ON Cancer, Late-NIght Political TV "Comedy, God in CONTROL, Mortality, Gratitude

 Today I made an earnest attempt to be more physically active with home-based exercise, combining walking, slow running and non-impact 'rock-running designed to increase my heart ratewithout putting strains on my soft leg and feet tisssue...total measured steps for today surpassed 14,000.  Now I'm being involuntarily exposed to TV news and so-called "comedic" late-night shows in which the hosts take potshots at our own depraved "leaders".  I am NOT a Jimmy Kimmel fan, and I've never been one.  And that Stephen Colbert..forget him!  I'd just like to live my life training for better fitness and endurance, and to train my reactions to others during my daily existence whenever processes test the limits to my patience. As a matter of fact, it's not the provocations I pass through that matter so much, but rather my own chosen reactions to them. I watch the local Gainesville-area news and am saddened by the stories about different folks who hurt others with  a kind of violence and abuse indicating that they've lost their minds.And there are the typically ugly mug shots I see                                                                                   slapped across the TV screen..no, they have taken leave of their senses, thoroughly impulsively reactive people that I deeply wish to avoid like the plague.  Well, now we have an ebola outbreak, a new variant of COVID, and the hantavirus scaring the general population.  And cancer is slipping in quite easily among the population, my own body struck with prostate and aggressive brain cancer varieties.  The medical care here provided in the Gainsville area by UF Health is state of the art, and the BOSS is my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, running the entire show: I follow my health and medical providers' instructions and am at peace accepting that my physical life is limited by time and that I am in God's loving and powerful hands.  I am deeply grateful for the many wonderful blessings in my life and in those of my loved ones.  So I"m about to head back to the bedroom and briefly agitate our dearly beloved Pewee Daisy...may you all sleep well and enjoy tomorrow to its fullest...

d

colbert

Some Perspective About My Past in 1971

 It's Friday morning on what used to be a typical weekday.  55 years ago I would have been showing up in the ninth grade at Nova in Davie as the weather outside was transitioning to a stench of chronic Everglades fire smog.  Lobo's debut hit Me and You and a Dog Named Boo was getting its radio overplay...soon I would tire of hearing it.  I was fourteen and a half, thoroughly tired of having to go to school for  a year. After school I temporarily stood up to a bully leaving the bus one afternoon and go t a little beat down in a fist fight)The esxperience taught me what contemptible ghouls the unwelcome onlookers were who were staring at me in a circle.  The next morning I received some sympathy from busstop classmates for what I went through, and that creep Arnone laid off me, never to be a friend. Later that summer during the early 10th grade I would return to school more serious in my studies.  On prime time sitcom television, some new series like All in the Family and Mary Tyler Moore were starting their runs...my family became good fans.That fall "my" Miami Dolphins, coached by Don Shula, were good enough to make it to the Super Bowl...which they convincingly lost to Dallas. Overall, I was not a happy camper and tended to slip into daydreaming for much of my high school class time.  At home, my father would overdose me with talk of his dog racing betting strategies and philosophies. Still, I appreciated his efforts at weightlifting to the point of getting good at the bench press, pull-up, and standing press (I could lift up my own weight from the ground).   Growing up during this period was a confirmation of me not having an easy life. In my home neighborhood, my neighbors were raucous and out of control, loudly playing music deep into the night.  

Going to Beach with Melissa Today

 This morning would be the birthday of my late father and son.  Daddy would be turning 100 while Will would be 36.  Melissa and I are planning to stay overnight at a Daytona Beach Hampton Inn and then return home Monday.  After Saturday's double-lap walk through Depot Park, I got up early, around 4:30, and did ten minutes of running in place on the living room rug floor before brewing some coffee and writing this. Earlier yesterday evening I listened some more to a library audiobook about running and the first chapter of an annoying Hardy Boys adventure story...it reminded me of an old South Park episode titled "Mystery of the Urinal Deuce" when the gay lads keep "getting a clue" You know,  Joe and Hardy each sound like their privileged brothers, the only missing words being their "clues"that no one ever holds them accountable for . Later this morning, Melissa and I have a reservatioto at a Daytona Beach hotel, where we hope to enjoy the ambience of our room balcony and the poolside.  It sure would be nice to recover some walking and running fitness on that sandy beach, too.  The beach looks like the perfect location to practice running softly.  

