Quips and Quotations (Ivories That Tickle Edition)

 

1928-2025

I would listen to the radio and think, 'I can write a song as good as that,' and the problem is, they already have people who can write songs 'as good as that' so what do they need one more for? What is necessary is somebody that can write something different.

--Tom Lehrer

Vital Viewing (The Hannibal Run Edition)

Today's not Conan O'Brien's birthday, but there's reason to celebrate anyway as just the other day The John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington D.C. presented the man with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Now, you may have heard that thanks to an "Executive Order", TJFKCFPA has come under the thumb of the current occupant of the White House, something that may have been on O'Brien's mind as he gave his acceptance speech:

I've watched many of these Mark Twain Prize telecasts over the years, and the recipients very rarely mention the man the prize was named after, so as a Twain fan it pleases me to no end that O'Brien did and did so at such great length.

It also makes me think I should include an accompanying video of Twain, but that's not really possible. Late in life he did appear on film, but it was silent film, so we're denied the Great Man's acerbic witticisms. The best I can do is this:

And that's what Conan was talking about!

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1936-2025

The Mark Twain Prize seems to have passed Ruth Buzzi by, but that's the Kennedy Center's loss and not the loss for those of us who lived through a time when she was a regular, and a regularly hilarious, presence on television. Buzzi was best known for Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In and on that once-well-known rapid-fire sketch comedy show she was best known for her portrayal of homely, purse-battering Gladys Ormphby, but she played other characters as well. Perusing through what YouTube has to offer, the following comedy of manners is what gave me the biggest laugh:

Twain, that old foe of propriety, would have loved it.

Vital Viewing (Fall Guy Edition)

 

 

Actor John Ritter was born on this day in 1948 (and died at the all-too-young age of 54 in 2003.) He's best known for the late 1970s-early '80s sex farce sitcom Three's Company, on which he played culinary school student Jack Tripper, who shares an apartment with two attractive young women while having to pretend he's gay so the landlord won't think any hanky-panky is going on. The funny thing--literally so, as it was the primary source of the show's humor--is no hanky-panky ever did go on, though the main characters often thought otherwise. 3C may have been the sexiest network series of its time, but it was all talk, no action, much innuendo about nothing:

 

Real sex wouldn't have been nearly as funny (though arguably still attention-getting.)

Ritter talks about the sitcom that made him a star and other things in this 1997 interview with Conan O'Brien:

So what was that Don Ohlmeier "in-joke" all about anyway? Ohlmeier was the head of NBC Entertainment, the network O'Brien was on at the time, and the highest rated network throughout the 1990s. The lying-in-the-snow wisecrack could have been a reference to Ohlmeier's alcoholism. Perhaps not a nice thing to joke about, but Ohlmeier was arguably fair game. He had been accused of sexual harassment shortly before going into rehab, and a cynical attitude toward the man was beginning to take shape. The cynical attitude wasn't lessened any by Ohlmeier's friendship with O.J. Simpson, who had recently been found not guilty of murder, though few people outside the jury box believed he was innocent. In fact, a battle of sorts was brewing between Ohlmeier and Saturday Night Live Weekend Update anchor Norm McDonald over anti-O.J. jokes the latter was making on the air, a battle McDonald would eventually lose when he was fired from SNL--WAIT A SECOND! This post is supposed to be about John Ritter, not Don Ohlmeier.

Conan mentioned that John Ritter fell down quite a bit on Three's Company. Though I didn't want the man to hurt himself, I would say that was a good thing, as Ritter was one of the great physical comedy actors of his generation. See for yourself:

  

Watching Ritter comically stumble and bumble his way around Joyce DeWitt and Suzanne Somers, you might not guess that this man was in actuallity a classically-trained actor, would you? Well, here's the proof as Ritter takes a dramatic turn opposite Billy Bob Thornton in 1997's Sling Blade:

No slapstick, though Ritter's character may have put his foot in his mouth.

