Quips and Quotations (The One with the '90s Sitcom Obit Edition)

 

1969-2023

I gravitate towards sort of broken characters who try to be better people.

--Matthew Perry, best known for playing Chandler Bing on Friends.

Are You Lonesome Tonight?

   

In 1969 Elvis Presley was enjoying a career resurgence when this photo was taken of him with the then-host of The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson, the latter visiting backstage at whatever Las Vegas hotel the former was playing at the time. Then as now, but more so then when there were much less in the way of viewing options, the late-night talk show was the first choice of celebrities who wanted to go on TV and promote their latest book, movie, record, or just themselves. Elvis, however, was such a big star at the dawn of the 1970s that the mere fact that he walked the Earth was promotion enough, and thus never appeared on Carson's show. That's not to say Johnny couldn't find another way to capitalize on the King of Rock and Roll's great success.

An up-and-coming comedian named Andy Kaufman turned out to be that other way. His act consisted of several comic characterizations, the most popular of which was the fresh-off-the-boat Foreign Man, which eventually became Latka Gravis on the hit sitcom Taxi. However, the character was still nameless when Kaufman was booked on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in March of 1977.  The following clip isn't the entire appearance, which means I have to do the mundane job of setting it up. The Foreign Guy comes and does some very poor impersonations of various celebrities, but then strikes paydirt:

The real Elvis Presley died about five months later. Andy Kaufman passed on in 1984, and Johnny Carson, who otherwise would have turned 98 today, took his leave in 2005. Of the three, only Carson's death remains undisputed. And even he's got his own streaming channel.

Quips and Quotations (A Lovable Space That Needs Your Face Edition)

 

1946-2023

Creating her was actually intellectual. How do I make her likable and loveable? ...Dumb blondes are annoying. I gave her a moral code. I imagined it was the childhood I would've liked to have had.

--Suzanne Somers, on her Three's Company character Chrissy Snow.

 

Under the Radar: Charles Fleischer

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Vital Viewing (Pushing the Encycle Edition)

 

Remember this?

Sinead O'Connor's confession to Dr. Phil:

Now let's hear what one-time Saturday Night Live bandleader G.E. Smith has to say about the whole brouhaha:

Well, of course Smith is going to defend O'Connor. Those hedonistic show biz types all stick together. But what about the damage done to the Roman Catholic Church?

It somehow survived.

In fact, at times the Roman Catholic Church's survival skills are damn near miraculous.

But back to Sinead:

She could have been singing about herself.

1966-2023

Vital Viewing (Finishing Off Edition)

 

British actor Albert Finney was born on this day in 1936 (he died, unforgivably unbeknownst to me at the time, in 2019.) In 1982 he sat down for a chat with the utterly American talk show host David Letterman: 

Suaveness to spare. Finney, I mean. As for Letterman, he must have known he couldn't compete in that area, and so didn't even bother putting on a tie. Cute, indeed!

The hit 1963 film, based on Henry Fielding's 1749 novel, consumed much of Letterman's and Finney's discussion, but as you'll see in the following clip, the consumption doesn't stop there. Joyce Redman is Albert's/Tom's dinner companion. Watch:

Now, what are we to make of that?!

"Here’s one thing you can try on your own that might do the trick (assuming that you’ve seen a doctor and ruled out anything that requires treatment). There’s a French saying, l’appetit vient en mangeant which describes the situation of not being hungry, but then sitting down to eat and finding that your appetite has kicked in. This has probably happened to you so you’re familiar with the effect. Well, it can work with regards to sex as well as food."

 In his introduction, Letterman also mentioned this 1974 movie based on Agatha Christie's 1934 novel. Released a mere 11 years after Tom Jones, Albert Finney himself was a mere 38 years old when he played Christie's famous late-middle-aged Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. 

 .

Prothetics. It's got to be prosthetics.

Since it's a murder mystery, we may as well go to the bloody heart of the matter. Here's Finney, along with Martin Balsam, John Gielgud, George Coulouris, and, in repose, Richard Widmark: 

So, whodunnit?

