It Is To Laugh

National Review's critic Kyle Smith has gone nuts.  In his discussion of the Looney Tunes reboot, he complains the new stuff is too much like the original Looney Tunes--old-style slapstick, when they should be smarter. But he goes even further.  Much further:

It's seems beyond dispute that humor tends to age more like Borden's than Bordeaux.  Drama lasts; comedy fades.  From the entire first half of the 20th century, what is still funny?  I realize Chaplin and Keaton and the Marx Brothers still have their fans, but this stuff doesn't exactly light up Comedy Central today.  Comedy that endures even 50 years is rare.

Since this is the exact opposite of the truth, that "beyond dispute" part is especially bizarre.

What airs on TV isn't the question--TV tends toward recent stuff (though there are plenty of channels which schedule old TV shows and movies). The question is what do audiences respond to, and I can state--from personal observation, not opinion--the great old comedy still goes over big with modern audiences.  The best from the past will still be around when most of today's enthusiasms are forgotten.

In fact, I've never heard bigger laughs than those generated by Chaplin, Keaton, the Marx Brothers and their ilk (not that many reach their level). It's the drama of those days that doesn't play. I suppose some old silent drama still works, but audiences much prefer the comedies.  And the "serious" Hollywood films of the 1930s often seem silly today, while the great clowns, not to mention the screwball comedies, still delight.  For that matter, the old Looney Tunes are pretty great.

Maybe Smith wrote this article on Opposite Day.

She Works At Paramount All Day And Fox All Night

PBS has a documentary out on Mae West.  Makes sense--she certainly was a major star in her day.  And since she wrote her own screenplays, she did it her way. It's just odd what this People article on the doc list as her film highlights:

"The actress, who starred in films such as She Done Him Wrong, I'm No Angel, Sextette and My Little Chickadee..."

Sextette?

Her heyday in movies was short, less than a decade.  After catching the audience's attention in a supporting role in Night After Night (1932), she starred in two 1933 blockbusters--She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel.

After Hollywood got stricter censorship in 1934 (partly due to West) and the audience moved on to other names, the rest of her career was downhill.  By the time she made her last film at Paramount, Every Day's A Holiday (1937), some were calling her box office poison.

She made a bit of a comeback in 1940, costarring with W. C. Fields in My Little Chickadee, which is a fun film, if no classic.  But she made one more movie in the 1940s--The Heat's On (1943), a flop--and didn't work in film again until 1970, when she appeared in Myra Breckinridge, a spectacular disaster.

She made one more film in 1977, when she was in her 80s.  This was Sextette, based on a play she wrote.  Sextette is an embarrassment--a slow motion car crash.  It also lost all its money.  That it should be listed as one of her major titles is just weird.

Isn't That Special?

I was just watching TV.  The programming on my local CBS affiliate was preempted by a press conference giving us the latest California coronavirus news.  Then that got preempted by CBS national news informing us the SpaceX launch had been aborted due to weather conditions.

I've never seen a double preemption. It was sort of exciting.  Though, to be honest, neither message seemed so important that they had to break in.  I don't know who makes the decision, though I guess I know now the national team wins out over the local team. (Or does it?  Did the local team resent being taken off the air?  Could it have done anything about it?)

PS  I was flipping through the channels when I saw this.  I think normal CBS programming at the time was The Talk.  I don't really watch that show, but I would expect fans were doubly annoyed today.

JC

Jimmy Cobb has just died.  The great jazz drummer was the last surviving member (by a good margin) of the team brought together by Miles Davis to create the best-selling jazz album Kind Of Blue.

Numbers

I haven't written much about the virus because 1) it's already being so widely covered I don't have much to add, 2) I don't have any special insight about it and 3) it's mostly depressing. (Of course, I've stopped writing about everything lately.) So this isn't really about the virus, it's more about the coverage, which is often surprisingly bad--presumably because many reporters don't understand numbers.

California has been doing fairly well, at least compared to many other high population states, especially in the northeast.  However, Los Angeles County is the worst hit section of California, with a quarter of the population yet half the cases.