Vital Viewing (Comedy 2 Night Edition)

1943-2024

Comedian, actor, musician, and, having spent part of his childhood in the area, Cleveland booster Martin Mull died this past Thursday. Here he is sometime in the 1980s as a guest on David Letterman's NBC late night talk show. As it turns out, Mull was something else other than just a comedian, actor, musician, and Browns fan:

"Representational" doesn't quite describe Mull's retro-photorealistic collage-like paintings. Not that "retro-photorealistic collage-like" describes the artworks all that much better, but I like 'em:

The Ides of August

Sunday Morning

Carpe Diem

Self-Portrait

Band on the Run

Some noted celebrities have taken notice of Mull's artworks, and used them for their own endeavors:

So was painting just Mull's hobby? Actually, it was his main line of work. Or rather, it's what the Rhodes Island School of Design Bachelor of Fine Arts (1965) and Master of Fine Arts (1967) graduate would preferred to have been his main line of work, but fine art doesn't always pay the bills, thus the comedy, acting, music, and boosting. A closer look at how he paid those bills:

Martin Mull first came to public attention in 1977 playing wife-beater Garth Gimble on the late-night black comedy soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Doesn't sound too pleasant, I know, but if it's any consolation his character got his comeuppance when he was fatally impaled on an artificial Christmas tree. Mull's stint on MHMH didn't end, however, as he soon returned as Garth's identical twin show biz brother Barth. This led to the spinoff Fernwood 2 Night, the titled small town's local TV station's misguided attempt at a talk show that had host Barth spending as much time fending off announcer/sidekick/buttinski Jerry Hubbard (Fred Willard) as he did interviewing guests:

Fernwood 2 Night eventually morphed into America 2 Night, which had Barth and Jerry moving to California and interviewing real-life celebrities but with the same disastrous results. That show ended its run in 1978, but it wasn't the end for Mull or Willard, who nearly two decades later would make...

...sitcom history. Martin Mull had for some time been appearing on Roseanne where he played the title character's boss and later business partner Leon Carp, who was eventually revealed to be gay. Fred Willard played Scott, Leon's old flame, and the two eventually decided to get married (some 20 years before the Supreme Court ruled same-sex couples could do so.) Now, Mull and Willard were straight in real-life, but here at Shadow of a Doubt we hold no objection to heterosexuals playing homosexuals as long as it's done with some understanding of what that state of being must be like (or at least as much understanding as you're likely to get on a sitcom.). And they did. Unfortunately, all I could find on YouTube was the following clip in which someone very obviously pointed a video camera at a TV screen and started recording. It's still very watchable, but just not listenable. Turn up the volume all you want. All you'll hear is a mutter. Undaunted, I went to the website IMBd and found out just what  muttering went on between Mull and Willard. It's just below the video. Watch (that's Norm Crosby officiating) and then read:  

• 
  
• Scott: I love you in a way that is mystical and eternal and illegal in 20 states.
• Leon Carp: That's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard.
• 
  
• 
  

• 
  
  
  

 Martin Mull did a lot of movies and TV guest shots in his lengthy career, but it was as a stand-up, or rather sit-down, comedian that I found him at his funniest:

That ended kind of abruptly, but who else but God always leaves them wanting more?

Finally, a hometown promo:

That was from the early 1990s. These days we have two downtown stadiums, one for the Browns and one for the Guardians, as well as a casino and a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but even if we didn't, Mr. Mull still would have convinced me to stay, just as long as he made me laugh in return for doing so.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Road to Pride

 

Is comedy inherently subversive or is it inherently reactionary? Does it make fun of, and thereby attack, the status quo, or does it reenforce existing norms by taking potshots at anyone or anything that poses a challenge to those norms? I guess it all depends on what you're laughing at. If it's the Marx Brothers in the 1930s ruining a wealthy matron's dinner party along with the mansion where it's being held, then you could say what you're laughing at is an attack on the capitalist system, and thus the status quo, making it subversive.  However, if you're somebody who laughed hysterically every time the late Medal of Freedom recipient Rush Limbaugh made mention of "feminazis" on the radio, then you're laughing at, and in agreement with, a potshot taken at those who would challenge a woman's freedom to be nothing more than barefoot and pregnant, a challenge to a norm that today apparently still holds some appeal (we'll see just how much at election time), and that makes it reactionary.