"I couldn't tell you. I haven't seen the movie."

Vital Viewing (School Daze Edition)

 

Jasmine Guy was born on this day in 1962. She's best known for playing the self-absorbed Southern belle Whitley Gilbert on the late 1980s-early '90s African American college sitcom A Different World. Jasmine ended up being the breakout star of the series, though that wasn't... 

...always the case. Clockwise from the bottom left we have The Cosby Show's own breakout star, Lisa Bonet, continuing her role as Denise Huxtable, the mildly rebellious daughter of Cliff and Claire (as opposed to the wildly rebellious costar of Bill Cosby and Phylicia Rashad); next is Kadeem Hardison as (the initially) horny math whiz Dwayne Wayne; Dawnn Lewis as Jalessa Vinson, a divorcee who's returned to school; and Marisa Tomei, as talkative white student Maggie Lauten. Missing is the star of today's post, Jasmine Guy. She was on the show, but her character was considered such an outlier that she wasn't even included in the cast picture. The snobbish Whitley also had kind of an antagonistic relationship with the other characters and would have seemed out of place in such a chummy picture. Nevertheless, the character was seen more and more as the first season advanced, and she even got to meet...

...Denise's mother when she paid a visit to fictional Hillman College (said to be based on Howard University.)

Antagonist or not, the character of Whitley Gilbert was eventually deemed important enough to the show that Jasmine Guy got to be included in this later cast photo, and as the first season ended and the second season began, her importance would only increase. For starters, Lisa Bonet got pregnant. This was too much for A Different World's morally righteous executive producer, Bill Cosby. Rumor has it that Cosby was so upset that he mixed a drink to calm his nerves. Or maybe it was to calm somebody else's nerves. Anyway, it's not like Bonet was going to have this child (the future Zoe Kravitz) out of wedlock, but even though she was married in real life, her TV character wasn't. Bonet was canned and off TV for about a year. When she returned it wasn't to A Different World but once again The Cosby Show, as a stepmother(?!)-to-be.

As for ADW, more changes were in the works. The series got great ratings, but sandwiched between the show it was spun off from and another monster hit, Cheers, how could it not? Truth is the show just wasn't that funny (despite the best efforts of Guy and Hardison), was kind of preachy at times (the usual old fart authority figures showing up to wag their fingers at the collegiates latest scrapes), and supervising producer Anne Beatts, who was white, seemed to be merely guessing at what a black college must be like. Actually, she seemed merely to be guessing at what any 1980s college must be like, as her view on the subject seemed to be informed by a 1930s Jack Oakie campus comedy. Former Fame star (as well as Phylicia Rashad's sister) Debbie Allen was brought in to revamp the show. I suspect that she was giver freer rein than former Saturday Night Live writer Beatts, possibly because Allen was an alumnus of Howard University and thus knew the territory well. Several actors, including Marisa Tomei--how was anyone to know there was an Academy Award in her future? --were let go and new ones were brought in. From the second season onward, the show was much funnier, much more edgy, and much more steeped in the black youth culture of the day. There were still moral lessons to be had, at times about some very serious things like racism and date rape, but like any good story, be it a drama or comedy, it avoided the finger-wagging and instead let the characters oftentimes self-created problems speak for themselves.  

Starting from the left in what I guess is the back row we have Glynn Thurman (ROTC/math professor Colonel Bradford Taylor), Dawnn Lewis, Kadeem Hardison, Lou Myers (Vernon Gaines, the crotchety owner of the campus hangout, The Pit), Sinbad (multiple sports coach and dorm director Walter Oakes, a recurring character in the first season, joined the main cast in the second.) Right to left in what seems to be the front row we have Darryl M. Bell (Dwayne Wayne's best friend and perennial screwup Ron Johnson Jr, another recurring character in the first season, part of the main cast in the second), Charnele Brown (level-headed Kimberly Reese), Cree Summers (hippyish Freddy Brooks), and Jasmine Guy. Though there was some comings and goings as the series run neared its end (a young Jada Plinkett arrives at Hillman), this was the primary cast most of the time. Many, many stories were told, and there were many, many season-length story arcs, with each cast member getting their turn to shine. However, looking at the series as a whole, it's very clear there were two...

