In one episode of the TV show Night Court Judge Harry Stone meets a younger version of himself: a kid in a three-piece suit and a fedora who does magic tricks. Faced with this window into his past the judge moans, “Oh God, I was a geek!” And I said, what? No! Judge Harry Stone is cool!
For some of us who grew up with Night Court’s original run from early 1984 to May of 1993—because it was strategically placed right after Cheers I watched it from the very beginning—the show is part of, and even represents, a cultural change that happened during that time. The 1970’s preached non-conformity but it was really the ‘80’s that embraced it. Night Court started off more or less grounded in reality but its throwaway lines and then whole plots became increasingly surreal. Night Court made it hip to be square, or polygonal, and at its heart its stabilizing influence was the barely stable Judge Harry Stone, prankster, magician, and Mel Torme fan, played by the prankster, magician, and Mel Torme fan Harry Anderson.
While his Judge Stone character was squeaky clean it tickled me when Anderson showed up occasionally on Cheers as the grifter Harry The Hat, and when he hosted Saturday Night Live and stuffed a guinea pig in his mouth and shot magician Doug Henning in the back. I liked it that he had a dark side, and that it was just as weird as his light side.
I know he did more TV after Night Court finished, but it wasn’t until I heard about his untimely passing that I thought about how much Night Court and Harry Anderson warped my adolescent mind. In 2006 he moved to Asheville, North Carolina. I have cousins there who take pride in that city being known for its weirdness and openness and being labelled a “cesspool of sin”. It seems fitting that Harry Anderson, who helped some of us embrace our own weirdness, would live in a place that embraced it right back.
In 2010 Stephen Hawking said that humans should stop sending signals out into space because we run the risk of letting aliens know we’re here. According to Hawking it could be very bad if aliens find us, and he compared it to Europeans discovering Native Americans. The Europeans did bring syphilis and smallpox, but they also brought horses, so aliens could potentially do something similar.
I really do respect Stephen Hawking and I don’t think he offered up his opinion lightly. He has a history of carefully thinking things through. When he was at Oxford-–this is absolutely true-–he was a lazy and unmotivated student but told his professors that if they gave him a first he’d leave to go study at Cambridge and if they gave him a second he’d stay at Oxford. So naturally they gave him a first.
I once did something similar: I managed to pass sixth grade math by telling the teacher that if she flunked me I’d just come back the next year, but that’s another story. Sometimes I imagine his old Oxford professors getting sloppy drunk. One of them says, “Dude, we let Stephen Hawking go.” And the other one says, “He was such a slacker then. How could we know he was gonna write bestselling books and play poker with Data and Einstein on the Enterprise holodeck? And stop calling me ‘dude’. We’re both in our nineties.”
If I could ask Stephen Hawking one question, though, it would be, “What led you to the conclusion that aliens are a threat? And show your work.” I have to include “show your work” because, even though I’m pretty sure he didn’t just leap to this conclusion I would like to know how he arrived at it. I think Hawking may be completely wrong about aliens, but it’s an interesting question to debate, and I credit Hawking with making me think about my own position.
The problem I have with the assumption that aliens are going to come and put an interstellar smackdown on us if we let them know we’re here is that, as far as I know, we really don’t know what aliens are like or what their interests are. I think Hawking was right when he said the universe is likely teeming with life, and given how diverse life is just on this planet whatever forms that life takes are likely very strange, even unrecognizable. If he’s smart enough to have figured that out, though, he should be smart enough to realize that if aliens are capable of advanced interstellar travel they’re probably already aware of us. And if they’re not aware of us they’ve probably already scanned this solar system and discovered that there’s a nice rocky little planet full of water and silicon and heavy metals and Viagra and whatever else they might need to continue their galactic cruise. And if their technology is that advanced then everything we have is theirs for the taking whether we advertise our sentience or not. That’s also why I admit that Hawking may be right. I hope someday we’ll meet aliens on friendly terms, but the universe is a cold, hostile place. Some nights when I look out and see the moon cut into pieces by the spreading branches of a tree I wonder what is out there and I am afraid.