Cancel Culture from the Fascist Side about Kirk

The freaks hidden among the multitudes in our increasingly fascist America are the real menace in our society when it comes to assassinations, whether you're talking about JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., RFK, the attempts against George Wallace, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, John Lennon, or the attempts against Trump in 2024...and the sniper shot against Charlie Kirk recently.  With all the guns floating around in clear view in our gun-crazy culture, an adept, murderous maniac can seize the opportunity and commit a horrendous act, pretty much from the vantage point of anonymity, if he or she has successfully been concealing from others any intentions of taking such action.  It does not require conspiracies from an extremist group, as some in the current fascist regime have angrily gone off about in public rage.  You or I might become famous, and if there is at least a little controversy accompanying that fame then chances are that somebody, somewhere will allow themselves to become offended and at least consider making us into a target.  It's interesting nowadays that the MAGA Trump boot-lickers are the ones practicing "politically correct" cancel culture on anyone they can get away with accusing of inappropriate comments about the murder or Kirk himself...reference recent outbursts by Stephen Miller, JD Vance and Pam Bondi.  This canceling of Jimmy Kimmel for suggesting (in my opinion, presumptuously and probably erroneously) that the shooter just might have been pro-Trump, is a spotlighted case in point.  Long ago I tired of watching these late-night "comedy" spectacles like Kimmel, Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers because of the political ugliness behind much (if not most of) their jokes, so not having Kimmel on doesn't change anything with me.  Besides, you can get your audience to laugh at the politicians you dislike, but try coaxing the same fans to actively and consistently participate in the voting process.  In EVERY available election, even those "boring" local and state contests.  Yeah, good luck with that...I think these smartass professional jokesters need to start ridiculing the electorate instead!  Then again, a lot of these half-ass, apathetic and emotion-driven voters seem to think that the meaning of democracy is going to protest rallies after their side has lost the election. Now THAT is a sick joke...   

Quote of the Week...from W.C. Fields

It ain't a fit night out for man nor beast.                          W.C. Fields

Early twentieth century comedy legend W.C. Fields wrote and starred in a short film in 1933 titled The Fatal Glass of Beer.  His character, Pa Snavely, lives in a cabin in the frigid Yukon cold.  Without getting into the story's plot, the one thing that stuck with me so many years later was Fields opening up the cabin's door, loudly proclaiming the above quote, and then receiving a blast of fake snow in his face...this happened a number of times, each one hilarious.  I've grown to use Fields' quote whenever the weather is sub-par, especially if it's stormy or cold.  Lately I've been signing up for distance running races that would fit that description, the last one being the off-and-then-on half-marathon I ran this past Monday morning.  That one started out being too stormy to stage, and then ended up exceeding cold (for my admittedly wimpy Florida standards) after being delayed one day.  Tomorrow morning is going to be another one of those "ain't a fit night out" instances as the temperature has been forecast to bottom out at 26 degrees.  Remember, I'm a Floridian and a lifelong one at that: 26 degrees ain't fit for much of anything...

Quote of the Week...from Groucho Marx

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing.  If you can fake that, you've got it made.   ---Groucho Marx

