Report to Readers: Postponing Facebook until after I've read my comics is working really well and is now official policy. Avoiding bummers turns out to be a good thing. Who knew?
Sometimes generational humor works both ways. Anybody can get a laugh at today's Pros & Cons, but some of us get a secondary snort of "Well, now, if he'd said 'James Kirk'..."
I mean, geez, this is like some woman saying her husband is Dick Sargent. Dammit, if you're going to be delusional, at least get your fantasies right.
Which reminds me that when clean-cut, handsome, clueless Dick Gautier died the other day, several people remembered his work in "When Things Were Rotten," a Mel Brooks-produced TV comedy that lasted 13 episodes.
But then someone mentioned "Quark."
Tsk. No, that was clean-cut, handsome, clueless Richard Benjamin, it was produced by Buck Henry and it only lasted eight episodes.
Apparently, they don't teach history anymore.
Deflocked salutes the final nail in the coffin, or, I suppose, the wooden stake that signals the end.
"Sesame Street" started out so rambunctiously off-the-wall that I think it was more popular among college students than among toddlers.
It premiered my junior year in college and none of us had color TVs back then, but, then again, none of us needed color TVs back then.
I saw an article the other day about young kids and tube-time, and one suggestion was that parents and toddlers watch together. It didn't say anything about binkies and bongs.
By the time I was a young father, they had ramped things down a little (and so had I), but that was the point where they should have stopped listening to Educational and Developmental Experts, because they continued to make the show less and less interesting and more and more the sort of thing that people with more than one diploma think that kids need.
And that was also about the time they began to listen to marketers, which meant that Sesame Street simply became the Powers Rangers of PBS, selling stuffed toys and T-shirts instead of action figures to their young audience.
And then they sold out to HBO, because, well, because its the Circle of Life.
Hakuna Matata Badda Bing Badda Boom
But speaking of death, and, more specifically, Death, today's Speed Bump cracked me up. As often as Death appears as a character in comics, you'd think we'd have run out of gags.
And you'd be wrong.
What I like most about Coverly's approach is that you can't quite tell which one of these guys she's messing with, or if the answer is that she's simply that vacuous. And the answer doesn't matter -- it's the question that adds to the humor.
Maybe you have to have cheated the Reaper to laff as hard as I did, and I was sure in the mood: As it happens, yesterday I was remembering the first time I went in for chemo and they had a guy playing the piano in the lobby by the cancer center to make people feel better.
As I walked in, he was playing, "You're Gonna Miss Me When I'm Gone."
As I walked out two hours later, he was playing "Are You Lonely Tonight?"
It's not that you can't make this stuff up.
It's that you don't have to.
Juxtaposition of the Day #1
Fake News has become like the weather in that everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it.
Ohman implies a dig at people who think "Young" and "Hip" are synonyms, because, while their grandparents are more apt to send emails whose subject lines include "Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd:" -- which is the secret code for "here comes some bullshit" -- the only reason hipsters don't is because they don't use email.
That doesn't mean they're smarter. It just means you can't tell how many times a piece of bullshit has been uncritically passed along on most other social media.
I would suggest that charting the credibility of posts and the age of the poster would simply tell you the percentage of each age cohort you have among your contacts.
Stupid does not discriminate by age, nor is it stymied by anyone's ease of technology.
Which segues neatly into Walters, because he's simply riffing on what intelligent people already know about the topic.
A bit futile, but, then, I'm into gallows humor, so there ya go.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
There's humor in the greatest disasters, and apparently -- to the delight of the Internet -- The Donald is having a little trouble finding a band to play at his party. Last I heard, a Springsteen tribute band had pulled out.
A tribute band.
Jeez Louise, tribute bands play at the corner tavern on wings night. You start getting shot down by tribute bands, you need to try a little mouthwash or a better deodorant or something, pal.
By the way, that's an excellent Kellyanne Conway. Sheneman catches that odd, equine imbalance in her face without being cruel.
As with Trump's silly hair and pelican chin or Obama's sticking-out ears or Bush's elfin ones, the goal is not necessarily to mock so much as it is to figure out what makes a person recognizable and then capture it.
The Republicans and their media allies do not make this easy by flooding the market with blondes and readers need to know if you've drawn Kellyanne Conway or Ann Coulter or Ivanka Trump.
Perhaps they could wear distinctive head coverings.
Never mind: They found a band
He just got Dan Nainan to do the inauguration. He's a 55-year-old stand-up comic who claims to be a millennial, and isn't even wanted at the corner tavern on wings night.
Posted by: Ignatz | 01/18/2017 at 09:04 AM
He's about five years away from being a Perennial.
Posted by: Mike Peterson | 01/18/2017 at 10:55 AM
Loved your reflections on the original Sesame Street. Remember the original Electric Company ?
Not only Rita Moreno, but Morgan Freeman (who? - at the time)as Easy Reader.
Posted by: Mary in Ohio | 01/18/2017 at 07:26 PM
I watched Electric Company even if my son was out in the yard or back in his room, but it certainly bled into our family culture. I still quote Morgan Freeman as the umpire in the Spiderman story of "The Wall" -- "I can be pretty stupid, when I want to be!" and am apt to be caught singing "My brother's mother, is my mother, too!"
Now brace yourself for a huge name drop: I was at a conference on youth issues and media and, at lunch, others were too intimidated, I guess, so I plunked myself down next to "Maria" and had a wonderful conversation with an extremely intelligent woman who I didn't have a huge crush on, of course not.
Posted by: Mike Peterson | 01/18/2017 at 07:45 PM
Re: Dick Gautier; the one actor I used to mix him up with was Dick Shaun, so I was thisclose to mentioning in a conversation his performances in "The Producers" and "It's a Mad Mad Mad World". But hey, I was a kid when those movies (and Get Smart) came out...
Posted by: Craig L | 01/18/2017 at 09:41 PM
Very impressive, Mike ! "Able to leap Capital T in a single bound !"
Posted by: Mary in Ohio | 01/19/2017 at 07:46 PM