Any time I get hooked on a show it’s because of the characters. I’m not naïve enough to think they’re real people or even that the actors are anything like the characters they play, although I do always kind of hope they are because the reason I’m devoting half an hour to a sitcom is because I think, if these people were real I’d enjoy hanging out with them. Take, for instance, Frasier. Yes, I could definitely see myself attending the theater or an art gallery with Frasier and Niles, but I also thought I’d be just as happy having a beer at Duke’s with Martin. Again I know they’re not real people but Martin was wonderfully brought to life by John Mahoney. Take, for instance, my favorite exchange from the whole series, from the season 3 episode Chess Pains:
Frasier: Oh, hi, Dad. Did you see my new chess set? Martin: Oh yeah, it’s nice. Frasier: “Nice?” Well, the inlay was made from the same Travertine marble they used at the Emperor Hadrian’s palace outside Tivoli! Martin: Really? Well, I’m gonna celebrate with a beverage brewed from the crystal-clear waters of the majestic Colorado Rockies! Frasier: Good one, Dad. Say, how about a game? Martin: Nah, I don’t think so. Frasier: Oh, come on, Dad. You know how to play, don’t you? Martin: Well, Daphne showed me once. But really, checkers is more my speed. Frasier: Oh, come on, checkers is a kid’s game. Come on, Dad! I just got it! Please? Nobody will play with me! Martin: All right, I’ll give it another shot. Those guys at the park make it look great-eating baloney sandwiches, smoking cigars, sometimes a fist-fight even breaks out! Frasier: Well, let’s just start with name-calling and see where it goes, all right?
It’s a funny bit but it’s really the way Mahoney and Grammer, especially Mahoney, commit to it and play off each other that makes it. Then after I got hooked on Frasier it was a real treat to go back and rewatch Moonstruck, Say Anything, and The American President, and to watch The Broken Hearts Club just to see the different characters he could be–always charming, always distinctively John Mahoney, and yet so different from role to role.
He started acting at the age of thirty-seven but Mahoney was serious and dedicated to the craft. As brilliant as he was on TV and in movies he preferred the theater, working live before an audience. In a 2014 interview he said, “The audience has a job and the actors have a job and when you both do your job and meet the result is just magical.”
He really brought the magic. Hail and farewell John Mahoney.
There’s a longstanding misconception in standup comedy that women aren’t funny. It still hangs around a few dark corners and I’m not sure why because as long as there have been women there have been funny women, and even in standup’s earliest days, when the prejudice was most prominent, there were a few real women who could be at least as funny as, if not funnier than, their male counterparts. And there was at least one fictional one: Sally Rogers, part of the trio of writers for the fictional Alan Brady Show, which was the backdrop of the real Dick Van Dyke Show. Let me make that a little clearer: at a time when it was popularly believed women weren’t funny a woman played the role of a TV comedy writer. And that woman was, of course, Rose Marie.
It’s probably too much of a stretch but I like to think Rose Marie’s very funny, and also very charming, portrayal of Sally Rogers, helped pave the way for other women, including cast member Mary Tyler Moore who was just as funny and who’d go on to be a fictional TV news show producer at a time when it was still widely believed that was a job a woman couldn’t do. Unfortunately we also lost Moore in 2017.
Of course it was an occasional joke on The Dick Van Dyke Show that Sally’s co-workers didn’t see her as a woman. This is emphasized in a season one episode, “Sally Is A Girl”, in which Rob, Buddy, and Mel get together a poker game. They won’t let Laura play because they all insist they don’t play poker with women, but are happy to have Sally join. After all she bowls, drinks brandy, and smokes cigars just like the guys. At least this was supposed to be a joke. Even as a kid, watching daily reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show, I thought Sally was great as she was, and, in an earlier episode, “Sally And The Lab Technician”, while Rob and Laura worry she’s not being feminine enough it was no surprise to me that Sally’s date, Thomas, thinks she’s great. It’s telling that the writers and producers thought this would be a surprise, and reflects just how deeply rooted sexism was at the time. Now we can, or at least should, accept that Sally could be both one of the guys and one of the gals and that all she really had to be was happy with who she was, although there’s still progress to be made.