The funniest, in my opinion, of the Marx Brothers comedy team, Groucho's string of one-liners rarely ceases to make me smile, if not break into uncontrolled laughter...the movie Duck Soup was his crowning achievement.  The above quote, although still funny, leads to a more serious point.  Humanity is by its very nature corrupt, and especially when people try to present an image of benevolence and virtue.  Non-profit organizations, religious institutions, labor unions...have I offended anybody yet...to me they are infected with people faking their good intentions.  To that, I have a complaint about a local running club, which has the gall to post its mission statement as "Our mission is to build the local running community and act as a network that supports runners of all ages and abilities" while at the same time placing an incredibly restrictive time limit on this Sunday's marathon event of theirs at five hours, excluding the very people they claim to support.  Any runner finishing as much as a minute beyond that will not be timed...but the good, benevolent folks behind the event will be happy to keep their entry money anyway.  But I'm misanthropically honest enough (and I'm not faking it) to realize that after putting together just about any group of people with a banner, cause and hierarchy of leadership, you're going to come out of it with lies and phony statements of purpose and beliefs.  Sounds kind of humorless, but no, it took someone like Groucho to make this point while making us laugh.  Okay, it's obvious that I have a beef about this race, but I did register for the half-marathon and will run it Sunday morning.  I'm still interested in a future attempt at covering a full marathon some time in the near future...the last (and only official) time was thirteen years ago.  I might just wait for an opportune weekend morning and run the exact same course while timing myself, just to see if I can do it within a reasonable time frame. As for that club, hey, they're all human and so am I, with all our respective faults. I'll just leave it at that...

Funny Old British Comedy Skit Sticks with Me

I was just recently mentioning to a friend a very funny British comedy skit I once saw back in the '80s on one of the many good shows my local Gainesville PBS station used to broadcast back then.  In it, a frumpy late-middle-aged couple is going off to bed, but first the wife insists that the reluctant husband take out the garbage.  Grumbling, he trudges outside and then, after looking around him, suddenly rushes to his car...still in his pajamas...and heads to the airport, where he takes off in a jet, super-high speed, to go partying and gambling in some far-off resort.  The jet zooms back in and he quickly gets back to the garbage cans, when he slowly makes his way back to his room.  Then his wife asks him if he got all the trash...and he's off again!  That skit stuck with me because, one, it was so damned funny and, two, it opened up the possibility of having a wacky, self-contained adventure during a weekend...and then getting back to "business as usual".  In particular, I think of various marathons and half-marathons scattered each weekend across America...and even in other countries of the world and wouldn't it be cool to pull off something like that dude emptying the garbage...except that I wouldn't be secretive about it.  I wish I remembered which series that skit came from: I've narrowed it down to Dave Allen At Large, Not the Nine O'Clock News, and Monty Python's Flying Circus... 

Quote of the Week...from Groucho Marx

Who are you going to believe...me or your own eyes?.    --Groucho Marx

The witty, acerbic member of the twentieth century comedy team Marx Brothers, Groucho Marx had a lot of funny sayings...another I like is from the movie Duck Soup: "Why, a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child.  I can't make head nor tail out of it."  The above quote I did select sadly has a lot of relevance to today's world of disinformation, conspiracy theories and innuendo. I, like you, am a fellow traveler through this strange time of mass digitalization and nearly universally available news sources due to cell phone/Internet technology as well as a multitude of different "news" channels on television, tailored to reinforce the preconceived notions of their viewers.  Social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, and search engines like Google employ algorithms to discern their users' interests and politics...and then present material that promotes them.  I distinctly remember Trump's 2017 presidential inauguration and the general sparsity of people attending it in person...and his claim to the effect that it was a record-setting crowd.  And then his yes-people went out into the media to parrot that false claim.  About all these mass shootings, the Covid pandemic and the 2020 election, I've seen these issues all for what they were and yet the media is loaded with those promoting denial and lies: and people believe them and not their own eyes!  I'm not sure people in general haven't changed...they've always had this kind of tribalism to them that sways them to accept "facts" that are untrue just to fit in with their group.  What's different is how this omnipresent digital input is affecting how different folks distinguish reality from fantasy...or whether they actually want to...

Quote of the Week...from Leslie Nielsen in the Movie Airplane!

I just want to tell you both good luck.  We're all counting on you.        ---Leslie Nielsen, Airplane!

