Do Not Adjust Your Set (TV)

 

(1967)
Written by and staring: Denise Coffey, Eric Idle, David Jason, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band
IMDB Entry 

The second UK sketch comedy show that gave birth to Monty Python was Do Not Adjust Your Set. While At Last the 1948 Show headlined John Cleese and Graham Chapman, this one featured three of the troupe:  Eric Idle,* Terry Jones, and Michael Palin.

This one was pitched as more of a children's show and featured the same type of skits that were later a feature of Monty Python. 

The part that interests me the most was the appearance of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. The Bonzos are one of my favorite groups, the Monty Python of rock music. They used creative anarchy on stage, and they performed a song in every episode. Reportedly the TV appearances were toned down from their stage act. Neil Innes, one of the principal songwriters with Vivian Stanshall, later wrote songs for the TV show and for Monty Python and the Holy Grail, performing "Sir Robin's Song" in the movie.

Denise Coffey is not well known in the US, but was very successful in the UK after the show. The same goes for David Jason, who had a major role in Only Fools and Horses, which did make it across the pond. He was eventually knighted.

Jones, Palin, and Idle, of course, became big stars with Monty Python and various other shows. Once they joined forces with Cleese and Chapman, and hired the American animator Terry Gilliam, comedy history was born. But it is interesting to see how it got started.

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*Idle appeared in both, though not as a regular in At Last the 1948 Show.

At Last the 1948 Show (TV)

(1967)
 Written by and starring John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Marty Feldman, Tim Brooke-Taylor
Also Starring: The Lovely Amie McDonald
IMDB Entry

 Monty Python didn't come out of nowhere.  All its performers had already had sketch comedy shows on the BBC before then. The next two weeks, I'll be looking at a couple of them, starting with At Last the 1949 Show.

The cast are giants of sketch comedy. John Cleese and Graham Chapman, of course, founded Python and were a writing team throughout it. Marty Feldman -- who started as a writer -- became a surprising movie star, most notably in Young Frankenstein. 

Tim Brooke-Taylor is lesser known, but he starred in The Goodies, a major success in the UK.* In addition, there were small roles for Python's Eric Idle and the Goodies' Bill Oddie.

The show was a series of sketches, with linking material provided by the Lovely Amie McDonald. Yes, that's what she called herself and the played a dumb blonde who was pure ego. She also introduced the line "And now for something completely different."

The sketches covered some of the ground the Python would -- shopkeeper interactions, parodies, etc. They are funny, but not reaching that height.  Pythons did reprise some of them -- the "Four Yorkshirmen, where each of the people kept topping the other to show how miserable they were growing up, was used in their live films.

The show only lasted a season before the actors went their separate ways. As usual, the BBC didn't save any of the tapes, but they have since been uncovered and are available both online (TubiTV) and on DVD. The shows repeat sketches since some of them were compilations. It is a great look at how Monty Python's origins.

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*So funny that one of their audience members literally died laughing.

Al Boasberg (comedy)

(1891-1937)
IMDB Entry

Al Boasberg was one of the greats of radio comedy, but you have to be a completist to know anything about him. He was a gag writer and made a living -- often a very lucrative one -- selling gags to vaudeville and radio comedians, and acting as what today we'd call a script doctor to punch up a movie.

Boasberg was born in Buffalo and grew up to work in his father's jewelry store. In in spare time, he wrote jokes and sent them to vaudeville comedians. In 1921, he sold his first jokes to vaudevillian Phil Baker for $5 each.* His career took off when George Burns came to town and offered him a job writing for him.

Word of his talent got around. He was instrumental in creating Jack Benny's comic persona and wrote for Bob Hope; Burns and Allen; Wheeler and Woolsey; and Leon Errol. He moved to Hollywood in 1926 to work with Buster Keaton and was credited as a writer on The General.  He also wrote for Harold Lloyd, Olson and Johnson, and many others, usually uncredited. He was making $1000 a week to come in and add jokes to script and continued to write for Benny's radio show.

His most famous work was when he was hired to write a bit for the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera. Supposedly he had some falling out with the producers and did not deliver the script. When they went to find out where it was, they discovered it had been cut into strips with a single line that were nailed to the ceiling of his office. It was worth putting them together -- they were the basis for the classic stateroom scene.

He also contributed dialog to the classic horror film Freaks, certainly the odd movie out on his list of credits. 

He also directed the occasional short subject. 

Sadly, he died of a heart attack at age 45. Just the day before, he had introduced the character of Rochester to the Benny show.

A giant of comedy.

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*That may not sound like a lot, but it's the equivalent of about $80 today. It was a common practice even up to the 70s for comedians and cartoonists to buy jokes. 

Trafic

 (1972)

Written and Directed by Jacques Tati
Starring Jacques Tati, Maria Kimberly, Marcel Fraval 
IMDB Entry

Readers of this blog may have noticed my liking for Jacques Tati (especially likely). I decided to take the time to watch his final film Trafic, again. I remember being disappointed, but maybe a rewatch would change my mind.

The story is simple.  M. Hulot (Tati, of course) is a designer of a new type of camper car, which he plans to unveil at the Amsterdam auto show. It's loaded on the truck for the journey, with a driver (Marcel Fraval) driving. Maria, a publicist for the auto company (Maria Kimberly) is also involved in getting the car to be displayed.

The movie has the thinnest of plots -- which is typical of Tati. He always depended on gags to carry the story, and a specific type of gag where it is the reactions of the characters that are the basis of humor. For instance, when there is the inevitable car crash, the section -- one of the best in the film -- shows a strangely calm reaction as they gather up the part that had ended up on the side of the road and the edge of the woods.