Then there's the curious case of Bob Hope. A lifelong Republican, much of his material was written by lifelong Democrats (such as Larry Gelbart, who went on to create the TV version of MASH.) In his monologues, Hope pretty much made fun of anybody in the news, be they on the left or the right, though in a no-blood-drawn sort of way. And he made fun of himself (most famously his failure to win, or even be nominated for, an Oscar), the comic self-effacement a big part of his appeal. The movies he made in the 1940s and '50s, such as the The Princess and the Pirate and Son of Paleface (where his costars were Roy Rogers and Trigger), as well as the Road pictures he made with Bing Crosby, were mildly subversive in the way his cowardly heroes stumbled head first into one movie genre after another, making chaotic mincemeat out of Hollywood depictions of machismo, but as he got older, and older, and older still (he lived to be 100), Hope became much more of an Establishment figure, and the trademark self-effacement lost much of its credibility. Whatever shame he felt in not winning an Oscar was probably more than made up for by getting White House invites throughout ten different administrations. Finally, like many comedians who got their start in vaudeville, he peppered his monologues with jokes aimed at ethnic and racial minorities. He did that less and less as time passed, but there was one minority which he just wouldn't let up on:

“I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d better get out before they make it compulsory.”

By 1989, the homophobic humor had begun to catch up with Hope. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) wrote him a strongly worded letter of complaint, reminding him that whatever Orwellian fears he had of a future homosexual police state, for the time being it was gays and lesbians themselves who were uncomfortably at the mercy of a heterosexual ruling class. Whether out of sincere regret, or a realization that a public relations fix was in order, or maybe even both, Hope surprised the alliance with a letter of apology. Furthermore, he offered to film a Public Service Announcement condemning violence against gays and lesbians. GLAAD had only been around four years at that point, and couldn't afford such an announcement, so Hope went and paid for it out of his own pocket. Watch: 

Bob Hope may have been at his most subversive when playing it straight. Thanks for the memory.

Under the Radar: Joe Flaherty

 

Circa 1971: Here's several members of Chicago's improvisational comedy troupe Second City (the group took its name from a 1950s New Yorker article by A.J. Liebling in which he mocked the Midwestern metropolis for always coming in second to the East Coast metropolis.) You probably recognized John Belushi right off the bat, but maybe not the others, so let me tell you who they are going from left to right. First off is Judy Morgan, followed by Eugenie Ross-Leming, Jim Fisher, and, towering over Belushi, the subject of this post, Joe Flaherty. Flaherty and Belushi acted alongside each other in three Second City revues and were also castmates on the National Lampoon's Radio Hour: Odd to say this about a radio program, but I actually found a 1974 video clip from the latter. Very much of its time (but nevertheless fairly amusing in ours), part of it satirizes Watergate criminals sent off to college dorm-like minimum security prisons, and the other part the era's courtship etiquette:

Along with Flaherty and Belushi, you may have recognized Gilda Radner, Harold Ramis, and two guys who looked like either one could be a young Bill Murray. Well, the one with the beard is a young Bill Murray, the other is Bill's older brother Brian Doyle-Murray.

Belushi's subsequent life and career is pretty well-known by now. He and Gilda ended up on Saturday Night Live, and were joined by Bill in that show's second season. Belushi at first was overshadowed by Chevy Chase on SNL, but then saw his celebrity rise after Chase's departure. Actually, it was a movie he did when the show was on hiatus, Animal House, playing a college student who parties more than he studies, that really secured his stardom, a stardom cut short by a fatal heroin overdose. As for Flaherty, even if he never achieved the same level of success as Belushi, his career was no less interesting (to me), with the added bonus that he got to live a whole lot longer.