One of my favorite movie comedies is the 1980 farce Airplane!, a satire of the preceding decade's airplane disaster flicks.  Toward the movie's end, Leslie Nielson's "And don't call me Shirley" character Dr. Rumack is trying to encourage low-confidence stand-in pilot Ted Striker (played by Robert Hays) as he and his co-pilot, flight attendant Elaine Dickenson (Julie Hagerty) try to land the stricken passenger plane safely.  He starts out with the above quote...then keeps repeating it until the plane is on the ground...and then says it again!  To me that was one of the high points of an already side-splitting movie...and the race I just ran this past Sunday reminded me of how preposterous it was.  I was running a half-marathon and had just cleared the hilliest part, with just about three miles to go as my body was aching all over and starting to run out of steam.  And that's when it started, Airplane-style, with people standing on the side of the course repeating the same mantra: "You're almost there!"  Over and over and over and over again, each of them apparently unaware that I still had quite some distance to go while repeating the same tired old line up and down the road.  Finally, just when I turned left on NW 1st Street for my final stretch run, a young woman volunteer yelled out, "You're almost there! I'm telling you the truth!"...apparently, she somehow knew that this had been going on for miles on the course.  I half-expected somebody to repeat it after I had finally crossed the finish line as Leslie Nielson did in the movie...oh well, we can't have everything!  Have you ever experienced this sort of thing, where you keep hearing the same often well-intentioned line over and over again to the point where you're just about ready to slug somebody? 

How About an "Automatic Passenger" for My Car

 

They say that children grow up imitating their parents, either deliberately or unconsciously.  I do know that with driving, both my mother and father have had their influence on me.  For example, I tend to think out my itinerary in advance, getting myself strategically in the correct lane sometimes miles down the road...that's my mother speaking to me.  My father, although a careful driver, had one particular less praiseworthy influence on me.  Picture Ralphie's "old man" in the TV holiday staple movie A Christmas Story, down in the basement cursing endlessly at the furnace...transfer that setting to the road and you have someone reacting to every provocation he perceives from others.  And I picked up on it and carry that habit with me...but when I get a passenger in my car I tend to go more into "Uber driver" mode and generally keep my verbal reactions down.  Now I can pretend that I'm driving an imaginary passenger in order to work on dampening my verbal reactions to the nincompoops I encounter on the road...but why not instead get an Automatic Passenger, much like the above-pictured Automatic Pilot from the classic 1980 comedy film Airplane! It can be situated in the middle of the back seat, and I can press a button up front which will inflate it into the shape of a comical person much like our friend from the movie...with its presence clearly visible through my rear-view mirror. On the other hand, I could get a poster-sized representation of a passenger and prop it up back there.  Or just tape the words "Automatic Passenger" or "Uber Driver" on the dashboard as an instant reminder to behave myself.  In case you're wondering about this silly article, I wrote it while making "dignified driving" a personal goal for the next hundred days...no, most likely I'll settle for just pretending I have a passenger with me...

Quote of the Week...from Henny Youngman

I told my doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places.           

                                                                                           ---Henny Youngman

Henny Youngman...who died at the age of 91 in 1998, was king of the one-liners in the stand-up comedy trade...his trademark line was "Take my wife...please!" Only Rodney Dangerfield with his "I don't get no respect" theme compares in stature.  I picked Henny's above one-liner because, well, this past year I've seen plenty of doctors...including yesterday's regular visit to my primary physician.  One of the problems many of us experience nowadays is that it's difficult to communicate one-to-one with your doctor and that appointments can sometimes take weeks if not months.  I do have the benefit of an online portal through which I can ask questions to one of my now-several physicians, usually getting a prompt response from a designated physician's assistant or nurse practitioner.  Still, when discussing some subtleties of a test or possible upcoming procedure there is nothing like direct give-and-take dialogue between patient and doctor, something I was able to accomplish yesterday. Otherwise it's like the Henny Youngman joke, with the two parties talking at cross-purposes.  Ironically, although his joke was funny, it also contains an element of truth...whatever you were doing when you broke your leg, stop doing it!  I checked up on a list of Henny's more famous short jokes and quickly found myself chuckling...

