for that long in one sitting.

Everyone discussing this online is talking about raising or lowering expectations. My expectation is that neither man will fare so poorly that his boosters can't declare him the obvious winner by a million-billion miles. This whole thing about "performance-enhancing drugs" is another Trump alibi/distraction. There's zero evidence that Biden gets a shot in his incumbent butt before any major address but if you're really invested in the premise that he can barely walk or talk, I guess you have to come up with some explanation when he actually walks or talks.

And of course, the back-up excuse if Trump doesn't do well will be Jake Tapper. Trump dwells in a world of "Heads, I win…tails, it's rigged!"

Me, I think it's way too early for this. Neither man officially has his nomination yet. One hasn't even named his running mate. The polls don't mean much this far ahead of Election Day but even if they did, they've been essentially tied for some time…as anyone who understands the term "margin of error" knows.

Assuming these are the two guys on the ballots in November, I think Biden's going to win because Trump's reminding me more and more of a crook being pursued in a high-speed chase but whose car is coming apart, piece by piece. It's inevitable that he's going to crash but I don't think this debate will be the spike-strip that does it. I think it'll just further polarize a battle that has already become too polarized for the issues to matter as much as they should.

Another classic Bob Newhart monologue.

When I was in Junior High School, there was a talent show and I somehow wound up as one of the audition judges. Students who wished to perform — and there were a lot of them — would come in to a small classroom and perform for a panel of five or so judges and we'd pick the ones who would get to be in the show in the big auditorium. One guy came in, announced he was going to do a comedy routine he'd written and then proceeded to do this one, just about verbatim.

Little did he know that one of the judges (i.e., me) not only had a copy of Bob Newhart's 1960 debut album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, but had played it often enough to know every cut of it by heart. That included the "Driving Instructor" routine.

The student did a nice-enough job of it given that he was maybe 14 years old but after he finished, when it became time for the judges to compliment him and thank him for coming by, I blew the whistle on him…and regretted it. I should have just said thanks and let him go off and then, when the judges discussed who to put in the show, mentioned that his bit was not original and likely to be recognized by many in the audience, especially parents.

The plagiarizing student never forgave me and scowled at me all through the rest of junior high and then through our mutual three years of high school. And I almost didn't blame him for stealing it. As you'll see, it's a pretty funny bit…

Eddie Murphy says he wants to do a remake of my favorite movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. It appears he doesn't yet have a studio ready to put up the zillions of dollars it would take to make such a picture and I'm wondering if he's saying this just to see if any such backer comes forward. It would probably take zillions for two reasons, one being that Mr. Murphy is, probably deservedly, a very highly-paid movie star…and if you were to pack the film with other stars of that caliber, they'd want Favored Nations with him or something close to it.

You'd also have to spend a lot of money to make the chases and stunts and action scenes pretty damned spectacular…and I wonder if it would be anywhere near as effective. Here's the thing: When my fave film was released in 1963, there was no such thing as CGI and audiences didn't know very much about camera trickery. Along with Spencer Tracy, Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Ethel Merman, Dick Shawn, Phil Silvers and the rest, there was another kind of star in the movie: The stuntpeople. Audiences didn't think Buddy Hackett had actually flown an airplane through a billboard but they knew that someone did — for real.

Today, it would be done with CGI. Or if you had someone actually do it, moviegoers would just assume it was CGI. Nobody today believes any stunts in any movies are real unless it's well-publicized that (for example) a Tom Cruise actually did some of his himself. (And you can find plenty of people on the Internet who think that's a lie. By the way, the man who flew the plane through the billboard — for real — was named Frank Tallman.)

So I'm not sure the action stuff would be as thrilling as it was in 1963 Cinerama and I'm not sure you could afford a comparable all-star lineup. Also, there are a lot of funny people around but with a few exceptions, they're not known for or experienced in physical comedy and they aren't "types."  The moment Phil Silvers appeared on the screen in the original film, audiences knew instantly the kind of person he was. He had decades of experience playing avaricious con men and so brought loads of characterization to the screen with him.

Name a star today who has that kind of history. Or name one whose very appearance instantly denotes "prey" like when Don Knotts appears or "ineptness" when we see the Three Stooges dressed up as firefighters. Mad World had a cast of comic actors who went back to the days of silent pictures. A remake today would probably reach back as far as stars whose films came out on VHS.

This is not me thinking that a remake denotes some kind of disrespect for the original. A few years ago when they announced a new Three Stooges movie, some folks who for some reason thought the original Stooges could possibly be disgraced, denounced the whole idea. Well, the movie came and went and I didn't notice any lowering of reverence for Larry, Moe and the third Stooge of your choice. They were those loud knuckleheads then, they're those loud knuckleheads now. Their films are as popular as ever.

I'm not saying that someone with the deepest of pockets couldn't assemble an all-star cast. I'm just saying it wouldn't be easy and it would only be a remake of my favorite flick in the slimmest of ways. And there's one more problem that I probably should mention: If they do make it and I go see it, I'm unlikely to be eleven years old. Then again, others might be.

This is the second episode of the 1977 hostless Laugh-In series. You'll especially enjoy it if you're nostalgic for jokes about Jimmy Hoffa and Anita Bryant. And look carefully and at different moments, you'll get to see my partner Sergio Aragonés being chased by a train, diving into a woman's navel, getting blown-up and taking a bath…

Dave Marron just wrote to ask me this…

What's your opinion of the Hanna-Barbera Laurel and Hardy cartoons? Were they faithful to the Boys, or are they an abomination that should never see the light of day ever again?

My answer would fall somewhere between those two extremes. I covered this matter here back in 2007 but I wouldn't expect anyone to wade through the 31,949 messages on this site — that's the actual number as of this minute — and indeed, few have so I get asked this a lot.

I have a kind of two-tier answer here: The cartoons themselves are as good or bad as anything Hanna-Barbera was producing at the time. They're competent. They have their moments. I don't think they're anyone's favorites. They don't have that much to do with the real performers on whom they're technically based.

I feel almost the same way about the Abbott & Costello cartoons that H-B produced, though the ones of Bud and Lou had a slight edge since they did have Bud Abbott supplying his own voice. Also, Lou Costello was a little more of a cartoon character in real life, his humor depending less on gestures and certain subtleties that were vital to Stan and Ollie. You weren't going to get those gestures and subtleties out of Hanna-Barbera…or probably any animation studio then in operation.

So I don't hate the H-B Stan and Oliver cartoons. They're about on a par with the studio's Lippy Lion and Hardy Har Har cartoons…and similar enough to make it credible that, as rumor has it, they used leftover or recycled Lippy and Hardy scripts. (I just typed "L&H scripts," then realized the initials apply to both. So did the level of comedy.)

So that's one tier of my response. The other has to do with what a shame it was that producer Larry Harmon obtained and exploited the names and likenesses of my two favorite performers. I had some run-ins with Mr. Harmon and didn't like him…which is odd because throughout my life, I've been criticized for liking people that others abhor.

Mr. Harmon, may he rest in peace, came across like Sgt. Bilko without the charm or occasional benevolence, always trying to hustle me into writing something for him for deferred income — or no promise of any ever, no matter what. A lot of folks seems to think that he cheated the heirs of Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy and while I have no direct info on what was signed or what was paid on that matter, I had my own sense of his integrity. It, not the cartoons themselves, colors that whole body of work for me.

I rarely watch Bill Maher these days but this, from his broadcast last night, was too good not to share…