...firsts among equals, with their own multiple-seasons-long story arc.

Some years after A Different World went off the air, Jasmine and Kadeem had a talk with Oprah:

Man-oh-man, the way she whips on that that Southern accent! Who needs Gone with the Wind?

Since Jasmine and Kadeem provided most of the laughs in the largely laughless first season, it made comic sense that their characters should get together. It just didn't make any other kind of sense, as Whitley and Dwayne didn't have all that much in common. It's hard to make the case that they were perfect for each other. So what? At the end of the day comedy is about nothing if not about imperfection, and this was the TV era of mismatched lovers. Whitley's and Dwayne's on again-off again-and-on again yet again-relationship, with its miscues and failed seduction attempts, as well as the sudden and surprising opportunities seized, provided just as much laughs as could be had from Sam and Diane on Cheers or David and Maddie on Moonlighting.

Looking for videos online that chronicle Whitley's and Dwayne's rollicking relationship proved no problem at all. In fact, there was an embarrassment of riches. I was ready to post four, five, even six clips in order to give you a fuller picture of the passionate peaks and vitriolic valleys of their riotous romance. Fortunately, I happened upon a single video that tells you in four-and-a-half minutes what six clips otherwise would have told you in a half-hour or so about these loopy lovebirds:

  

 

You may have noticed that they're not always boyfriend and girlfriend in those clips. In fact, the relationship almost ends permanently when a politician named Byron Douglas III (Joe Morton) catches a heartbroken Whitley on a rebound of such force that it lands both of them right smack dab at the altar. And Dwayne? Obviously, for him this the nadir of an off-again relationship. But the nice thing about the light switch metaphor is that the switch flicks up as well as down. Watch:

Diahann Carroll was not known for her physical comedy skills, but that was a pretty neat backwards pratfall at the end. I wonder why she never did anything like that on Julia. Humor too subtle I suppose.

As for Whitley and Dwayne, theirs wasn't the first pop culture instance of a man crashing an ex-girlfriend's wedding, but at least this time...

...no one brandished a weapon.

Vital Viewing (Passionate Pauses Edition)

 

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

Romantic comedy with some women's gymnastics thrown in.

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

Vital Viewing (Girls Gone Wild Edition)

 

1947-2023

Actor Cindy Williams was best known as one half of that wacky female TV duo...

Um...Wrong wacky female TV duo.

Of course, I'm talking about Laverne and Shirley. In the following clip, Cindy (Shirley) and Penny Marshall (Laverne) talk about the time Paramount Pictures sent them to plug their series at, of all places, the Cannes Film Festival:

They seem to have been a wacky female duo in real life as well as on TV, huh? Speaking of TV, I was in a dither as to what clip to show from their popular 1950s-in-the-1970s sitcom, before I finally decided that...

...sex sells. So without further ado...

I hope nobody got the clap watching that.

Cindy Williams did have one high-profile role before taking on the even higher-profile role of Shirley Feeney. In the top half of the Mort Drucker-drawn poster above, you can see an illustrated version of Cindy in the arms of an equally illustrated Ron Howard. In the following clip, Cindy talks about almost turning down the part of Laurie Henderson:

Francis Ford Coppola! American Graffiti came out in 1973. Had Coppola shown an interest in Williams a year earlier, she may have ended up in this movie:

I mean, look at Diane Keaton's hair. It wasn't too different from Cindy's:

 Well, I guess she may have had a couple more curls than Diane. Anyway, Cindy was much more memorable as a lovestruck teenager than she would have been as mobster's spouse. See for yourself:

Oh, my, I feel like we're intruding on a private conversation. Blame the subtitles.

Vital Viewing (As Primitive as Can Be Edition)

 

Actor Bob Denver was born on this day in 1935 (he died in 2005.) Though it's not his original claim to fame, Denver is by now best-known for the 1960s situation comedy Gilligan's Island.