There's also an amusing sequence where Hulot shows the features of the camper car, where each bit had a double duty. It's right out of some of Buster Keaton's work.*

Maria is the catalyst for events. She's American and a master of disregarding traffic laws, leading to the situations that make Hulot's trip a frustrating one. She got the role because her millionaire lover was going to finance the film. Tati had lost a fortune in on his previous film, Playtime, and had troubles getting financing, so he jumped at the chance. Kimberly was a model in the US and acquits herself well.

Another nice technique is that the film doesn't use subtitles. Dialog -- not a lot of it -- switches from one language to another, so if you don't know the word, someone will repeat it in another. This sounds clunky, but it comes across as perfectly natural.

Admittedly, the film doesn't reach the heights of Tati's best, but even this, his least successful film, you can see the signs of his comic genius.

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*Tati was a big fan of Keaton.

Michael O’Donoghue (comedy)

(1940-1994)
Wikipedia Page

Michael O’Donoghue’s influence on 20th century comedy is incalculable. While he was not the type of comic writer who would ever get mass appeal due to his dark approach to humor, he was a part of two of the most influential comedy institutions of his era.

O’Donoghue grew up in Rochester, NY, and by college, he became enamored of being a comedy writer, writing original revues. Once he graduated, he wrote a comic strip for the Evergreen Review—not a comic magazine – featuring Phoebe Zeit-Geist, a woman who often ended up kidnapped and naked, parodying superhero comics. Gary Trudeau has cited it as an influence.

He ended up being one of the founding writers of The National Lampoon. Now the Lampoon has faded in every way since its heyday, but it was a smash hit when it started, showing a new form of humor – irreverent, dark, sexy, and willing to take no prisoners in its satire.  O’Donoghue was in the center of that. He contributed many articles and eventually rose to be its editor.  One of my favorites was his “How to Write Good,” a hilarious parody of writing advice columns.

By the late 70s, the Lampoon could do no wrong. It jumped into movies with Animal House. O’Donoghue wrote a record album – National Lampoon’s Radio Dinner, and wrote and appeared in the short lived National Lampoon Radio Hour.

Then Lorne Michaels came calling.  He hired O’Donoghue to write and perform in the new sketch comedy he was developing – Saturday Night Live.  O’Donoghue was one of the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players. As such, he was the first person to be shown in the first sketch, and also had the very first line on the show.

O’Donoghue had specific ideas about comedy, and put them into place. In general, he thought violence was funny. The sketch above shows some of it, and it was even more obvious in one recurring sketch where he would do impressions of celebrities have steel needles poked into their eyes. He also did a series of sketches as “Mr. Mike,” who told fairy tales that ended up with death and mass destruction – as he put it “random acts of meaningless violence.”

His most successful SNL sketch – considered a classic of the show --- was the brilliant “Last Voyage of the Starship Enterprise.” If you haven’t seen it, watch it here:

O’Donoghue was prickly, and thus left SNL after arguments. He tried to do a TV special – Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video – which was deemed* too violent and released as a film. He would be hired back a few times to SNL, but always was fired.

He took up acting roles and co-wrote and appeared in Scrooged. He also had some success as a songwriter, most notably “Single Women” which was a hit for Dolly Parton.

O’Donoghue died in1994 of a cerebral hemorrhage; he suffered from migraines for years. I would write more about him, but suddenly I am run over by a truck. The End.

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*Rightly

The Pickle Brothers/The Uncalled for Three (comedy)

(1965-1968)
Ron Prince, Michael Mislove, Peter Lee
Wikipedia Entry
IMDB Entry
History of the Pickle Brothers

Everyone remembers their first rock concert. Mine was the Beach Boys.

This was around 1967.  You have to remember that this was the low point of their careers. Brian Wilson stopped touring, their albums were getting poor reviews, and it was looking like they were washed up.The concert was outdoors at Nassau County Community College, and it was free.

They didn’t draw 100 people.

But I’m not writing about the Beach Boys.   I’m talking about their opening act, “The Uncalled For Three.” It consisted of three wild comedians, a mixture of slapstick, puns, sight gags, parody, vaudeville, and rapid-fire jokes.  I loved it.

The group formed at Hofstra University on Long Island and began to find a local following and started appearing in clubs like The Bitter End and The Hungry i.* Eventually, they changed the name of the act to “The Pickle Brothers.” and toured as an opening act for the Beach Boys.**

They started appearing on variety and talk shows. Here’s their act on The Ed Sullivan Show  in 1966.

It was typical of their comedy, which seems much like that of Laugh-In, though faster and more frenetic. You can also see the influence of the Marx Brothers very clearly..

The group started to get attention and then tried what many comedians tried: a TV show.

They did it first class. The script was written by Gerald Gardner and Dee Caruso, who as a team wrote for Get Smart and the Monkees.*** The director was William Friedkin, who later went on to make The French Connection. The show included Maureen Arthur, who was memorable as Hedy LaRue in the film version of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

The result can be found on Youtube.

You can see the similarities in concept with The Monkees.and the result was able to keep up their anything goes style of comedy.

Alas, as you probably know, the show wasn’t picked up. The pilot was well received by audiences, but TV executives didn’t think they could keep up the quality for a full season.

The group broke up a year or so after the pilot. It’s probably difficult to keep a comedy act together once vaudeville wasn’t around. The three members went on to other things.

Peter Lee has published an ebook about their history.

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*Neither are well known today, but they were the top venues for comedy and folk singing in the early 60s, breaking many stars. The Bitter End is still in operation.

**I happened to spot their act a few weeks ago on Sullivan show reruns. The name “The Pickle Brothers” meant nothing to me, but there was something very familiar about their style. A little Googling and I found out that they were, indeed, the Uncalled For Three I had seen as the Beach Boys’ opening act. It seems they kept the name “Uncalled for Three” for their touring.

