Thursday, September 25, 2003

Herb Gardner, R.I.P.

If I were to mention a successful playwright with a background in cartooning, a lot of you would instantly think of Jules Feiffer, and that would be correct. But the description also fits Herb Gardner, author of A Thousand Clowns, I'm Not Rappoport, Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, Thieves, The Goodbye People and many others. I never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Gardner but owing to the quirky sense of humor that pervaded his work, I felt like I knew him.

In the late fifties, he wrote and drew a syndicated comic strip called The Nebbishes, which is almost forgotten today. I have a pretty good library of books on comic strip history and I'm not sure it's mentioned in any of them. I remember it being quite funny and being extensively merchandised, mostly for things like cocktail napkins and bar equipment, at a time when strips rarely appeared on items that might be bought by an adult. Around 1960, Gardner gave it up and turned to novels and then plays and screenplays.

In addition to his impressive body of known work, he is said to have done a lot of unknown scripting. Sometimes, it was a matter of secretly assisting friends. Rumor has it he wrote all or most of the funny lines in scripts credited to Bob Fosse, especially in All That Jazz. He also is supposed to have done extensive punch-ups and revisions on some other pretty famous movies and plays by strangers, but information on these is vague. Even discounting all this, he leaves behind a pretty impressive body of work.

Here's the New York Times obit.

• Posted at 10:45 PM · LINK

The Gubernatorial Debate

I TiVoed it earlier and I've just finished watching it. If I had to pick a winner, I'd probably pick Gray Davis, who wasn't even there. I can't imagine too many viewers deciding to vote for any of these people because of what they said in the debate, but I can sure imagine someone deciding we might as well stick with Gray. (Actually, Arianna Huffington may have "won" in the sense that she increased her celebrity and visibility for other purposes but she's still going to get 3% in the election.)

I think the court made the right decision not to delay the vote. The sooner we get this over with, the better. Leno missed a bet the other night by not starting his show by having a little, tiny car pull up outside and all of the candidates get out with rubber balls on their noses.

• Posted at 12:01 AM · LINK