Tuesday, May 2, 2006

Video Follow-Up

Yesterday, I posted this video link to a Don Rickles performance and speculated it was from the early days of Showtime. Not so. Michael Kilgore informs me it's from Rickles, a 1975 CBS special with guests Jack Klugman, Don Adams, Michele Lee, James Caan, Michael Caine, Jack Palance, Elliott Gould, Bobby Riggs, Larry Linville and Loretta Swit. I vaguely remember that show. It had some excerpts from Rickles' Vegas act but it also had musical numbers of him dancing with a line of showgirls. It was very...odd.

• Posted at 9:04 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Greg Mitchell makes an interesting point on Stephen Colbert's speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner: Yeah, maybe it was tasteless...but not as tasteless as Bush's speech at the 2004 event when he joked about not finding Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.

• Posted at 9:00 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Couple of folks wrote to ask what I thought of George W. Bush's speech/skit that preceded Stephen Colbert's the other night. I thought it was actually a clever idea. I suspect that it came about because someone at the White House said to someone else, "You know, Bush is at his worst when he's trying to be funny. If only we could bring in a stunt double for him to handle the comedy..."

Bush impersonator Steve Bridges did a good job. My mother, who has vision problems, said she couldn't tell looking at the TV which Bush was the real one. George W. probably deserves some credit for going along with the bit and doing some pretty self-deprecating material. I wouldn't have thought he had it in him.

It's tempting to read some subtext into a few of the lines. Bush has pretty well demonstrated that he doesn't think much of reporters, even the ones who report things his way, and I don't think it was untrue that he would rather have been somewhere else that evening. (Later, after Colbert, that seemed even more likely.) But as Freud should have said, sometimes a joke is just a joke.

Here's the video of the routine, which runs a little under eleven minutes...

• Posted at 2:01 AM · LINK