Great Old TV Episodes...from Everybody Loves Raymond

 

RECOVERING PESSIMIST is a Season One episode of the sitcom series Everybody Loves Raymond, first airing in 1997.  I myself had never taken to this series although Melissa liked it and my mother had meticulously taped every episode she saw, stacks of labeled VHS tapes lining the wall in her Hollywood, Florida  home.  The other night we had the television tuned in to TV Land, and they were showing a sequence of Raymond episodes...including the one I'm featuring.  In this episode Ray (Ray Romano) is nominated for Sports Writer of the Year, but his habitual pessimism warns him not to even bother attending the awards banquet...his wife Debra (played by Patricia Heaton) coaxes him into showing up anyway.  Although all that is happening seems to contradict Ray's negative frame of mind toward everything, he refuses to relent until Debra finally convinces him to adopt a more positive, optimistic attitude.  Ray then goes next door to present his new, shinier outlook to his mother, father, and brother...and then gets a big dose of why he had become such a pessimist in the first place.  Although there are probably a few funnier episodes in this nine-year series, I picked this one because of Ray's negative next-door experience with his childhood family.  For myself, I've noticed in a number of diverse social situations over the years where I would enter them with a very upbeat, optimistic mindset only to be practically knocked off my feet by the overwhelmingly dark, oppressive atmosphere around me.  And it's true: if you have spent a great deal of your early life surrounded by others hell-bent on spinning the events of their lives and others' in derisive, angry or frightened terms, then like Ray in this hilarious episode you'll possibly adopt a similar attitude.  By the way, my favorite character in Everybody Loves Raymond is Ray's policeman brother Robert, superbly portrayed by Brad Garrett...

Great Old TV Episodes...from the Andy Griffith Show

 

DOGS, DOGS, DOGS, from the comedy classic Andy Griffith Show, was first broadcast during its third season in April, 1963. A slew of friendly dogs of all shapes and sizes has descended on the Mayberry courthouse, and Andy and Barney have to figure out what to do with them before the man from Raleigh arrives to assess their request for extra funding.  While Andy is out, Barney has an idea and takes the dogs miles away to an open field, releases them and drives back, smug in his own ingenuity.  But as a severe thunderstorm approaches and Andy and Barney are sitting there in the courthouse...along with Andy's very concerned little boy Opie...Barney goes off on a guilty soliloquy about how dogs are naturally built for withstanding heavy rain and lightning while looking out for each other, unlike giraffes, "But dogs are short and they take care of their own...giraffes don't, no, giraffes don't at all. Boy, giraffes are selfish! They just run around looking after Number One, getting hit by lightning...but dogs..."  Don't worry: everybody, including the dogs, ends up safe and sound with a typically happy ending.  But Barney's few seconds of rationalizing has to stand as one of the high, sidesplitting moments of the entire series...it's a shame that Don Knotts, who played him, decided to leave the series a couple of years later...

Great Old TV Episodes...from the Beverly Hillbillies

DUKE BECOMES A FATHER was from Season 1 of the Beverly Hillbillies CBS comedy series, first shown in April, 1963.  There are two interwoven story lines.  Mademoiselle Denise is a beautiful young French woman who is visiting Beverly Hills with her purebred dog and snobby Mrs. Drysdale thinks her own poodle is the father of the new litter...but as the episode's title reveals, it's Jed's bloodhound Duke with the honors.  Meanwhile, Mlle. Denise has entranced Jed and since she cannot speak English, he enlists the aid of Miss Hathaway to give him a lesson speaking French. It's his expectation that after one hour he will be able to completely understand his new-found love that reminded me of how so many apps and language learning courses nowadays make similar claims when becoming fluent in another tongue is much more involved and usually necessitates a degree of immersion in its home environment, surrounded by its speakers.  Jed sits and stumbles through Miss Hathaway's language lesson and, perplexed when it is almost over with very little progress made, says "Them last five minutes must be doozies!".  Granny and Jethro both shine in this episode, and Jed makes his recurring comment about his cousin Pearl's son, "One of these days I'm gonna have to have a l-o-o-n-g talk with that boy!"... 