If you've never seen the show--which at one time would have and may still put you in a distinct minority--it's about seven people shipwrecked on an uncharted South Pacific island, each person a "type": a sea captain, i.e., skipper, a millionaire (perhaps a billionaire in today's money), his society matron wife, a movie star, a science professor, a girl-next-door type, and a fuck-up. What I find particularly interesting is how six of these seven castaways clung to their individual stereotypes despite three years spent in an island setting that made such stereotypes increasingly irrelevant, if not completely ridiculous. The sea captain no longer has a ship but still sees himself in charge; the movie star has no red carpet to walk on but still dresses as if there's paparazzi snapping photos; the millionaire flaunts his money though there's no stores on the island and the coconuts and bananas are free for the taking; the society matron looks as though she's all set to attend some charity benefit luncheon though as a shipwreck survivor marooned on an island she could probably use some charity herself; the girl-next-door type has to share her hut with the movie star, technically making the latter a girl next door, too, thus rendering the whole concept superfluous; while the science professor, though he lacks a college campus, lecture hall, and laboratory, comes closest to equaling, at times even exceeding, his former life on the mainland as he basically runs the island behind the sea captain's back and solves all sorts of problems that crop up except for the number one problem of how to get off the island, as all his book learning turns out to be no match for...

 ...the fuck-up, i.e., Gilligan. Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh. After all, even though he has his own distinct personality, Gilligan is the one castaway lacking in any pretense. He clings to nothing, guilelessly taking each day as it comes, with little concern that he may be deviating from some self-assigned role. He's a free spirit as well as a fuck-up. He may even be a fuck-up because he's a free spirit. Or vice-versa. Neither trait gets you all that far in civilized society so it may be the island is the best place for him. Perhaps all those "mistakes" that lay waste to the Professor's carefully laid plans and dooms the castaways to yet another half hour without phones, lights, or motor cars as if they were tropical Amish, is just some unconscious sabotage on Gilligan's part. Whether the aforementioned Denver, who so memorably brought Gilligan to slapstick life would agree with that, I don't know, but he shares some thoughts on his character and the show in general with Rosie O'Donnell in this clip from 1997:

Bob and Rosie talked about the two versions of Gilligan's opening credits. We'll show you both, first the black-and-white segregated version, in which there's no Professor and Mary-Ann, both having been relegated to the back of the bus closing credits, and the multi-hued desegregated version, in which the two have finally attained their equal rights:

I definitely prefer the second opening. It's much more egalitarian.

Oh, that island wasn't egalitarian at all!

Following in the footsteps of such classic fat guy-skinny guy duos as seen above, we now present to you the comedy team of...

...Denver and Hale!

I like the fact that someone set the above video to polka music. It makes that island seem like Cleveland.

...because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and
everybody goes "Awww!”

--Jack Kerouac

Mr. Kerouac may not have had Maynard G. Krebs in mind when he wrote that sentence, but I'm sure Max Shulman, creator of the TV series (and author of the book in which it was based) The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis no doubt had Kerouac in mind when he dreamed up Krebs, television's first bohemian, and Dobie's best friend. Why they should be best friends is a bit puzzling. I remember the high school I went to as being rather clique-ridden: jocks hung around with jocks, cheerleaders hung around with cheerleaders, nerds hung around with nerds, stoners hung around with stoners, and so on. Had there been beatniks in my school--it was about fifteen years too late for any to attend--I'm sure they would have hung around other beatniks and not whatever clique Dobie belonged to (the lovestruck kids who mope around Rodan sculptures clique, maybe? Except he seemed to be the only member.) I guess there's just an unwritten law of comedy that states that laughs are best mined from two best friends with nothing in common. Dobie and Maynard merely paved the way for Oscar and Felix. Anyway, if you haven't figured it out by now, Maynard was played by Denver, shooting him to fame about five years before achieving even greater fame as Gilligan:    

Somehow, the Establishment always gets the upper hand.