Particularly frustrating is how often the numbers seem to be getting better only to get worse again.  In fact, this has happened so regularly there has to be some explanation--perhaps the release of official numbers are done differently by the authorities on the weekdays versus the weekend.

Unfortunately, the media coverage (at least what I read) is often all but useless in explaining any trends.  They dutifully report the latest numbers, but offer no context.  The two main numbers are new cases and deaths.  New cases requires interpretation--for instance, presumably, the more testing, the more new cases will be caught.  Deaths also require context, since, if nothing else, it's a lagging indicator.

But then we get headlines like this: "LA County Coronavirus Cases, Deaths Tick Upward..."

I thought they might be referring to a trend--more new cases than before, more deaths than before--but no, they simply mean the number of overall cases and deaths since we started counting has increased.  Well, that's how numbers work. Until new cases and fatalities go to zero, the overall numbers will keep going up.

Even with all the data it's hard to understand what's happening.  But when the stories are done without respect to trends, it's almost better to have no reporting than bad reporting.

MT

I just got word that an old friend of mine, Mike Terranova, has died.  I met him in college. We lived in the same dorm, and in a hallway of eccentrics, he stood out.

He majored in chemistry and we ("we" being Mike and others on the hall, including myself) sometimes mixed up concoctions that were incendiary or explosive. I'd say more but I'm not sure if the statute of limitations is up.

He also studied Russian.  I remember when he would grumble he'd make a sound like boizhe moizhe, which I believe was a Russian grumble.  And when he said goodbye he'd call you tovarich.

He was into botany, and when we walked through the woods he would happily tell you about the various flora.  When we lived in different parts of the country, in fact, his letters would often tell you stories about the different trees and so on that he'd been looking at.

Every week in the dorm we'd get a sheet listing meals the cafeteria would be serving. Mike would highlight what he planned to eat.  That seemed to me to be too much preparation.  So I secretly replaced his sheet with my own, where I'd highlighted different selections.  I eagerly awaited to see if he'd follow my menu, but he just took what he wanted (which is what he should have been doing all along).

After graduation, he moved to Boston, studying chemistry at Harvard, while I moved to Chicago and then Los Angeles.  But we still kept up, and I visited him out east several times.  He and his wife (and eventually his daughter) had a nice place in the Beacon Hill district, whose history goes back to colonial days.  It was a long and narrow place--I would call it shoebox-shaped--but very vertical, with four stories if you included the basement.

The first time I visited him there I took a train into town.  I had a heavy suitcase (no wheels) and he told me not to worry, his place was just around the corner.  And at each corner I expected we'd finally made it, and he told me we weren't there yet.  We must have walked a mile (or so it felt) before we got there.  I asked him why he didn't tell me it was that far in the first place, and he said he figured it'd be easier to do it one block at a time.

We often walked to Quincy Market for dinner, but once he wanted to go to this out-of-the-way fish restaurant he'd heard about.  We walked all over town--it seemed like hours--looking for it.  We finally found the place and it was closed. (All these stories about walking so far.  But Mike was fun to be around so you didn't mind.)

He loved music.  He played viola and would rehearse for hours (which takes dedication because the viola has the most boring part in a string quartet).  He was a fanatic about what I would call pre-classical music.  He studied music written by composers I never heard of.  He would study these old musical manuscripts and make tapes where he sang these pieces in four-part harmony.

The last time I remember seeing him was in Providence, many years ago.  A film I had written was playing at a festival, and Mike (and two other friends) joined me for the premiere.  I have a story, though it's more about me than Mike.  We ate dinner before the showing, and I spilled some soup on my pants.  On the way back, we walked by my car, where I had a change of clothes.  So I had Mike and my friends form a wedge while I changed my pants on the street.

Old friends are the best friends, and I'd never met anyone like Mike. He made a difference in my life, and he's gone way too soon.

