More on The Old Philosopher

There's so much more to say about Eddie Lawrence. Brad Ferguson wrote, "The New York Times obit is good, but it neglected to mention that Eddie Lawrence hosted the Three Stooges show on WPIX Channel 11 in New York for about a year in 1963-64. That's how I found him."

My pal Mark Rothman wrote a tribute to Eddie that says much the same thing I said. I offer it as independent corroboration. Mark reminds me of another of Eddie's great roles — as a burlesque comic in one of my favorite movies, The Night They Raided Minsky's.

And here's a little sample of Eddie at work. This is a special Old Philosopher record he made for disc jockeys. Enjoy…

My Latest Tweet

  • CNN has reporters in a flight simulator emulating the search for Flight 370. Makes sense since CNN is kind of a news simulator.

An Unbalanced Scale

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There's pretty much everything you need to know about the way Fox News has been covering Obamacare.  Someone went to the guy who designs their charts and said, "Okay, make sure six million looks like it's about a third of seven million."  Or more likely, they didn't have to tell him.  He works there.  He knows.  More "fair and balanced" coverage from the people who told us Mitt Romney would win in a landslide.

Monday Morning

That loud rock music you heard in the distance Saturday evening, wherever you were, came from the birthday party for our pal, Bill Steinkellner. His superb spouse Cheri arranged a good, old-fashioned sock hop at what looked like a high school gymnasium. (It was actually a Senior Center. I was amused that on the wall of the men's room, there were ads for medication to help males who are having trouble urinating. Talk about your Target Audience.) Anyway, we had a great time and no, we didn't dance. We stayed mostly outside with the non-dancers and talked with the likes of Ken Levine, Leonard and Alice Maltin, Lynne Stewart, George Wendt, Dan Castellaneta, Michael Bell and others. Great party, great people, great hot dogs.


Then last night, I had to go out to the Aero Theater in Santa Monica since I hadn't seen It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in over two weeks. The charming Karen Sharpe Kramer and Kat Kramer introduced what may be Stanley Kramer's greatest film, which the Aero was showing in tribute to the late Sid Caesar. Sid's daughter Karen also spoke, and then they ran the film which the audience thoroughly devoured and enjoyed. I was impressed because there were a lot of Mad World virgins in the house — people seeing the film for the first time. (Kat called for a show of hands in her intro. Even if she hadn't, you would have known because of all the whispering: "That's Charles Lane…" "That's Edward Everett Horton…") Naturally, I noticed things we didn't include in the commentary track on the DVD/Blu-ray set. Wish we could go back and do a commentary track for the commentary track.


Today is supposed to be the last day the Souplantation restaurants have their Classic Creamy Tomato Soup. Guess where I'm dining.


The second part of the Allan Sherman video was preempted for Breaking News about another great funnyman of the records, Eddie Lawrence. It will appear here later today. And in a day or two, I'll be posting the final chapter in the story of my grandmother's funeral. [SPOILER ALERT: We bury her.] Back to work. And soup…

Eddie Lawrence, R.I.P.

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One of my favorite comedians, Eddie Lawrence, died last Tuesday at the age of 95. If you're over the age of 50 and don't know who he was, skip down and watch the video. Yeah, he's that guy. He did other things on records besides his routine, "The Old Philosopher," but that was the classic. I own them all and they all make me laugh.

Eddie was kind of a Renaissance Man. He was an actor, both on-camera and for animation. He appeared in musicals and plays and also wrote them. He also painted, having inherited the studio of his dear friend, Zero Mostel. This obit in the New York Times will tell you a little of what he did.

I first discovered him the way I discovered one of my other heroes in the world of comedy records — on the old Soupy Sales show. Soupy would have his puppets, Pookie and Hippie, mime to records. Sometimes, it was Freberg. Sometimes, it was Lawrence. I loved the work of both men and after I got to know and work with Stan, I set my sights on Eddie. Here's a story I told once before on this blog…

It was a 1994 recording session for the cartoon series, Garfield and Friends. Ordinarily, the series was recorded wholly in Los Angeles with L.A.-based actors but the producer, Lee Mendelson, indulged me an extravagance. He let me go to New York and record a couple of episodes with talent from back there. I was there with the east coast actors while the rest of the cast was in a studio in Hollywood, the entire session connected via digital phone lines. For the day, I hired three actors I'd always wanted to work with — Arnold [Stang], Imogene Coca and Eddie "The Old Philosopher" Lawrence — and we booked a Manhattan recording studio. The studio was recommended by our L.A. recording supervisor and by coincidence, it turned out to be one where Arnold and Eddie had, decades before, recorded many Paramount cartoons.