After 13 successful years in Chicago, its owners decided it was time for a second Second City, and somehow Toronto was chosen. Sent to that Canadian metropolis as a kind of advance man, Flaherty found it was a very good choice indeed, as the city had as much a performing arts scene as Chicago, and a plethora of comedy talent. Dan Ackroyd, John Candy, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Rick Moranis, Dave Thomas Catherine O'Hara, Eugine Levy, as well as aforementioned Americans Ramis and Radner and Flaherty himself, and probably a few others I'm unaware of, were earning laughs onstage with a mixture of improvised and (this sometimes gets overlooked) scripted material, as had the folks back in Chicago. What didn't happen in Chicago that did happen in Toronto was a television spin-off. Why in one city and not the other? Apparently, the person who owned the Canadian Second City rights wanted to explore new ways make money off the brand, and the Chicago folks didn't. Who says it always has to be the Americans who are the entrepreneurs?

What became known as SCTV ran from 1976 to 1984, first on Canadian TV, then in United States syndication, then as an expanded show on NBC on Friday nights, and finally on premium cable. SCTV had a TV show-within-a-TV show premise: a bunch of people who wanted their own program were turned down by CBS, NBC, and ABC and so, undaunted, put on their own show on their own station. Truth be told, I usually paid no attention to the framing device, and just enjoyed it as a series of unrelated sketches, except when Joe Flaherty showed up as the TV station's sleazy intermittently wheelchair-bound owner Guy Caballero:

Reminds me of a certain orange-haired politician.

1941-2024

 

Vital Viewing (Great Depression Stimulus Package Edition)

 

Actress Jean Harlow was born on this day in 1911 (prone to bouts of influenza at a time when penicillin was not yet widely available, she died of kidney failure at age 26 in 1937.) Let's start out with a few home movies:

Watching the above you might get the impression Harlow was a silent film star. In fact, she was a major star of early talkies, as well as a major sex symbol of early talkies. In this scene from 1932's Red Dust, she tries her best to break the ice by talking up dairy products with a major male sex symbol of early (as well as later) talkies, Clark Gable (speaking of which, Gable's behavior at one point probably wouldn't pass a present-day #MeToo test, but keep in mind it's not the present day but 92 years ago):

Red Dust was a drama, though the above scene was obviously one of the film's lighter moments. Now, while I won't pretend it was the first and foremost reason she or later blond bombshells as Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield were such box office draws, Jean Harlow was in fact very good at comedy. Here's a comic scene from another movie that was otherwise dramatic, 1933's Dinner at Eight. I've shown it before (in a post about Marie Dressler, who also appears) and it never fails to make me chuckle:

 Take that, Sam Altman!

Leaving Las Vegas

 

The Riviera Hotel and Casino opened in 1955, the ninth resort to do so on the legendary Las Vegas Strip. Mob-owned and Mob-run for decades, it featured top-notch entertainers, and was one of the bigger draws for those tourists who save up their money all year round so they can experience the pleasure of losing it at the tables or slot machines. The Riveria also popped up in movies such as the original Ocean's 11 (the one with the Rat Pack, not George Clooney), Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, and Diamonds Are Forever. Unfortunately, casinos aren't diamonds. Starting in the 1980s, multinational corporations began buying up most of the rest of the gangland holdings on the Strip, and proceeded to knock down the aging neon towers one by one and replace them with even larger indoor gambling theme parks, the nearby construction of which reduced foot traffic to the Riveria. Ownership eventually passed from the underworld to more legitimate groups of investors, and finally in 2015, the state-run Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. Are we talking a unique form of American socialism here? Nothing so provocative, I'm afraid. The Riviera was just bought to be gotten rid of and the whole thing went through a series of "implosions" to make room for some kind of trade center expansion. Before any of that happened, though, there was first a liquidation sale...