My real subject, though, is Rose Marie, who brought Sally to life, and who was just as sharp and fearless as the characters she played. This fearlessness went all the way back to when she first sang on stage at the age of three and almost immediately became a star. In her autobiography Hold The Roses she shares stories of other showbiz stars she met, including, early in her career, Al Jolson.
“Oh, Mr. Jolson, you were so great, you made me cry!”
He looked at me and said, “You were great too, ya little runt.”
Nice man! However every time we would appear together at benefits, like the Milk Fund at Madison Square Garden, he would spot me with my father, come over and say, “Hi, ya little runt. You gonna go out and kill the people?”
I would look up at him and say, “I hope so.”
No need to hope, Rose Marie. You killed ’em. You were smart, talented, and, most of all, funny. Hail and farewell.
If you’ve seen the 1966 animated classic Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! you’re probably hearing that song in your head now, but do you know who sang it? Now, before you went to Google and looked it up did you know who sang it? The narration was done by Boris Karloff, but the song “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch” was sung by Thurl Ravenscroft whose name was accidentally left out of the credits, which is extraordinary because I can’t imagine a copywriter passing up the chance to type out the name Thurl Ravenscroft. It’s not as though we’re talking about Howard Keel. How could you forget the name Thurl Ravenscroft? There may even be bloggers who write posts about the song just as an excuse to write out the name Thurl Ravenscroft, but that’s another story.
So, aside from the man with a fantastic name and a voice that registers on seismographs who was Thurl Ravenscroft? Born February 6th, 1922, he was a voice actor and singer who lent his voice to several animated productions, many of them Disney films beginning with 1941’s Dumbo. He was also a founding member of a singing quartet called The Mellomen who also recorded under the name Big John and The Buzzards, and sang backup for several singers, including Elvis Presley. A devout Christian he also recorded albums of hymns and wanted to be the voice of an audio version of the entire Bible but James Earl Jones was selected instead. Even though James Earl Jones is an excellent actor with a great voice, though, he doesn’t have a name like Thurl Ravenscroft. Thurl Ravenscroft did, however, provide the voice of Darth Vader for a Donny and Marie Osmond Star Wars sketch, although the less said about that the better.
For more than fifty years Thurl Ravenscroft also provided the voice of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes mascot Tony The Tiger. In a 2004 interview originally published in Hogan’s Alley: The Magazine Of The Cartoon Arts Ravenscroft mentioned that he’d been doing the voice of Tony for fifty-three years. It would be his last interview before his death in May 2005.
And now that you know you’re unlikely to forget Thurl Ravenscroft.
On September 15th, 2017 the Cassini spacecraft, launched from Earth almost twenty years ago, will crash into the upper atmosphere of Saturn. I feel like both the probe and the planet deserve better. We’ve crashed objects into other planets before, sometimes unintentionally. In 1979, after six years in orbit, Skylab crashed back to Earth. So did space station MIR in 2001, completing its fifteen year run, although unlike the Cassini spacecraft the stations weren’t carrying seventy-two pounds of plutonium.
For most of human history the planet Saturn was the last planet. Even when people still believed the Earth was the center of the universe and that the Sun and all the planets revolved around it, even before people understood what planets were, when they were just “wandering stars” astronomers put Saturn farthest out. Its name, Saturn, comes from the Romans’ name for the god who was the father of Jupiter. Even in mythology Saturn is farther away. Even for Plato and Aristotle, who thought everything in the sky moved on crystalline spheres, and they even talked about “the music of the spheres” as they ground against each other which I thought would make a horrible cacophony unless the aether was like a vinegar-dipped finger on a leaded water goblet, but that’s another story, Saturn’ sphere was at the very edge, the farthest of the planets. Only the stars, clustered in their own sphere, lay beyond.