While I was recording with Arnold, Eddie Lawrence arrived. You may not know Eddie's name but he's a wonderful character actor and comedian who did a series of much-quoted records as "The Old Philosopher." His catch-phrase was, "Hey, is that's what bothering you, Bunky?" Anyway, he and Arnold were longtime pals, and when Arnold and I were done with his cartoon and he exited the booth, he and Eddie embraced.

Then Arnold looked him in the eye and sounding as serious as Arnold Stang could possibly sound, he pointed to me and said, "Eddie, don't give this young man any trouble. He's a fine director and you just do everything he says."

Eddie promised he would. That wasn't good enough for Arnold. He added, "If you give him any crap, I'll come back here and kick your ass." Then he handed me his pager number and said, "Remember…if he gets out of line, call me and I'll come back and kick his ass." This wasn't necessary but there was one moment when Eddie was giving me a little problem and I had to threaten, "I'll call Arnold." He immediately apologized and agreed to do it the way I wanted. The power of an Arnold Stang threat.

Actually, Eddie was a dream. A few weeks earlier, I called his agent in New York and said I wanted to hire him to do one or two Garfield cartoons. Here was the deal. I told the agent, "What I really would like to do is write for the Old Philosopher. I know Eddie has always written all his own material so I don't want to offend him. If he doesn't want anyone else writing for that character, I absolutely understand. I'll just write a different kind of Garfield cartoon and have him play a role, just so I can meet him and say I worked with him. If, however, he is willing to trust me, I'll do two cartoons with the Old Philosopher character and we'll pay him twice as much."

The agent said, "I don't know…Eddie is really protective of that character."

I said, "Tell him I know his work backwards and forwards. Tell him I will send him the material in advance…which is something I've never done for anyone else in six years of this show. Tell him I will overwrite the monologues. I'll write them 50% longer and he can cut the jokes he doesn't like or reword them or whatever he wants."

She said she'd check with him. The next day, she called me back and said, "Eddie says he'll do the two episodes with the Philosopher…but I'll warn you. He's going to be really fussy about the material." We verbally "shook" on the deal and a week later, I sent the scripts to her to pass on to Eddie.

I was packing for the New York trip when the phone rang. On the other end was the unquestionable voice of Eddie Lawrence and he said, "Mark, you have been listening to my records." I would love to be able to tell you that he did everything I wrote just as I wrote it but in fact, we spent about a half hour then and another half hour after I got to New York fiddling with the jokes. Which was fine with me. I wrote two Old Philosopher routines for Eddie Lawrence and I am a happy man because of it.

I am not, however, happy that when he invited me to go to lunch with him and see Zero Mostel's studio, I had to decline because I had a plane to catch, nor am I happy that on subsequent visits to Manhattan, I never got around to rescheduling that lunch and tour. But we spoke a few times on the phone later. Some of the stories he told me are in the great interview he did with my pal, Kliph Nesteroff. Here's Eddie at work…

Recommended Reading

Nicholas Kristof suggests this country save some money by eliminating five public welfare programs. But of course, they won't be eliminated…because they're welfare for the wealthy.

Carl Today

Here's a nice little profile of Carl Reiner and what he's up to these days. It makes the usual mistake of thinking Larry Gelbart worked on Your Show of Shows but we've all come to expect that by now.

Carl talks about the 1973 compilation movie, Ten From Your Show of Shows. The Cinefamily group here in Los Angeles, which shows interesting films at the old Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax, will be running Ten From Your Show of Shows on April 4 and 5 as a tribute to Sid Caesar. The April 4th screening, which will be hosted by Mel Brooks, is sold out. Seats seem to still be available for April 5th. I'll be at the April 4 event so I'll give you a full report…but I can tell you in advance that people will be laughing a lot and Mel will tell the story about Sid trying to pull the cab driver out through the little window of his taxi.