Great Old TV Episodes...from Bewitched

DRIVING IS THE ONLY WAY TO FLY was a first-season episode in the long-running comedy series Bewitched, first airing in March, 1965.  My family regularly watched this series, which at least in the first few years really clicked on a comedic level, with many great acting performances.  Darrin and Samantha Stevens (played by Dick York and Elizabeth Montgomery) are the young married couple...Samantha reveals to Darrin in the first episode that she is a witch and Darrin in turn insists that she squelch all the nose-twitching magic power that she is accustomed to using.  In this episode, since Samantha isn't supposed to fly, she insists to her hubby the need for her to learn how to drive.  Enrolling in a driving school, she gets the world's most nervous driving instructor, Harold Harold...portrayed by Paul Lynde, who would later play the hilarious role of Samantha's jokester Uncle Arthur.  Samantha's mother Endora (Agnes Moorehead), who makes no secret of her scorn for Darrin, makes a brief appearance in this one.  But some of the other funny characters are missing, like Darrin's fickle boss Larry Tate (David White) and the Stevens' nosy next-door neighbor Alice Kravitz (Alice Pearce).  But Lynde was hilarious, and I always discerned a sweet spirit that Samantha radiated throughout the series.  As a kid I always looked forward to the special episodes that featured either Lynde as Uncle Arthur or Marion Lorne as Aunt Clara, whose spells invariably backfired.  Later on, Alice Pearce died from cancer and while her character endured with another actress (Sandra Gould) it just wasn't the same.  And Dick York, whose comedic portrayal of Darrin was a classic in the history of comedy on TV, had to bow out due to back trouble, ably replaced by Dick Sargent...but it wasn't the same, either.  By the time Bewitched ended in 1972 I don't think anyone in my family was watching it anymore.  But the first few seasons...including this great episode from the first one...were special...

Great Old TV Episodes...from The Andy Griffith Show

 

ERNEST T. BASS JOINS THE ARMY, from the classic sixties TV comedy series The Andy Griffith Show, originally aired in October, 1963.  Set in the idyllic, fictional small town of Mayberry, North Carolina, this series featured Andy Griffith as Sheriff Andy Taylor and his sidekick Deputy Barney Fife, played by Don Knotts.  Since Mayberry was supposedly situated below the nearby Appalachians, several episodes featured mountain folk descending on the town with their peculiarities, like the Darling family...and Ernest T. Bass, a figure that Deputy Fife grew to simply refer to as "a nut".  In this episode, Bass comes down to Mayberry to enlist in the Army.  Being rejected, he blames Andy and goes about town throwing rocks through windows.  Finally arrested and thrown in the county jail, Barney, on duty at the time, leaves to go to the diner to get breakfast...next to him another man sits, face buried in a newspaper.  Barney turns to ask him something, the paper is lowered, and there is Ernest T., captured in the above picture...to me a classic comedy moment in the history of TV.  The mystery of Ernest T. Bass escaping from his locked jail cell as he pleases flummoxes and frustrates Andy and Barney...until Andy learns why this rascal wants to enlist: the solution is also a classic TV moment.  This episode is loaded with many funny scenes...Howard Morris plays Bass, who appeared in four other episodes.  Morris did not play starring roles in his career, but did appear in the much older Sid Caesar series, has been the voice of numerous characters in animation flicks, and tried his hand at directing.  But to me his crowning success will always be Ernest T. Bass, one of the funniest characters I ever saw: he's a nut!

Great Old TV Episodes...from M*A*S*H

THE GENERAL FLIPPED AT DAWN to me was the funniest episode of M*A*S*H, a half-hour CBS comedy series that spanned eleven years...even though its setting, the Korean War, only lasted two. The abbreviated title stands for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, and the main character is Hawkeye Pierce, a very skilled and clever surgeon played by Alan Alda and who sees the war for what it is.  The particular episode I chose was from Season 3, originally aired in September, 1974.  General Steele visits the medical camp and arbitrarily commands that it all be moved five miles down the road.  His kooky behavior quickly alienates most everyone there, and when Hawkeye sends off a helicopter with an injured soldier and refuses to make it come back for the General's personal transportation, he court-martials Hawkeye.  Harry Morgan, who a year later would come back and portray a completely different character, Colonel Potter, to the series' end, played the bonkers General Steele in this episode.  With its original cast including Wayne Rogers as Captain John McIntyre, McLean Stevenson as Lt. Colonel Henry Blake, and Larry Linville as Major Frank Burns in the early years, I really liked watching M*A*S*H.  But as each of these three departed, the show progressively became more serious and intellectual and I tended to avoid it.  Ironically, it was the final years of the series that garnered most of its awards, critical acclaim and high ratings...