It’s distinctive because of its rings but those were unknown until 1610 when Galileo first turned his telescope in Saturn’s direction, and he thought they were two giant moons. A few years later when he looked again he thought they’d disappeared. Saturn is the hipster planet and wears its rings at a jaunty angle so from Earth’s perspective it looks like it’s tipping its hat at us and every once in a while those amazing rings, only about three-hundred feet thick, are only visible to us as a narrow shadow. Then in 1655 Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, who first proposed that the rings were a disc around the planet, discovered Saturn’s moon Titan, and in 1675 Giovanni Domenico Cassini observed a gap between two of the main rings. It’s now known as the Cassini gap, although the rings, once called A and B, have since been further divided, like notes, into A through G, so there is music of the rings.
Saturn would continue to be the edge of the known solar system for more than a hundred years until the discovery of Uranus and the launch of a thousand jokes about how you could only find it with a telescope, and Neptune would be discovered a short time later. Then Pluto was named a planet in 1930 and demoted when astronomers realized it was one of thousands of trans-Neptunian objects. Astronomers have also confirmed what, for a long time, we’d suspected: there are more planets out there orbiting other stars. Maybe Earth isn’t unique. Maybe, for that matter, Saturn isn’t either, which is part of the what makes it important. We send spacecraft to Saturn, and to the other planets, is because of what we share in common, and what they can teach us about our own world.
Still there is something special about Saturn. The rings haven’t always been there and will eventually be absorbed into the planet itself. It should be noted that Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune also have rings. They just aren’t as spectacular. Saturn’s moon Titan is the largest in the solar system, bigger than Mercury, so it’s aptly named in spite of never having won a Superbowl. It’s the only moon with a dense, observable atmosphere, and it wasn’t until the Huygens probe, which went with the Cassini spacecraft, landed on Titan on January 14th, 2005 that we got our first view of its surface. The Huygens probe was the first human creation to land on another planet’s moon.
An unearthly view. Source: Wikipedia
And like I said it was, for a very long time, Saturn was at the edge, the final planet. Beyond it only lay the stars which were clustered together in a sphere of their own.
I still hold onto this crazy belief that someday we’ll get there. There’s no surface on Saturn to stand on but maybe humans will land on Titan. Maybe they’ll fuel their ships with its lakes of liquid methane and ethane. Maybe they’ll harvest the icy rings for water. At anywhere from 746 million to more than a billion miles from us Saturn would make a pretty good rest stop for travelers planning to visit other suns. I won’t call it destiny because that implies that it’s something that will just happen. Getting there will be only the first of several challenges. It took the Cassini spacecraft six years to get there even after several slingshot maneuvers around Venus, Earth, and Jupiter and a top speed of more than forty-two thousand miles an hour, and it didn’t have to carry food, water, air, radiation protection, and a bowling alley, or at least some stationary bikes. Just because something is difficult, though, doesn’t mean it’s impossible, and I think people will accept the challenges, to quote a famous Earth orator, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept”. And maybe, having accepted, future travelers will stop to remember that long after our view of the solar system had been extended there was a probe that came to deepen it.
-Shelley Berman, February 3, 1925 – September 1, 2017
Maybe the name Shelley Berman doesn’t sound familiar to you even though his first comedy album, Inside Shelley Berman, sold over a million copies and he was the first comedian to perform at Carnegie Hall, but even if you think you haven’t heard of him you have heard his influence in every whining, complaining comedian who turns anthills into Everests. He turned confession into comedy at a time when most other comedians were doing character monologues. He was obsessed with himself, but in a good way, because he portrayed himself as deeply insecure, worried about everything, so you felt sorry for him. He played, and could have even inspired, a ludicrously misanthropic character in the Twilight Zone episode “The Mind And The Matter” as a man who discovers he hates all of humanity but discovers he hates himself even more. As historian Gerald Nachmann says, “Something about Shelley Berman made you want to throw your arm around the guy and tell him that everything was going to be all right.” He was described as “everymanic”, and when Time did its infamous piece on the new generation of “sick comics” it’s surprising he wasn’t singled out as the sickest. Maybe it all started at the Chicago improv group The Compass Players, where Berman brought plenty of neurotic baggage and doing improv learned to unpack it. The Compass produced several other notable comics—in fact at one point Berman almost formed a trio with his fellow players Nichols & May, but they realized they worked better as a duo and he was too much of an individual to share the stage. And yet he also credits others for his success. Night after night he worked on a bit that came from an audience suggestion: a man waking up with a hangover from a party the night before. He kept repeating a line about throwing the host’s lamp out the window until one night a fellow cast member offstage whispered “Make it his cat”. “The Morning After The Night Before” became one of his funniest and most successful pieces and has a hilarious opening line: “My tongue is asleep and my teeth itch.” There’s also a prologue in which he assures the audience no cats were harmed, long before such disclaimers became standard.