Today's Video Link

In January of 1965, on the day before Lyndon Johnson was sworn in for his full term as president, I saw a great special on TV. It was called Allan Sherman's Funnyland and it starred Allan Sherman and his guests Lorne Greene, Jack Gilford and Angie Dickinson. As I've written here, I loved Allan Sherman when I was a kid. I still do in many ways.

In that pre-VCR era, I recorded the audio of the show (which aired but once) on my reel-to-reel tape recorder and played it over and over and over. At some point, I lost that tape but it almost didn't matter: I had the show committed to memory. A few years ago, someone sent me a DVD of it so I could see and hear it again…and I still thought it was a pretty good special. Someone has posted a couple of chunks of it on YouTube and here's one. I'll post another one tomorrow…

VIDEO MISSING

Lorenzo Semple Jr., R.I.P.

Writer Lorenzo Semple Jr. has died at the age of 91. A lot of folks reading this will recognize him as the main writer behind the Batman TV show of the sixties…and he did many other things, as this obit will tell you. I was not a fan of that show (or what it did to the public image of comic books) but Mr. Semple had a splendid body of work and he deserves to be celebrated for it…and for things other than Batman.

Anthony Tollin sent me a link to the obit. And Anthony Fiske sent me a question to ask why Semple is being billed as the "creator of Batman" in some reports. Well actually, I think they say he was the creator of the TV series, which is also not the proper phraseology. The Writers Guild has changed the rules from time to time but generally now, the person who writes the bible and pilot for a new series based on pre-existing material — which is what Semple did for Batman — gets the credit, "Developed for television by…" It was a little less formalized back when the show went on.

Friday Evening

We had a 5.1 earthquake here in Los Angeles earlier. Where I was, it felt weaker than the 4.4 we had eleven days ago, though it lasted a lot longer. No damage here.

The earthquake hit at 9:09 PM. It dawned on me that if it had hit between 7 PM and 8 PM, Bill Maher would have been on live doing his Real Time show…which would have been interesting. Maher would have probably yelled "Damn fracking" as he and his guests dove under the table.

And by the way: Every time one of these things hits while the news is on live, people make fun of the way the news folks reacted. Ever been on a live TV stage and seen how many lights and other equipment you have dangling over your head? It's not a place you want to be during a quake. I was once…and while none of the lights fell, a lot of dirt and other minor debris fell on us.

Voting Day

willeisnerawards

Time is running out to cast your ballot for this year's Will Eisner Comic Awards Hall of Fame. Like, you have until Monday. If you're a professional in the comic book industry — defined as writers, artists, colorists, letterers, editors, publishers, retailers, scholars and librarians — you're qualified to vote. Go here to do your duty.

Colbert Rapport

One of the dumber controversies flaring today is one that concerns a bit Stephen Colbert did on his show last night about racial stereotypes. And the outraged folks — the ones pushing #CancelColbert as a Twitter hashtag — aren't even upset about the routine but about a Twitter excerpt from it. Here's Brittney Cooper making the case for the offended and Mary Elizabeth Williams making the case that the offended shouldn't be offended. I rarely agree with Ms. Williams' articles about the TV business but I'm with her on this one. And I would think the chances of Comedy Central canceling The Colbert Report are about the same as the chances of McDonald's dropping french fries from their menu.

Tales From Costco #10

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This will probably amuse about six people but since I'm one of them and it's my blog, here it is. At first, it may not sound like a Tale From Costco but be patient. We'll get there.

We all have silly little words and phrases that inexplicably make us laugh. One of mine came from a comedy writer named Fred Rosenberg who, alas, is no longer with us. There are a number of Fred Rosenbergs alive and working in the entertainment industry but not the one who did the great impression of comedian Jack Carter.

It was a really dumb impression — that was kind of the point of it — but Fred did it every time I was around him and I always found it funny. He wouldn't replicate Carter's voice but he'd mimic the man's posture and frantic onstage manner. (For those of you who came in late to comedy: Jack Carter was a popular comic of the fifties and sixties, often seen on The Ed Sullivan Show and any other venue that booked stand-ups.)