****You can spot the similarities between The Monkees and the Pickle Brothers pilot. Gardner also originated the Who’s in Charge Here? series of books, which took pictures of political figures and added speech balloons. (For example, the cover of the first one showed JFK and Harry Truman, sitting together, with Truman saying “So the bathroom still leaks.”

Albert Brooks -- Comedy Minus One (comedy)

(1973)

Albert Brooks is now a comedy legend, but like all comedians, he started out in standup.  And one of the earliest recorded examples of his work was the impressive Comedy Minus One.

Brooks had been called the comedian’s comedian, mostly because it’s a nice joke. His father, Harry Einstein, had a nice career in the 30s and 40s under the name Parkyakarkus. His son Albert went into the family business, though changed his last name to Brooks for reasons that should be obvious.*

He started doing guest spots on various variety shows and eventually got a recording contract. Comedy MInus One was his first effort.

It was definitely a strange mix. In the middle is a straight standup act about him as an opening act for Richie Havens, the crowd chanting “Richie, Richie, Richie” throughout his routine. There’s also an interruption where he asks “What do you think of the Record?” and the introduction where he brings in a notary public to prove that the album was in front of a live audience.

But it was the second side is where it takes off. “Comedy Minus One” is a standup act – only you’re the comedian. A script was written inside the album cover, and the listener could read it and have Brooks – and later Georgie Jessel (a legend of vaudeville comedy) – play the straight man.

The cover even showed what was going on. There was the legend, “Introducing the comedy team of Albert Brooks and . . . (over).”  When flipped over, there was an aluminum foil “mirror” with the word “You” above it.

Like many of Brooks’s comic idea, the idea was offbeat and played straight.

I remember when it came out. I was program director of the college radio station, and put out a warning that no one was to try to take the part. It was difficult to make it work over the air because you needed to get the timing right. But, of course, I broke my own rule. Since I had rehearsed it a bit, there were no awkward pauses and I think it came off pretty well.

Brooks did a second comedy album before branching out into short films and full-length comedies.** He always had a slightly different view of life, which made him so much fun.

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*Brooks said that his father claimed to have never heard of Albert Einstein, but that he was probably pulling Brooks’s leg.

**His brother, Bob Einstein, carved out a niche for himself as Super Dave Osborne.

Chickenman (comedy)

1966-197?
Written by Dick Orkin
Starring Dick Orkin, Jane Roberts, Jim Runyon
Wikipedia Entry

By the 1960s, radio had fully evolved away from dramas and comedies to DJs playing music. But the urge to put a story on the air continued in small pockets, often on individual stations as a part of their programming. Probably the most successful of these was Chickenman.

The show as created as part of the success of Batman. Chicago radio station WCFL thought it might be funny to create a superhero spoof to run in among the top-40 hits. Dick Orkin, the production director at the station came up with the concept.

Chickenman was actually Benton Harbor (Orkin), who fought crime on weekends by donning a chicken suit and going after criminals.  He was assisted by the befuddled Police Commissioner Norton (Orkin) and his highly competent secretary Miss Helfinger (Jane Roberts). When unable to fight crime due to his job as a shoe salesman, Benton’s mother Mildred (Roberts) would help out.

The segments ran under three minutes, but had a wonderful deadpan sensibility. Even the most absurd developments were played perfectly straight.  Here’s a selection:

The show was just planned for a two-week run on WCFL, but it quickly took on a life of its own and continued.  After a few months, it was syndicated and was played across the country and for the Armed Forces radio.

Orkin created his own production company to syndicate it and eventually took full control from the radio station.  The episodes ran through the mid-70s, at which point Orkin – with his partner Bert Berdis – created a second show for radio: The Tooth Fairy, with Orkin as the title character.

The team went into advertising and produced a series of successful ads, following closely in the footsteps of the great Stan Freberg.  They won several Clio awards for the best in the industry.*

Orkin died on December 24, 2017, well remembered in advertising and radio (he was in the Radio Hall of Fame). His Chickenman is still available on CD, and is still a delight.

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*As an aside, in 1991, the Clio award ceremony was probably the greatest fiasco in award show history. The MC was a no-show and the event’s caterer was pressed into service, but there was no script or winners list. He walked off. The next presenter was drunk and, after giving out a few awards, staggered offstage.  Then people started mobbing the stage, grabbing the statuettes, and making off with them. Their sponsor soon went bankrupt.

Comedy Tonight (TV)

(1970)
Starring Robert Klein, Madeline Kahn, Peter Boyle, MacIntrye Dixon, Judy Graubart, Marty Barris. Robert Merrill, Jerry Lacy
IMDB Entry

Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In changed TV comedy, creating a frenetic style filled with oddball (and frankly dumb) jokes.  In a year, this was the way to go.* And, at the time, instead of reruns for variety shows, the networks ran summer replacement series.  Comedy Tonight was one of the best.

The show was hosted by Robert Klein and was a series of skits** using a cast of very talented comic actors.  The show’s theme, of course, was Stephen Sondheim’s song of the same name and the show would start with the case singing it, then breaking off in the middle for short skits or blackout gags before returning to it.

The show attempted to be topical.  Not in politics, but in various things in society that were open to satire:  soap operas, commercials,  talk shows, and the like. A subject was chosen, and there would be a series of gags – some quick, some a little more developed – on the theme. 

Not much is available about the show, but a couple of things remain vivid to me, even now.

• For a segment on advertising:  This was the time when cigarette commercials were going off the air, and Winston was going out with a campaign “What do you want?  Good grammar or good taste?”***  Klein replied, “With Madison Avenue, you’re lucky to get either.”
• For a segment on talk shows:  Big star (obviously modeled on Judy Garland) is on a talk show.  The host asks her to sing “The Trolley Song.”  She declines, saying she’s not ready, she hasn’t rehearsed it, she hadn’t expected it, etc. The host finally gets her to give in so she goes to the stage, puts on a tailcoat and hat, and the band starts playing the music, which she sings while doing an elaborate dance routine.