He was such an intense individual he even did standup his own way—sitting down.
The tragedy of Berman is that the nervous, irritable, insecure character on stage was a nervous, irritable, insecure man in real life. He was an obsessive worker for whom every detail had to be just right, which earned him a bad reputation and cost him work. A 1963 documentary that showed him screaming backstage because a phone had rung during one of his routines almost destroyed his career, forcing him to take smaller and lower paying gigs. In fact it was the second time a phone had interrupted him that night, but the documentary was edited to show him melting down after just one. Some think the producers also had the phone ring deliberately to set him off, making him an early victim of “reality” television. Such obsessiveness might have been forgiven from a well-known actor interrupted in the middle of Hamlet’s soliloquy, but audiences and critics were surprised and turned off by a nightclub comic who took being funny so seriously. Maybe success—which, no matter how hard he worked, some who knew him said he didn’t feel he deserved—magnified his own personality, but it also magnified how others perceived him. Years later he’d say, “people are still surprised when I say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and that I don’t have saber teeth.”
Yet he never entirely dropped out of the limelight. He would also turn his attention to writing books and teaching, and while he’d still do some comedy performances he focused on acting, which is what drew him to The Compass Players in the first place. A quick glance at his IMDB page shows him working steadily, and in his influence he may never be forgotten.
When I was a kid the local UHF station would show a Jerry Lewis movie every Sunday afternoon, and I loved them. Every weekday after school there was the Three Stooges marathon, but I realized Lewis’s humor was a much more mature, sophisticated slapstick, and getting the jokes made me feel grown up. He could also somehow take a punchline you’d see coming a mile away, like the setting up of chairs In The Bellboy, and make it hilarious. Some of his films, including Three Ring Circus and The Nutty Professor, could also get pretty dark, and I liked it that he could balance comedy and drama, that he wasn’t restricting himself to one or the other. I think I was also dimly aware that there was a connection between Lewis and the contemporary comedians I also saw, although it would be years later before I’d realize he was kind of a transitional figure between the old vaudeville comedians and the ones for whom a big break meant television or, if they were really lucky, film. Jerry Lewis, who wrote a serious book called The Total Film-Maker, really did appreciate film as a medium few comedians before him had. Unlike others he understood that comedy on film meant more than doing or saying something funny in-frame. He understood the value of the close-up, the cutaway, the edit. That he could also act while keeping every detail of the scene in mind is extraordinary.
While I loved Jerry Lewis’s comedies as a kid the film of his I enjoyed, and still enjoy, most as an adult is The King of Comedy. Granted it’s not really one of his films, but working with the tag team duo of Scorcese and DeNiro he really shows his full range and depth as a dramatic actor. In an early scene when he talks to DeNiro, who plays an ambitious comic who wants to jump straight to the top, about the business Lewis has a faraway look in his eyes as though he’s lecturing a classroom. It’s powerful in its subtlety and says so much about his character. Even in the back of a dark limo in front of an audience of one he’s still a performer. In other scenes with DeNiro he’s more direct and personal. These moments the fantasies of a possibly psychotic mind, but Lewis has no trouble playing them as completely real.
A short time later, after telling DeNiro he’s having dinner with “some people”, we see him sitting alone at a table eating. He’s not reading or watching TV or doing anything except eating. His posture and expression, though, still exude confidence and dignity. Even when he’s alone he can’t drop the mask.