Communal Jigsaw Puzzles

 

Ever since I've been at home following my surgery and hospital stay, Melissa and I have been doing jigsaw puzzles on our dining room table...the above three so far.  We take turns over the course of the day laying out each successive puzzle and then slowly-but-surely putting it together.  It reminds me of an old 1920s Laurel and Hardy short film involving a chase scene...with an ongoing jigsaw puzzle on a table.  Everyone is running about in madcap fashion...until they catch eye of the puzzle and feel compelled to pause for a minute and work on it.  I call it a "communal" puzzle that anyone's welcome to contribute to, but since we're empty nesters and the visitors we have don't seem that interested in it, it's just the two of us...and the puzzle, of course.  Now it's time to disassemble our latest and break open a new one...

Great Old TV Episodes...from The Carol Burnett Show

 

SEASON 6 EPISODE 20 of the multiple Emmy Award-winning hour-long comedy variety series The Carol Burnett Show, which ran from 1967 to 1978, stands out in my memory for one sketch that feature Tim Conway playing his revered role as The Oldest Man.  In it Harvey Korman plays a rich man stuck upstairs in his swanky home as the smoke billows around him...Conway finally makes his appearance slowly climbing the ladder outside, and begins to painstakingly break with his axe every pane in the wall-sized window before entering...and then from the inside knocks out the remaining panes. When he did this, I fell apart with laughter...and it continued as Korman gets overcome by the smoke and tells Conway he needs to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation: the veteran comedian, who has already put his colleague into a laughing fit state, ad-libs a couple of lines and sends the skit over the edge.  My favorite Tim Conway role on this show has always been The Oldest Man...I remember an earlier episode when he plays a surgeon who stumbles into the operating room (Korman is the patient on the table, naturally), trips, and does excruciatingly slow somersaults across the floor.  Although it had aired since the late 1960s, I became a stalwart Carol Burnett watcher after CBS switched it to its great Saturday night lineup in 1973, closing it all out at 10. This fire rescue episode, also featuring Valerie Harper with Conway, Korman and Burnett in a blind date skit and one with Burnett spoofing Charro, originally aired in February, 1973...

Great Old TV Episodes...from Seinfeld

 

THE MERV GRIFFIN SHOW is easily my favorite episode of the nineties comedy series Seinfeld...the fact that it's the ONLY one I've seen in its entirety is probably a major contributing factor.  From time to time I tried tuning in to this series that everybody else seemed to be going bonkers over, but the gags and tone just didn't hit me right. Still, I like the New York urban setting and the intertwining subplots involving main characters Jerry Seinfeld, Elaine Baines, Kramer, and George Costanza.  In the Merv Griffin Show episode, originally aired in 1997, Kramer has managed to get the set of the 60s/70s TV talk show into his apartment and has totally submerged himself in Merv's old host role.  Meanwhile, Elaine has a very annoying, dorky coworker who is constantly sneaking up on her and putting her on worse terms with her already-obnoxious boss.  George feels betrayed by the pigeons, who let him run over them ("they broke the deal!"), thereby infuriating his passenger girlfriend.  And Jerry discovers the incredible old toy collection of his new love interest, scheming how to play with them behind her back (she won't let him touch them). The episode mixes all these stories perfectly, and the climactic ending...featuring animal handler Jim Fowler...is side-splitting, a truly classic moment in TV comedy. Several years ago my father was discussing how much he liked the Seinfeld series and I mentioned this particular episode as the only one I saw. "Billy", he said, "You just named probably the funniest one in the series." Should I watch some more Seinfeld to see if there are any other gems?  I could...after all, the reruns are still being shown on the CW channel 10-11pm...