Not much of the show remains; as you can see the IMDB entry is sparse.  There were only about a half dozen shows, all in the summer when the audience is low.  But Madeline Kahn and Peter Boyle became major names in movies and TV, and Robert Klein is considered one of the deans of standup comedy.  Several of the lesser-known names still had long careers, both on stage and in TV.

Still, it was a fine show that seems to have been completely lost.  Too bad.

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*Even when it was a mistake. Dean Martin’s Comedy World, a summer replacement series of 1974, had the wonderful idea of showing comedians around the world.  They tried to ape Laugh-In with short bits of a joke or two.  The problem is that a comedian on stage had a routine that built up in the telling and taking two or three jokes out of context didn’t work at all. The show was the US debut of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, with a couple of very short bits. Oddly, one of the sketches shown used the phrase “naughty bits.” The censors bleeped out the words (maybe the first example of what Jimmy Fallon uses as his “Unnecesary Censorship” videos).  Why the show just didn’t pick another Monty Python sketch is inexplicable.

**Similar in some ways to Monty Python, though shorter and less silly.

***For the younger folk, Winston’s slogan for  years was “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.” When it was first used “like” was considered grammatically incorrect (it was supposed to be “as”), but the usage is now unobjectionable.  However, that didn’t keep people from the time from kvetching about how bad the error was.

The Incredible Jewel Robbery (TV)

(1959)
Directed by Mitchell Leisen
Written by Dallas Gaultois, James Edmiston
Starring Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Groucho Marx
IMDB Entry
Full Movie on ShoutTV

I’m a major Marx Brothers fan, but there’s been one thing of theirs I never expected to see.  It was the last time they actually were on screen together, in a 30-minute silent comedy that’s primarily a vehicle for Harpo (of course) and Chico.

The plot is simple. Nick (Harpo) and Harry (Chico) are shown stealing a bunch of odd items from various stores.  They then go to a secluded spot and repaint their car to look like a police car.  It turns out to be a plot to steal jewels from the jeweler.

But forget the part.  The show* is an excuse for sight gags, some new, some old.  Harpo makes a gookie**, and there are sight gags throughout, some amusing, others not so. It’s great seeing the two of them on the screen, and Groucho appears in the final scene and utters the only line of dialog in the half hour.

The film was directed by Mitchell Leisen, a top film director in the 1930s who had worked with W. C. Fields, Jack Benny, Burns & Allen, and other top stars. 

Like most TV of the 50s, the show was ephemeral and, despite the Marx Brothers name, didn’t seem to be aired again.  It came back in the DVD era, and can currently be seen online at ShoutTV.com. 

It’s certainly not classic Marx Brothers, but completists and fans may want to give it a look.

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*Introduced by Ronald Reagn.

**A face he made in just about every Marx Brother’s movie.  It’s named after a cigar roller of their youth who made the face unconsciously while working.

Aaron Williams (comedy)

(1933?-)
Wikipedia Page

The cliché of a ventriloquist is that his dummy starts taking on a life of its own.  Though that sort of split personality doesn’t happen in real life, there is one ventriloquist who worked that sort of vibe into his act:  Aaron Williams.

I saw Aaron and Freddie on a family vacation to Miami Beach one Christmas in the early 70s.  He was the opening act for Wilson Pickett* and I immediately loved the act.

Most ventriloquists project a bond with their dummies.  They might be mischievous, but the ventriloquist would gently chide the dummy or treat their comments as joke.  Aaron was different.  He stood on the stage and seemed embarrassed to be sharing it with Freddie.  He sometimes got so tired of it that he’s stuff Freddie into a suitcase.

Of course, by the time Williams came to the stage, ventriloquism was passe.  There were no TV shows, just guest appearances and one shots. But he worked regularly as an opening act for people like Pickett and Ray Charles.  He also did work for the Los Angeles Police Department by doing anticrime demonstrations.

Williams time in the national spotlight was short, and his act was hurt by ventriloquism no longer an interesting novelty.  But he was a fine and effective comedian who broke new ground.

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*Pickett appealed to a younger audience than one would find at a Miami Beach hotel.  Most people didn’t understand the music and thought it was too loud.  I loved it.

Señor Wences (comedy)

(1896-1999)
Wikipedia Entry

Ventriloquism is a difficult way to become a star.  Not only do you have to master the techniques of throwing your voice, but you have to be a first-rate comedian or else it’s just a gimmick.  One of the biggest stars of the art in the 50s and 60s was a Spaniard who did things differently from any other similar act:  Señor Wences.

He was born in Spain as Wenceslao Moreno and developed his act over there before moving to the US in the mid-30s.  He started out in nightclubs and by the late 50s, he was a regular guest on TV variety shows, most notably The Ed Sullivan Show, which is where he got his greatest fame.

Wences was not the usual ventriloquist.  Usually, there’s a dummy or puppet. Señor Wences didn’t need that sort of prop.  His main character, Johnny, was merely the side of his hand:  the thumb as the jaw.  Lipstick was used to draw the lips, two googly eyes were added, and a small wig was put on the top.  He rested his hand atop a model of a body and Johnny came to life.

But his most famous “dummy” was Pedro.  Pedro was a head in a box.  Wences would open and shut the lid and have Pedro speak.  The voices were slightly different, too:  when the lid was shut, the voice was muffled. Pedro soon created a catchphrase:  “S’allright,” spoken in his deep, gruff voice.

Often, Wences didn’t use a dummy at all.  Once he established Johnny and Pedro, he would leave them on the table and have them comment and talk back to him.  He could take out a telephone handset and pretend to take a call or would start spinning plates on a stick as Johnny and Pedro reacted.