Maybe there was still a lingering miasma from his “comeback film”, Hardly Working, released three years earlier, or a shadow from what would be his last film, Smorgasbord, which had a limited U.S. release in 1983, but Jerry Lewis deserved an Oscar for his performance in The King Of Comedy. Of course, it’s DeNiro’s character in the film who calls himself “the king of comedy”, but the irony is we all know who really wore the crown.
Baseball was desegregated in 1947, and on January 13th, 1961, a growing American pastime–standup comedy–would be too. Dick Gregory stepped to the plate at Chicago’s Playboy Club and hit it out of the park. It wasn’t exactly a planned moment. Gregory was still working a day job at a car wash when he was brought in as a last-minute replacement for that night’s scheduled performer. He then broke other barriers, refusing to go on The Tonight Show unless he could sit down and talk to host Jack Paar. This was something other guests routinely did, but only if they were white. Gregory was uncompromising but also simply asking to be treated equally. As comedian and actor Dr. George Wallace, who shared memories of Gregory on NPR tells it,
He’s going, hey, my jokes are just as good as theirs. Why can’t I get attention? Why can’t they treat me like they treat the white – equally. Bring me to sit on the sofa. I’ve got a few words to say. He first hung up on Jack Parr. That was NBC at the time. That’s what you call groundbreaking material right there, hung up on NBC.
And he was funny and his jokes were just as good as those of other comedians, and while he told some conventional jokes–like one about how he’d read so much about smoking and cancer he quit reading–his personal perspective as an African American gave greater depth to some of his jokes, like,
I sat at a lunch counter for nine months. When they finally integrated they didn’t have what I wanted.
While Lenny Bruce was doing a bit about how amazing it was that performers get paid so much while teachers get paid so little Gregory offered a more pointed perspective, saying,
I love America. Where else can I ride in the back of the bus, have a choice of the worst schools, the worst restaurants, the worst neighborhoods–and average five thousand dollars a week just talking about it?
He didn’t just talk about it either. He would drop a club appearance to attend a civil rights rally, although he’d always make it up later. As the sixties went on too he dropped the genial tone that originally made him a success and became a sharper, more caustic comedian, and not just a comedian. He ran for mayor of Chicago, getting 22,000 votes, then for president. He was shot in the leg during the Watts riots. He committed himself to working for the civil rights movement and while racism is an issue of moral health his concerns extended globally and he also became an advocate for physical health. In 1984 he founded Health Enterprises, Inc. and specifically addressed the health of African Americans which he felt was impaired by alcohol and drug abuse and also poor nutrition because of poverty. Although he continued working as a comedian his lifelong passion was making the world better through more than just laughter.
We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened.
—Huckleberry Finn
Nashville’s Charlotte Avenue has, for reasons I don’t understand, long been home to numerous car dealerships. Maybe this is because it runs more or less parallel to some of the city’s main thoroughfares—West End, Broadway—but Charlotte is also on the edge of the city and parts of it are still a little seedy in spite of rapid gentrification. Venture out that far and you’ll want to make sure you have a way to get back. The railroad also crosses Charlotte at one point, so whether it’s the right or wrong side of the tracks might depend on where you stand, although it’s increasingly becoming mixed. Pricey hipster restaurants rub elbows with Bobby’s Dairy Dip, a ‘50’s era remnant that still serves the best milkshakes in town.
The funny thing is the biggest dealerships, the ones that dealt in late model luxury cars, that have fared the worst while independently owned dealers of used cars—let’s face it, they’re not classy enough to get away with calling their flivvers and jalopies “pre-owned”—have stuck it out through thin and thinner.
Some areas around Charlotte Avenue are also thick with graffiti. The fence in front of one of the car dealerships is especially popular. I don’t know why this is or, for that matter, why the dealership has put up white plastic slats behind the chain-link fence. They might as well put up a sign that says “TAGGERS WELCOME!” Sometimes the tags get painted over but they come right back, as unstoppable as the trumpet vine that climbs over the fence.
Maybe there is no clear explanation for any of this. Maybe the way all these things were made just happened.