...and Las Vegas mainstay Shecky Greene, who had played at that and every other hotel on the Strip, was on hand to salvage what he could.

Here's Shecky at home:

What happens on the Web, stays on the Web.

1926-2023

Vital Viewing (Siblings Soapbox Edition)

 

Dickie and Tommy Smothers

A couple of weeks ago I did a post on writer/producer Norman Lear, lauding him for making TV comedy safe for sociopolitical content. However, a death in the news now has reminded me that there was a predecessor, The Smother Brothers Comedy Hour, a show that, if it couldn't for itself make TV comedy safe for sociopolitical content, may have at least secured a beachhead for Lear's later, more successful assault on network Standards and Practices.

Inspired by The Kingson Trio and the folk music revival it helped launch starting in the late 1950s, brothers Tom and Dick Smothers decided to take part in the revival themselves. With Tommy on guitar and Dickie on base, the duo at first just performed straight-ahead folk. At some point in time, Tommy introduced a song by cracking a joke, and Dickie good-naturedly rebuked him for cracking the joke. Though both were decent musicians, they soon found audiences seemed to prefer that comedic rapport to the actual songs being played. The brothers weren't about to disappoint them, Dickie assuming the role of a straight man who couldn't get a folk ditty in edgewise thanks to his lamebrained brother's obstinance. In a few short years as the '50s gave way to the '60s, not only were there increased night club and concert bookings for the duo, but several Top-40 comedy albums as well, along with television guest shots on shows hosted by Steve Allen, Jack Paar, and Judy Garland:

In 1964 the brothers got their own situation comedy, called simply The Smothers Brothers Show. The concept was less than simple as Tom played an angel apprentice trying to earn his wings with the reluctant help of his mortal brother, Dick. It lasted just a single season. CBS wasn't about to give up on them. In 1967 the brothers were offered their own comedy-variety hour. This time around Tommy demanded something that he didn't have with the earlier series: creative control. Scheduled opposite the highly rated western Bonanza, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour didn't start out as anything radical. Like most variety shows of that era it was a mixture of comedy sketches and music, with the type of guest stars such as Jimmy Durante and Jack Benny who seemed to go from variety show to variety show. Kate Smith was once a musical guest. Tommy, though, wanted the show to have more of a countercultural bent. Rock acts like The Who and the Jefferson Airplane were booked. The sketches became edgier, much more topical. Pat Paulson, a writer-performer for the show ran for President. There were references to the Vietnam War and race relations. Drug humor made its debut on American television. Viewers, particularly college-aged viewers, began to abandon the seemingly safe environs of Bonanza (though that series also dealt with social ills such as racism, albeit through an 19th century lens) for the wilder-than-Wild West Smothers:  

 

By the end of their first season, the Smothers Brothers were winning the hour. It wasn't a permanent victory, as Bonanza eventually regained its former footing. Nevertheless, by some math that's beyond my comprehension, both shows remained in the Top Ten for nearly the rest of the decade. No doubt some people were put off by the rabble-rousing Smothers and that necessitated a return to the Ponderosa. Allegedly both the Johnson and Nixon Administrations were displeased with the young upstarts. Affiliates sometimes preempted the Smothers or deleted certain sketches when things got too heated. Soon, CBS itself started chopping away, cutting a lyric from Pete Seeger's performance of "Waist Deep in Big Muddy", an allegorical song about the Vietnam War; and delating a segment which had Harry Belafonte singing against a backdrop of footage of the riots that surrounded the 1969 Democratic Convention in Chicago (footage that had come from its own news division, though with Walter Conkrite rather than Belafonte in the foreground.) An entire show that featured Joan Baez paying tribute to her then-husband David Harris who had been jailed for refusing to submit to the draft was replaced with a rerun. The Smothers, particularly Tommy Smothers, was outraged by all this censorship. He refused to submit the finished shows to the network before being aired. Of course, at the end of the day--the day being April 4, 1969--it was the network that had, and that made, the final refusal:

The Smothers were down but not particularly out. All this took place before I entered the third grade, yet they were still a familiar presence on TV while I was growing up, guesting on other people's shows and on commercials and whatnot. In 1988, even CBS, however temporarily, welcomed them back into the fold:

One thing that's always puzzled me. A little under two years separate the cancellation of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and the debut of All in the Family in 1971. Both shows were on CBS, with no major changes in network brass in that time. If anything, AITF broke even more taboos, was even more controversial, than the Smothers. According to his autobiography, Norman Lear had the same run-ins with the bigwigs from CBS as did the Smothers. Yet Lear's show ran three times longer (four times if you add Archie Bunker's Place into the mix) than the Smothers. How did he succeed where the brothers failed? I can't locate it on YouTube, but I once saw an interview where Tommy Smothers was asked that very question. His theory was that a nonfictional Carrol O'Connor portrayed a fictional Archie Bunker. O'Connor wasn't speaking for himself, so everyone accepted it as make-believe. Whereas the nonfictional Tommy and Dickie Smothers portrayed a nonfictional Tommy and Dickie Smothers. Even that involved a good deal of make-believe--the real Tommy wasn't anything approaching lamebrained--but not when it came to politics. Speaking for oneself always involves a certain amount of risk. 

1937-2023

Under the Radar: Charles Fleischer

 

Born on this day in 1950, Charles Fleischer has been a stand-up comedian for going on half a century. Though the work has been steady, with many, many movie and television appearances, to date Fleischer has not become a household name. His own name, anyway. A character he lent his voice to...

...was on quite a few lips in the summer of '88.

Fleischer discusses that role as well the rest of his career in this 2015 interview:

 

We'll get a look at Fleischer's scientific side in a bit, but first let's take in a movie:

Directed by Robert Zemeckis and produced by Steven Spielberg, 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit takes place in an alternative 1947 in which the animated characters of the era live in Toontown, a cartoon neighborhood in an otherwise live-action Los Angeles, and commute to Hollywood, where they're employed on shorts and feature films not inked on celluloid but shot on sets just the same as movies with flesh-and-blood actors. If by that description alone it sounds like an extradimensions-intensive science-fiction drama, The Twilight Zone by way of CalArts, let me assure you that it's nothing more, and almost defiantly nothing less, than a symphony of silliness, a multiverse as merry as a melody and as light as Dumbo's feather, the high-concept plot gleefully undermined throughout the flick by the toonful loons punny dialogue (such as when Jessica Rabbit says, "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way.") Watch:

God knows what negotiations took place between two legendary animation studios to make it happen, but for me personally one of the joys of Who Framed Roger Rabbit is watching Walt Disney and Warner Brothers cartoon characters cross paths, along with a few outliers like Woody Woodpecker (Walter Lantz) and Betty Boop (Max Fleischer, no relation to Charles.) SPOILER ALERT: The following clip comes at the very end of the movie (though it's not like you're watching Agatha Christie):

Yes, Tinkerbell upstages Porky, but what do you expect? It's a Disney production.

 

Finally, Fleischer in the flesh doing what he does best. On the YouTube site I snagged this from, someone in the comment section accuses Fleischer of "trying to sound like Robin Williams". Since the two men started doing stand-up at roughly the same time, and Fleischer's first TV appearance (in 1974, though this clip is from about 1980) predates Williams by three years, it just may have been the other way around. Watch:

He's even more animated when he's not animated!

Quips and Quotations (Put on a Poker Face Edition)

1934-2023

 

My favorite kind of film is serious comedy. Comedy with serious underpinnings.