His technical skill was first-rate.  Wences was able to have three and even four conversations, switching from Johnny, to his own voice, to Pedro, to someone on the phone, to Cecillia Chicken (a puppet) in rapid succession.  It was the rapid-fire switches that made the performance.  Indeed, Wences told very few jokes, but got his humor from the reaction of the characters.

After Sullivan went off the air, Wences continued to perform as a TV guest star and at clubs.  In the 80s, he convinced producers to give him a part in the touring company of the musical “Sugar Babies,” by telling the producers he was 15 years younger than he really was. He retired in 1996 at age 100 and died in 1999.

Wild Thing (music, comedy)

(1967)
by “Senator Bobby”/”Senator Everett McKinley” (Bill Minkin)
Wikipedia Entry

In the 60s, music still had a novelty side.  You could have a hit with a song that was purely humorous, and even if it wasn’t a song (more on that later).  And “Senator Bobby” had one with his version of “Wild Thing.”

First, a little background.  The song “Wild Thing” was a number one hit by the UK group the Troggs in 1966.  It has a catchy but heavy guitar riff behind it with a growling vocals filled with sex and menace. 

And, in 1967, Senator Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen had a surprise hit single (#16) with “Gallant Men,” a spoken word recording praising the military, a hawk’s ideal in the Vietnam era.*  That album including it won Dirksen a Grammy Award for best spoken word album.

That’s where comedian Bill Minkin came in.  He had the brilliant idea of using Dirksen’s dramatic voice to use the “let’s get sexy” lyrics of “Wild Thing,” with the nom de comedy of Senator Everett McKinley.

Of course, records needed to have two sides, so Minkin did the same thing with a more liberal senator:  Robert F. Kennedy.  Internal evidence indicates that this was supposed to be the B-Side of the record, but it was released as the A-side.  Recorded as by “Senator Bobby and the Hardly-Worthit Players,” the song reach #20.**

The Dirksen parody was not neglected, though.

(Sounds a little like Elvis, doesn’t he?)

Both songs are a bit dated, if only because of the references to political figures of the time, and the Kennedy family. 

I would also guess that the assassination of RFK put a damper on it being played, though by then the song was old news, so it didn’t affect Minkin the way Vaught Meader was affected by JFK’s death.  Minkin became friends with Martin Scorsese, with bit parts in Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy.  He also hosted The King Biscuit Flower Hour for 20 years.

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*It made Dirksen the oldest person to have a top 40 hit until he was surpassed by Moms Mabley two and a half years later

**Though the Senator Bobby version was released as the A-side of the single, it’s clear that it was meant to be the B-side, which included the parody of Dirksen.

The Strange Case of the End of Civilization As We Know It (TV)

(1977)
Directed by Joseph McGrath
Written by  John Cleese, Jack Hobbs, Joseph McGrath; Original idea by Hobbs and McGrath
Starring John Cleese, Arthur Lowe, Ron Moody, Connie Booth, Denholm Elliott, Stratford Johns
IMDB Entry
Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock is sensational with its reimagining of Holmes in the modern day.  This isn’t the first, of course – Basil Rathbone had modern day adventures in the 40s, but had little critical favor.  And, in 1977, an obscure BBC film also showed a present-day Holmes – to comic effect.
The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It, was a short TV film with John Cleese as Holmes’s grandson, brought in for a case where the great detectives of the world are being killed off, as a plot by Moriarty to end Civilization as We Know It.

The film had a lot of things going for it.  There’s Cleese as Holmes, of course, as well as Arthur Lowe’s Watson.  Watson is often portrayed as being a little bit slow on the uptake (though not recently), and Lowe is by far the slowest.  Every one of Holmes’s comments – no matter how mundane -- were greeted by comments about  how clever Holmes was.

Despite some great moments, though, the film is uneven and wears badly.  There was a ton of topical humor, and many of the references are pretty obscure today.  Even worse, the direction is deadly slow.  The jokes are funny (if a bit broad), but there’s too much waiting between things.

Still, there’s plenty of funny moments.  My favorite is when Watson reads off crossword puzzle clues to Holmes (read them aloud if you don’t get the joke):

Watson: 1 Across. A simple source of citrus fruit, 1, 5, 4.
Holmes: A lemon tree, my dear Watson.
Watson: 2 Down. Conservative pays ex-wife maintenance. 7, 5.
Holmes: Alimony...alimony Tory, my dear Watson.
Watson: 2 Down. Southern California style. 1, 2, 8.
Holmes: A la Monterrey, my dear Watson.
Watson: 4 Down. Burglar's entrance
Holmes: Alarm entry, my dear Watson
Watson: That's rather poor, isn't it, Holmes? Right. One to go. A cowardly fish with a sting in its tail.
Holmes: Yellow manta ray, my dear Watson
Watson: Brilliant, Holmes

The show appeared once or twice in the US and UK, and then was quickly forgotten.  It’s certainly not genius on the level of Monty Python or Fawlty Towers, but it’s a very funny sidelight to the careers of the Pythons.

The Fatal Glass of Beer

(1933)
Directed by Clyde Bruckman
Written by W. C. Fields
Starring W.C. Fields, Rosemary Theby, George Chandler, Richard Cramer
IMDB Entry
Full movie at Archive.org

I happen to like subtle humor – jokes that require you to think a moment to figure out.  Usually, that also overlaps with deadpan humor – jokes that are treated seriously by the characters involved.  I may be a minority in that view, but I think that even if you’re not, it’s worth watching the genius of The Fatal Glass of Beer, one of the funniest 20 minutes ever put on film.

W. C. Fields made five short subjects.  We all know him as a cultural icon, and Fields was one of the best and most wide ranging of the great comedians.  While he usually came from the same comic place, his characters were on a continuum, from those who were the curmudgeon we expect him to be, to others who accept life’s insults with little more than a quiet comment. 