Jack Carter

So Fred would do this inane impression and it consisted of one line out of Carter's act. This is from around 1962…

These kids today with their dances! They do the Mashed Potato! They do the Baked Potato!

(And again, to translate for these kids today: The Mashed Potato was a dance somewhat like The Twist. There was probably a dance called the Baked Potato somewhere but Carter's joke was based on the assumption that there wasn't…and wasn't it absurd to think there might be? That's part of why Fred's impression was so funny to me, hauling out that silly line.)

Anyway, I laughed whenever Fred did the impression and to this day when I see mashed potatoes somewhere, I am often reminded of Fred's portrayal and I laugh. Yesterday afternoon, I was in Costco. I put a rotisserie chicken in my cart. I put a packaged Kosher-for-Passover turkey breast in my cart. I put four large bags of Arm & Hammer Baking Soda in my cart. I put a case of organic chicken broth in my cart. I put a case of canned cat food in my cart. I did not put either a large package of paper towels or toilet paper in my cart and I was wondering if they'd let me out of the building without one.

And then I spotted a big package of prepared mashed potatoes on display and it made me think of Fred Rosenberg's Jack Carter impression and I laughed. It's been more than twenty years since I last saw Fred but I heard his voice in my head and I laughed out loud. Other shoppers looked at me strangely but I didn't care.

One elderly gent who glared at me was driving around on one of those little scooters that Costco provides for shoppers who can't walk. He stared at me as if to say, "What's that idiot laughing about?" And I stared at him and thought, "Hey, I know who that is…" And I swear to God — it was Jack Carter.

Today's Video Link

Can you identify the 43 cartoon show themes in this video? I couldn't.

From the E-Mailbag…

A reader of this site who asked to remain nameless sent the following…

I feel the need to thank you for your articles about your family and in particular about the loss of your father and mother. I am going through this right now. I am about your age I think and I do not know how long my mother will be with me. She is spending more time in the hospital than at home and I am at a loss as to what to do for her. If you have any advice, I would love to hear it. Perhaps you could post this on your site and answer it so I will not be the only one to benefit from it.

Well, I think the main thing to remember is that your mother needs an advocate and a pair of legs. If she's going to the hospital a lot, she needs someone to take care of her home and affairs. It's easy to neglect bills and such when you're being shuttled off to see doctors and reside in a hospital often. But she also needs you to be around to help her be in the hospital.

Between my father and my mother, I became an expert at coping with the Kaiser Hospital to which they both went. (My father died at Kaiser. My mother died at another hospital, a few blocks from the nursing home in which I placed her.) I learned my way around Kaiser. I learned which departments handled what services. I learned shortcuts and ways into restricted areas. I learned to understand to the extent humanly possible, the bureaucracy in the place — which person could overrule which person, which person could make things hurry up, etc. I learned where the vending machines were and how to get a prescription filled, a.s.a.p. instead of waiting hours.

One of the main things I did for my parents was to go in and make friends with everyone. I was never rude or unpleasant with any hospital employee but I learned the nice way to say that I thought they needed to do more or do it sooner. These people spend their lives getting yelled at by angry/terrified people who don't understand the reality of a hospital's organization or how each person has limits on what they are allowed to do. That nurse may not be authorized to give the patient a sedative, for instance, and it doesn't do a lick of good to shout at her or make threats or demands. They're very appreciative when you understand their problems and you say things like, "I know you aren't empowered to do this for my mother…can you point me in the direction of someone who is?"

I was familiar with some of the senior officials of the hospital and I was shameless in dropping their names. When lower-grade staffers took care of my mother, I wanted them to know that I knew their bosses. It would have been counter-productive to say something assholish like, "If you don't do such-and-such, I'm going straight to Dr. Wasserman and get you fired!" Hysterical Loved Ones do that all the time and it doesn't help. It really doesn't. It makes hospital employees want to avoid you, not extend themselves. So I didn't do that…but it sure didn't hurt to let them know I knew Dr. Wasserman and would at some point be speaking to him.

I learned to carry a notebook with me (later, my iPad) and to jot down the names and titles and direct phone lines of everyone I dealt with and everyone to whom I was referred. I had special business cards printed. My regular business card is kinda fancy and it has a caricature of me on it — a drawing done by the legendary Al Hirschfeld. I even have three NINAs in my hair. Cute card for business reasons…distracting in this context.