--Alan Arkin

 The Russian Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1966)

Catch-22 (1970)

The Last of the Red-Hot Lovers (1972)

The In-Laws (1979)

Edward Scissorhands (1990)

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

Vital Viewing (Team Player Edition)

 

Stella may have told this magazine, but since I only have the cover and not the insides, I can't tell you why she posed in the nude. What I can tell you is that like fellow nude models Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, Stella Stevens possessed actual acting talent, particularly when it came to comedy acting. To prove my point, I've enlisted the aid of...

...these two guys.

First up, Jerry:

The Andy Griffith Show fans will have recognized Ernest T. Bass himself, Howard Morris, in the above clip. Note how uncharacteristically subdued Jerry seems. He may have met his match in Morris.

But back to Stella...

...this time with Dean:

A very earthy woman. Dino could have done a lot worse.

1938-2023

Vital Viewing (Passionate Pauses Edition)

 

Radio and television comedian Jack Benny was born on St. Valentines Day in 1894 (he died the day after Christmas in 1974.) Since this is the holiday that celebrates romantic love, I thought it best to include the love of Benny's life, Mary Livingstone, whom he married in 1927. Mary was a fixture on Benny's radio show (where she played not his wife but his secretary), but with the switch to television in the 1950s, she developed a crippling case of stage fright, and her TV appearances were sporadic. Here's one of those sporadic appearances, her stage fright quite unnoticeable:

Romantic comedy with some women's gymnastics thrown in.

From 1955 to 1970, Mary Livingstone didn't appear on TV at all, but Benny finally managed to convince her to appear on this Nixon Administration-era special:

Lucille Ball's appearance toward the end of that clip reminds me that she was a Beverly Hills neighbor of the Bennys for a number of years. Lucy did not like Mary Livingstone, once referring to her as a "hard-hearted Hannah" and complaining that she kept Jack on a "short leash". In fact, there doesn't seem to have been much fondness for Mary among Benny's immediate circle of friends. Benny's best friend, fellow comedian George Burns, tried putting it in context: "Mary wasn't a bad person, she was just difficult, a little jealous and insecure. She didn't want to have better things than her friends had, particularly Gracie [Allen, Burn's wife and comedy partner]; she wanted to have the same things, but more of them. And bigger." Gracie herself once confided, "Mary Benny and I are supposed to be the dearest of friends, but we're not. I love Jack and I can tolerate Mary, but there are some things about her I don't like."  The Benny's adopted daughter Joan wished her mother "could have enjoyed life more." None of this says much for Mary, huh? As always, there's a wrinkle. Outside that immediate circle of friends, things were said about the husband. The fey mannerisms that so superbly abetted Benny's almost supernatural comic timing led to some speculation--David Niven and Paul Lynde were among the speculators--that when he wasn't performing, he wasn't...performing. At least not his husbandly duties. The bedroom joke in the above video may have been no joke, certainly not to Mary. Denials on Benny's part notwithstanding, his interests were rumored to lie elsewhere, and given the mores of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, that could have been potentially career-damning if found out. Was this, then, a marriage of convenience? Was Mary Jack's beard? Well (to borrow a Bennyism), all that can be said for sure is that people often lead complicated lives, even celebrities. Especially celebrities.

 

 Whatever did or didn't go on in that bedroom, and whether or not the couple had some sort of agreement or understanding, Jack Benny seems to have had a genuine affection for Mary. He may even have loved her.  Shortly after his death, Mary wrote this in the then-popualr woman's magazine McCall's: 

Every day since Jack has gone the florist has delivered one long-stemmed red rose to my home. I learned Jack actually had included a provision for the flowers in his will. One red rose to be delivered to me every day for the rest of my life. 

Mary Livingstone survived her husband by nine years, dying in 1983 at the age of 78. Do the math and that's just over 3200 long-stemed roses. Perhaps it helped make up for any compromising that may have led to the hard-heartedness.