The Fatal Glass of Beer is not what people typically think of Fields, and may not seem like much the first time around,* but the more you see it, the funnier it is.

The film opens in the Great White North, where Mr. Snavely (Fields) is in an isolated cabin while the wind blows wildly.  Constable Posthlewhistle of the Mounties drops in, and asks Fields about his son, Chester (George Chandler), who is about to be released from prison.  After singing a tuneless song outlining Chester’s fall – due to drink -- Fields returns to his wife (Rosemary Theby) to be there when Chester  returns.

The movie is a deadpan parody of adventures set in the Yukon. The acting is deliberately broad; Fields and everyone else declaim their lines like in an old time temperance melodrama.  The outdoor scenes are shot against a process screen and make no attempt to make it look like anything other than a process screen.  The plot is melodramatic in the extreme and the blowing snow is clearly cornflakes.

And that’s the whole point.  The movie is filled with subtly funny moments that you may not notice the first time, but the more you see them, the more delightful they become.  It’s made to be deliberately bad, which is part of the reason why it’s so great.

There are also some wonderful sight gags, great and memorable lines** that get added humor from the delivery.  The humor is often as subtle as the acting is broad and it’s one of the few comedies that gets funnier the more you see it.

An example:

Mrs. Snavely:  Captain Tippett of the Canadian Mounties has smuggled a police dog across the border for you.
Mr. Snavely:  Smuggled a police dog across the border for me?
Mrs. Snavely: Yes, and he says for you to keep it under your hat.
Mr. Snavely:  How big is it?
Mrs. Snavely:  (indicating about three feet off the floor) About so high.
Mr. Snavely:  He’s crazy!

A lesser comedian would have said “How can I fit that under my hat?”  “Or that’ll hurt my head.”  Fields has the genius to assume that the audience would know what the joke would be, and went beyond the obvious.

Fields made four other short films:  The Gold Specialist***, The Barber Shop, the Pharmacist, and The Dentist.  All are good, but The Fatal Glass of Beer is the finest.

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*Theater owners reported that it wasn’t funny at all.

**And it ain’t a fit night out for man nor beast.” or “I think I’ll go out and milk the elk.”

***And adaptation of his vaudeville act.

Harvard Lampoon Life Magazine Parody (book)

(1968)
Written by the staff of the Harvard Lampoon, Henry Beard and Doug Kenney, editors.

Doug Kenney may have been the most influential comic mind of the latter half of the 20th century.  He was the mind behind Bored of the Rings, the first editor of the National Lampoon,* and screenwriter of Animal House.  There is also a direct connection between the Lampoon and Saturday Night Life.  And Kenney got his first national exposure as editor of  the Harvard Lampoon Life Magazine Parody.

The Harvard Lampoon had a long history of doing parodies of popular magazines.  It was a regular fundraiser of theirs:  they'd do a parody issue and sell enough copies around Boston and the northeast to make some money.    In this case, they were able to get the issue out to a much wider audience.**

The magazine matched Life accurately, but that was the easy part.  The articles were straight ahead silliness, many based upon the idea that the world is going to end.  There are profiles of intellectuals (philosopher Eric Mouth and poet Harry Umbridge), fashion made out of food (including a "sleeveless bacon blouse" and a salami skirt made out of genoa and bologna***), a recipe for thermonuclear turkey, kids playing war a little too realistically, the adventure and excitement of cows and sheep, and columns paralleling the columnists in the actual magazine.****

The magazine sold decently, making some money for the Harvard Lampoon, and perhaps gave some impetus for the founding of the National Lampoon.  The original is hard to find, probably because it was basically meant to be recycled.  But it's still one of the funniest parodies around, and historically important as a springboard for most of what was successful in American humor.

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*A subject for another day.  Henry Beard was no slouch, either.

**I picked it up in my home town on eastern Long Island.  It made me want to apply to Harvard to work on the Lampoon.  Alas, Harvard turned me down.

*** I have no evidence that Lada Gaga has ever seen an issue, but it make you wonder.

****Life Magazine enjoyed the parody enough to take out several full-page ads in it. There were multiple advertisers, and a modern reader might wonder if they were parodies themselves, but all the ads were genuine.

Who's in Charge Here? (book)

(1962)
By Gerald C. Gardner
Political humor dates quickly*.  The only way to avoid this is to stay topical, something that radio and TV have managed to do.  It's much harder to do it in a book, but Gerald Gardner came up with the idea to have a series of books, each with some funny topical humor of the year.
Gerald Gardner was a TV writer, best know for scripts for The Monkees and Get Smart.** In 1962, he got the idea of taking news photos and adding humorous dialog that supposedly showed what the people were saying or thinking.  The book was called Who's in Charge Here?, and the cover photo showed John F. Kennedy sitting with Harry Truman, with Truman saying, "So the bathroom still leaks."
Despite the photos of political figures, the book didn't take a political point of view.  It focused more on the absurdity and foibles of the people involves, as well as commenting on what was shown in the picture.
The book was a smashing success.  So much so that Gardner continued with new editions every few years.  There was More Who's in Charge Here, Who's in Charge Here 1966, Who's in Charge Here: Watergate Follies, and many other variations on the theme.  The most recent version I can find was from 1996. 
None were as popular as the original.  And I suspect the gentle ribbing you found in Gardner's books is out of place in today's more vicious style of political humor***.  It's hard to say how well the book hold up, but I think it's not too bad, since you only need to have a vague understanding of the events involved.
The books, though successful, were always just a sideline for Gardner, who was a very successful TV writer and producer both before and after the first volume came out.  It was a minor book, but an entertaining bit of political humor.
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*The clearest example to me was an Art Buchwald column on the Watergate hearings entitled (in our newspaper), "What We Have Learned So Far."  It was the funniest thing I ever read when it first came out.  Rereading it six months later, it was nowhere near as good.  And after a year, I couldn't find anything funny about it at all (I don't think it's was ever reprinted in any of Buchwald's collections).  Once you forgot the details he was satirizing, there was little left.
**A favorite Get Smart episode was "The Diplomat's Daughter," which had one of Smart's best villains:  "The Craw."  ("Not Craw!  Craw!!")
***At least, Gardner didn't suffer the fate of Vaughn Meader, who also joked about JFK. 