I had another, simpler one printed that just has my name, my phone number and my e-mail address in large, easy-to-read letters with no frills. When I took my mother into the hospital, I would pass the simpler one around to everyone who had contact with her and tell them, "Call me at any hour if I can do anything for her." And I'd leave a small pile of the cards next to my mother's bed. Those were of great help. Even when they never resulted in anyone calling me, they reminded all that the patient had someone keeping an eye on her…someone who might complain if she didn't get the best possible attention.

Another tip: Have one phone number. The number on my cards and all the forms I filled out at the hospital had my home number. When I was out, especially when my mother was in the hospital, I put my phone number on call-forwarding to my cell phone. So they could call the number I'd given them and always reach me.

It helped that they knew me. Often, a new nurse would come on duty, I'd go meet her and she'd say, "Oh, the nurse on the night shift told me you were so funny and helpful." Exactly the reaction I wanted! One time, my mother was taken in by ambulance without me being around. She phoned me from the hospital and told me where she was. I said, "I'll be right over." She said, "Good. You need to walk around and make all the nurses laugh and make them all think I'm someone special because I'm your mother." I laughed and I thought, "Yeah, I guess that's pretty much what I do."

My mother would help that along by telling every single Kaiser employee she encountered, "My son does the Garfield cartoons for TV." Actually, late in her life, she for some reason took to asking each nurse and orderly what their favorite cartoon show was…or if applicable, their kids' favorite cartoon show. And whatever they answered, she'd tell them, "Oh, my son writes that show." I walked in one time and a nurse said to me, "Oh, so you're the person who writes SpongeBob SquarePants."

I'd never seen the show but you can't make a liar out of your own mother…so I'd say, "Yeah, sure." The nurse then said to me, "I watch that show every day with my kids. Which is your favorite character to write?"

I said, "Uh…why, SpongeBob, of course!" When I was away from her a few minutes later, I hauled out my iPad, found the Wikipedia page on SpongeBob and learned some things about him in case I needed to engage in further bluffing. (Another nurse who found me charming had given me the password to the hospital's non-public — and therefore, much faster — Wi-Fi.)

Maybe you can't convince a SpongeBob fan that you write SpongeBob but you can find some reason they'll remember who you are. It could just be that you're unusually polite and congenial.

One time, I used my cartoon connections to get my mother a special consultation with a hospital ophthalmologist but I've told that story here already. I'll close this with one other incident though but first, let me summarize: You need to be there for your parent or other hospitalized person. You need to be around and to let the hospital staff know you'll be around and that you understand what they can and cannot do.

You need to cut through the Red Tape and navigate the infrastructure and hierarchy of the building. (I also learned where the employee parking lot was. More than once when I was having trouble reaching someone through official channels and I knew they were out to lunch, I'd get myself a sandwich, go down and wait in their parking space for them to return.) And you need to learn to do all this while still being a reasonable, friendly human being.

Now then. A final story…

One Sunday, my mother was ready to go home from the hospital. She was eager to get out of there and impatient that the paperwork to spring her had not been processed. "I want to be home in my own bed," she said over and over. I went to the nurse — who of course was on my side — and she said, "The only person who can expedite that is the Charge Nurse and she's not around at the moment." So I went in search of the elusive Charge Nurse. For an hour, I ran all over Kaiser Medical Center looking for her, being told, "Oh, she was here but she just went down to X-Ray" or "You just missed her…she went to the cafeteria to get some lunch." Inspector Javert did not pursue Jean Valjean with half the fervor of me searching for that damned Charge Nurse.

Finally, a nurse I'd made laugh several times phoned me on my cell and told me where to find the fugitive Charge Nurse. I rushed to that location with a sense of "Now I've got her" and a determination that I would not take no or even "in a little while" for an answer. I was relentless. I was unflinching. I was resolute.

And then I spotted the Charge Nurse. A lot of the nurses at Kaiser wore these colorful scrubs decorated with flowers or cartoon characters. The Charge Nurse was wearing one covered with pictures of Garfield. I did a drawing of Odie for the woman and had my mother out of that place in ten minutes.

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Sometimes, it's just so easy.