 

Fangmate of the Month

I wonder if the late comedienne Phyllis Diller's penchant for wisecracks about her own homely appearance would fly today. Here's one example: "A Peeping Tom was outside my house. He asked me to pull down the shades."  A person of such low self-esteem is in obvious need of a life coach. Is Tony Robbins available? Don't bother. In the middle decades of the last century Diller figured out that the best way to unleash the power within was by subverting the outwardly powers that be. With her electromagnetized hair/wig, ink blot mascara, tubercular laugh, conducting baton-length cigarette holder, and baggy Sunday funny pages-colored minidresses, Diller took the old comic hag stereotype and gave it an updated, consumerist, quasi-countercultural twist that made her one of the more memorable figures of 1960s-and-early 70s comedy and a backdoor American original. If she was self-loathing, then she loathed herself all the way to the bank. Diller was hot enough and hip enough by 1966 that the then-popular girlie magazine Playboy came to her with what must have been a rather surprising offer: a nude photo shoot. That she said yes may have been even more surprising. The whole thing was meant to be a joke, a way for the magazine to show that it could make fun of itself with the help of a woman famous for making fun of herself. Laughter, not titillation, was the goal. Diller, a veteran of the Playboy Club stand-up comedy circuit, seemed to enjoy the opportunity to appear in front of a camera wearing nothing but a Victorian-style bedspread. Unless its Hugh Hefner's beach towel. You decide:

The above photo was never published. Playboy ended up scrapping the whole idea. While a partially nude Phyllis Diller may not have been Jayne Mansfield, neither was she, when it comes to getting laughs, Phyllis Diller. And that Peeping Tom just might have kept right on peeping.

Erasures

 

1940-2022

Though he did some interesting work in the 1960s, James Caan's real heyday as an actor was the 1970s. First he played the real-life dying NFL player Brian Piccolo in Brian's Song, the first and easily the best of the disease-of-the-week made-for-TV movies that once gave hypochondriacs plenty of reasons to turn off the tube and pick up a book instead. After that success, it was mostly the big screen, baby (I imagine him talking like that.) I don't know if a passing resemblance to a young Marlon Brando is what got him cast as an older Marlon Brando's hotheaded son Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, but he emerged from it a star. Though his character did not survive the Mafia drama, he nevertheless got a flashback cameo at the very end of The Godfather: Part II. Other notable 70's films include Cinderella Liberty, The Gambler, Funny Lady, Rollerball, Freebie and the Bean, and Chapter Two. After 1981's Thief, there were many, many more misses than hits, but the hits are notable. There's the 1988 buddy-cop science-fiction action film Alien Nation, and in 1990s, Caan is Kathy Bate's best-selling author-prisoner in the enormously successful Stephen King thriller Misery. Though he was best known for tough guy dramas, Caan also had a flair for comedy, and can be seen to good effect in '92's Honeymoon in Vegas and the 2003 Christmas classic Elf. In 2016, the actor voted for Donald Trump, a man who often comes across as a Mad magazine parody of Caan.

1923-2022

Comedian and comic actor Larry Storch was never a huge star if you measure that sort of thing by the number of starring roles in comedy movies and long-running comedy TV shows, but he didn't seem to lack for work, a man whom producers and directors could depend on to be funny even when the script fell far short of that. Storch started out in standup, specializing in dialect comedy and imitations of famous people, such as Cary Grant (according to Grant himself, Storch was the first person to utter "Judy, Judy, Judy!") He was successful enough at doing this to be offered a small part in a movie, then another movie, and another, until he racked up at least 25 of them, along with hundreds of TV guest shots. He also did voice-over work in many cartoons, including Drac on The Groovy Ghoulies. However, the role Storch is best known for is that of Corporal Randolph Agarn for two seasons on the 1960s Wild West parody F Troop. That sitcom's portrayal of Native Americans might not pass muster today, but all I can say is as goofy as the Indians behaved, the palefaces on the series were a lot goofier, and no one was a goofier, or more hilarious, paleface than Storch.

 

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