Bert Williams (Comedy/Music)

(1874-1922)
Wikipedia Entry
Natural Born Gambler -- one of the few examples of his work.

W. C. Fields called him "the funniest man I ever saw."  Booker T. Washington said "He has done more for our race than I have."  He was a headliner on Broadway at a time when the only Black faces on Broadway were in blackface.  Bert Williams was simply a comic genius.

Williams was born in the Bahamas, but moved to the US when 10.  After working at a variety of jobs, he started appearing in minstrel shows* on the West Coast.  In 1890s, he teamed with straight man George Walker and the team of Williams and Walker took off, becoming a major vaudeville act.  In the beginning, they played the standard "coon act" of the time, but they slowly moved away into more universal comedy.  Williams also wrote songs for the act, several of which became popular.

In 1902, their show, In Dahomey, became the first show on Broadway to have a Black leading actor, and was a smash hit.  When Walker had to leave the act due to ill health, Williams was given the chance to star in The Ziegfeld Follies, probably the most prestigious show on Broadway at the time.  He made his debut in 1910** and was an immediate hit. 

The songs he wrote for the show also were big successes and he was probably better known as a songwriter and recording artist than a performer.  His signature song was "Nobody," a comic lament that has some real sadness to it.

Williams's persona was that of a man who was faced with hard luck and disaster but managed to be funny about it.  Much like Charlie Chaplin, he was a put-upon guy who had to fight for his breaks.  

In 1916, Biograph asked him to make films. Two were produced:  Fish and Natural Born Gambler.  Williams was required to use blackface, of course, but tried to do more than just be a coon comedian.  He was able to direct and kept the stereotypes to a minimum.  But the films never took off, and Williams returned to Broadway and the Follies.

Williams remained a headliner until his death.***  But he was clearly a man born at the wrong time.  His songs are not a style that remains in favor, and he was too early to be considered part of the Great American Songbook era of the 1930s. His film performances are in silent films, which keeps them obscure with today's audiences.  And his race kept him from gaining wide acceptance at a time when racial discrimination was the norm. 

But it's important to remember that, even in those days, he had the talent to be noticed by the top audiences in the country, a sure sign of a remarkable ability.

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*Yes, there were minstrel shows featuring all-Black casts. They wore blackface because that was what was expected of a minstrel show.  In the context of the time, blackface was akin to whiteface on a mime:  it identified the performer and did not, in and of itself, offend Black audiences.

**Along with Fanny Brice.

***After he collapsed on stage during a performance.

Firesign Theater (comedy)

c1967-Present
Members: Phil Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman, and Philip Proctor
Wikipedia Link
Firesign Theater Website

Back around 1970, I was at a party. The record supplying the music was done, and I put another one one.  A comedy record.  People were complaining that they wanted music, and that they couldn't hear what was happening, and meanwhile the party conversations went on, ignoring everything.  But after about ten minute, the group slowly became quiet, so they could catch everything being said.

The record was from the Firesign Theater.

They were a group of four writers/performers who started out doing radio plays and quickly graduated to records. They were as big a revolution in comedy as Monty Python's Flying Circus, who were starting out around the same time.

The group took its name from astrology -- all four members were Fire Signs* -- with a nod to the old Fireside Theater radio show. They took the conventions of radio drama and added psychedelic sensibilities and wove it all into a dense collection of comic brilliance.  In the early 70s, you could say, "Wait a minute, Danger.  What about my pickle?" and people would go off on long riff and quotes of the absurdist dialog that were their stock in trade. The Firesign Theater created more in-joke quotes than anyone except Python: 

• "That's just a two-bit ring from a Crackerback jox."
• "She's no fun.  She fell right over."
• "Antelope Freeway, one half mile."
• "What kind of chump do you take me for?"  "First class."
• "I can shout.  Don't hear you."
• "And you can believe me, because I never lie, and I'm always right."
• "You can wait here in the sitting room, or you can sit here in the waiting room."

(Yes, if you know the Firesign Theater, these are as funny as "This is an Ex-parrot!")

At their best, the Firesign theater was far ahead of its time.  They would, for instance, stop to listen if they had said thing on the other side of the record, and one half of a phone conversation on one album would have the other half showing up on another.  Their work was filled with social commentary (some prescient), slapstick, anything-for-a-joke humor, and more.  It never got stale, no matter how often you listened.

They started out in radio on the west coast, but were signed with Columbia Records, and put out their first album, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him in 1968.  It consisted of only four tracks.  "Temporarily Humbolt County" was a bitter satire on manifest destiny, but the true genius of the album was the title track, which took up the entire second side of the album, about a traveler lost in a country where everything is confusion. 

The album was successful enough for a second one, this entitled How Can You Be Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All? It really only had two cuts:  the title one, a skewed look at American consumer culture and their best known piece (and comedy classic):

Announcer: Los Angeles.  He walks again by night! Out of the fog.  Into the smog (cough cough). Relentlessly. Ruthlessly (“I wonder where Ruth is”).  Doggedly (dogs bark) Toward his weekly meeting with . . . the unknown. At 4th and Drucker he turns left, at Drucker and 4th he turns right, he crosses McArthur Park & walks into a great sandstone building! ("Oh my nose!") Groping for the door, he steps inside, and climbs the 13 steps to his office. He walks in. He’s ready for mystery. He’s ready for excitement.  He’s ready for anything. He’s…
Nick Danger (picking up ringing phone): Nick Danger, third eye!
Phone Voice: Yes.  I want to order a pizza to go, and no anchovies.

The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye is a parody of radio detective shows, with the hero meeting a Peter Lorre type mysterious man. And a search for Melanie Haber . . . . Audrey Faber. . . Susan Underhill . . . Betty Jo Bialowski!**  This is the point where most people became fans. 

They topped this with their next release, Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers, a parody of the teen "let's-put-on-a-show" movies of the 40s, but with their usual twists and surreal humor.  There was only one track, as they followed George Leroy Tirebiter, former child star, in his film High School Madness as he tried to find out who stole Morse Science High, as it gets mixed in with a Korean war movie.  The two plots run parallel -- or rather, are twisted like rope. 

It's actually pretty pointless to try to describe.  You just listen.  Rolling Stone has called this "the greatest comedy record ever made," and I certainly agree.  Though it's not anything you pick up on immediately.  The jokes are so multilayered that it takes several listens to begin to catch them all, and the more you listen the funnier it gets.  It was a pinnacle of comedy, as amazing in its own way as Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

The next album, I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus was a slight dropoff (understandable).  They followed that with a collection of their radio shows called Dear Friends, showing their earlier comedy.  But their next album, Not Insane was a disappointment, and they never really recovered, even though they did some good work afterwards.

The group remains together today, doing live shows of their work, and the various permutations also released albums over the years.  Proctor and Bergman worked together,*** and Ossman and Austin also did solo work. But they never made the break into TV or films, and they became forgotten by all but their long-term fans. 

But for their first three albums, they put forth a brand of comedy that was all their own.  No one has ever come close.

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* An Aries, a Leo, and two Sagittariuses.

**He knew her as Nancy.

***I saw them in the mid-70s.

Ripping Yarns (TV)

(1976-1979)
Written by Michael Palin and Terry Jones
Starring Michael Palin
IMDB Entry
Monty Python's Flying Circus was the greatest run of sustained comic brilliance in television history.  But all good things had to come to an end* and the six main performers ended up going their separate ways. John Cleese struck pay dirt immediately with Fawlty Towers, another comic landmark.  Michael Palin and Terry Jones did nearly as well with Ripping Yarns,** a show that's clearly overlooked.
It may have been the concept.  Ripping Yarns was a send up of the British boys' adventure novels (and other genres) of the 1920s and 30s, with derring do and British upper class locales (generally).  Palin and Jones used these stories -- which certainly looked very silly when they were writing it -- and turned them into wild humor.
Palin played the lead actor in all of them; Jones appeared once or twice, but pretty much stuck to writing. The episodes were filmed, not videotaped, and the stories took their genre and added many pythonesque absurdities.  There were six in the first season:

• Tomkinson's Schooldays.  The British schoolboy novel (think Harry Potter without the magic), where Tomkinson is tortured by upper classmen as he tries to prove himself in the school's great event, the Thirty Mile Hop.***
• The Testing of Eric Olthwaithe. Called "a northern yarn," this evidently parodied books about the people in the north of England.  Olthwaithe is the most boring person in his Depression-era town, until he accidentally gets mixed up with bank robbers.****
• Escape from Stalag Luft 112B.  About Major Phipp's maniacal plans to escape from a POW camp -- where the others don't want to escape.
• Murder at Moorstone's Manor.  An Agatha-Chrystie type murder mystery where nothing is as it seems.  Or everything is.  It has my favorite exchange:
  • Charles (after his brother is murdered):  But why?  Why do we have to have a funeral?
  • Mother:  People like funerals, dear.
  • Charles:  We didn't have a funeral for Aunt Mabel.
  • Mother: Well, we know why that was dear, now please.
  • Charles:  Why?  Why did we never have a funeral for Aunt Mabel?
  • Mother:  Because we couldn't find her, dear.
  • Charles:  We found most of her.
• Across the Andes by Frog.  Captain Walter Snetterton out to prove his theory of amphibian migration.
• The Curse of the Claw.  The evil "monkey's paw" whose horrific influence haunts a man's life.

The episodes did well enough that three more were commissioned the next year:

• Whinfrey's Last Case.  England's greatest hero foils a plot by the Germans to start World War I a year early.
• Golden Gordon.  A soccer mad man goes to extreme measures to revive the local team to its glory days.  Actually, rather sweet overall.
• Roger of the Raj. The story of the heir to a peerage who gets caught up in an rebellion in India.

Palin was, to my mind, the funniest of the Pythons, mostly because he was able to play the silliest of roles with an earnest manner.  He was assisted by top-notch BBC talent.
The show was expensive to produce, so after nine episodes, the BBC canceled it.  But while Fawlty Towers became a favorite in reruns, Ripping Yarns got very little play in the US.  I'm not sure why.  It had only nine episodes, but Fawlty Towers only had 12.  It's possible that the references of the parodies just didn't go over well in the US.
Michael Palin moved on, appearing in the underrated The Missionary and eventually finding his niche doing travel series.  Terry Jones started writing children's stories.  And, of course, Monty Python continues to be the gold standard for comedy.
But Ripping Yarns also deserves its place among the greats.
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*And, to be honest, the final season of the show -- without John Cleese -- was very uneven and often very unfunny.  Yes, I'm looking at you, Mr. Neutron.
**Eric Idle took a long time to find his niche, but eventually developed Spamalot for the stage and has been successful as a standup comedian.
***This actually was supposed to be a one-time special, but the BBC liked it so much they ordered more episodes.
****The ending is a neat dig at our passion for celebrities;  one of the jokes is that the same dull monologues that drove Eric's acquaintances to run away to avoid mind-numbing boredom are not interested once he becomes famous.