Update

As readers of this blog know, I don't usually get that personal. (And lately, I'm not writing anything, personal or not.) But I thought I'd give a bit of an update on my life.

About two months ago, it turned out I needed some surgery. (Sorry if I don't get specific--guess I'm not gonna get too personal.) Normally this would mean I'd meet with a doctor, schedule the surgery and have the operation.

However, just around that time, America decided to cancel all elective surgery.  The fear was hospitals were about to be inundated so they had to clear some space.  This did not leave me in good shape.  My surgery didn't seem elective to me--it felt pretty urgent.  I felt bad all the time.  But because I wouldn't actually die, they decided it was fine for me to feel miserable.

I did meet with a specialist--it was hard enough to get the appointment--who looked me over and agreed I needed this operation.  But there was nothing he could do until the ban was lifted. (I actually met with another doctor who agreed to operate, but the day before he called me and said his facility had shut down.)

I don't want to whine too much in a time when so many are suffering, but I felt awful from mid-March to late April.  And the worst thing was every day I'd go to sleep knowing I'd wake up feeling just as miserable, with no end in sight.  If they had just given me a date--even weeks in the future--I could have at least felt some hope.

Finally, in late April, America (and California) allowed elective surgery again.  So I was able to get that procedure not too long ago.  I feel great now.  I'm not entirely out of the woods--still recuperating--but the difference is every day I know I'll feel a bit better.

FW

Fred Willard has died.  I'm sorry I never got to meet him--I've been a big fan for a long time.

He worked in Second City in the 1960s (with Robert Klein and David Steinberg--wish I'd seen that cast).  He often played fatuous, overconfident people.  He came out west to form the Ace Trucking Company, a comedy group that regularly appeared on TV variety shows.  I remember a number of those performances.

In 1977, he got his greatest role on fake talk show Fernwood Tonight (later to be America 2-Night)--Jerry Hubbard, sidekick to Martin Mull's host Barth Gimble.  Hubbard, completely empty-headed, was brimming over with confidence that he could handle anything.  If the Emmys recognized genius, he would have won an award for this role.

Willard was famous (and funny) enough to host Saturday Night Live, appearing in the cult classic sketch where a man (Willard) invests all his money in a Scotch Tape store.

Over the years he appeared in countless movies and TV shows--he might not have been that well known to the public, but comedy connoisseurs loved him.  He perhaps got some notoriety for a recurring role as Martin Mull's lover on Roseanne--they eventually married (in an episode that aired in 1995).

An important association was with another improviser from the old days, Christopher Guest.  Willard appeared in a number of Guest-related improvisatory films, starting with This Is Spinal Tap and including Waiting For Guffman and Best In Show.  That last title is the most notable--his part is small (shot in a couple days) but as the clueless announcer at the dog show Willard steals the film.  In some ways, it's a follow-up to Jerry Hubbard.  If the Oscars recognized genius, he would have won an award for this role.

In later years, he played certain recurring roles that got him a lot of attention (and also, finally, some Emmy nominations)--Hank in Everyone Loves Raymond and Phil Dunphy's father Frank in Modern Family.  I thought he did a great job as Frank, and had plenty of fine performances left in him.  Sorry to see him go.

AK

Beatle friend and photographer Astrid Kirchherr has died.  Here's what I wrote about her on her 80th birthday.

A Wop Bop A Loo Mop A Lop Bam Boom

I wasn't planning on coming out of retirement so soon, but Little Richard passing away is a big deal.  If you look at my blogger profile, you'll see they ask for my favorite music acts--I listed five, and one of them was Little Richard.

The forefathers of rock and roll include Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley and a number of others, but Little Richard was as great as any, and was the best pure rock and roll singer of them all.  He also wrote a lot of his classics.

While he had a lengthy career, almost all his best and most important recordings were done in the second half of the 50s.  Almost every single he recorded then was a classic--his records had a sound that wouldn't let you down. (Warning--he rerecorded most of his hits, and while these versions aren't bad, they don't compare to the originals.) Here are just a few: