Apparently, theories are already starting to pop up on Ye Olde Internet that Richard Jeni didn't commit suicide and was the victim of, as they say, foul play. "Foul play" is one of my favorite euphemisms for murder. It makes it sound like someone violated the Infield Fly Rule.
Two different e-mailers wanted to know if I was suggesting that when I said there was no sign that the guy might kill himself. No, I was not. I don't know anything more about it than was in the Associated Press report to which I linked. As near as I can tell, none of the speculators have any reason at all to speculate, either...which doesn't mean this might not blossom into a great tabloid news story. I mean, Anna Nicole is kind of winding down and Britney Spears has run her course. Nancy Grace and others on cable would probably love to find even the remotest justification to introduce the "m" word into this matter. Remember: You don't need to believe there's anything to a scandal in order to cover it in the news these days. You just need to be able to say "someone" thinks something might have happened.
As a quick change of partial subject, I wanted to repeat one of the funniest things I ever heard Richard Jeni say. I mentioned it back here but to save you clicking, I'll just reprint it...
A few years ago, I was in Las Vegas and I happened to catch him doing an interview on a local show there. He was talking about his appearance in the then-upcoming motion picture, Burn, Hollywood, Burn, and he said approximately the following...
Did you ever see the movie, The Player? This is the exact same movie but without the quality. This is for the discriminating filmgoer who's been wondering, "What if The Player hadn't been a very good movie?"
I thought it was the funniest, most honest thing I'd ever heard anyone say in "plugging" an upcoming film.
Boy, I don't get this one at all. They're saying stand-up comic Richard Jeni committed suicide yesterday morning. There was no apparent reason, no apparent warning sign...nothing.
He was a very funny boy. Back here, I highly recommended his latest (and I guess now, last) HBO Special. I'd still recommend just about anything he did, though it may be a little harder to laugh at it after this. He was a very simple, straightforward comedian whose act seemed derivative of no one else. It came from nothing but his own sense of humor. On stage, he projected the image of a guy who really had a sane, common sense attitude towards the world. Which I guess is one of the things that makes it hard to accept that he did what they say he did.
Last week was the 25th anniversary of the death of John Belushi, who committed his own kind of suicide with drugs and the way he lived. I thought about posting something here but didn't get around to it. If I had, it would have been about how (to me) the most tragic part of Belushi's passing was that everyone knew in advance how it would end. In fact, it wasn't necessary to even announce the cause. When it first hit the news wires, they just said that John Belushi had been found dead and everyone just kind of shrugged and assumed, "Drug overdose." Some people thought they heard the TV and radio news reports give the cause of death hours before they actually did. It was that expected.
People talking about Jeni's death are probably going to mention Belushi and also Freddie Prinze. I knew Freddie a little bit, though not well. At the time he shot himself, I was working for the outfit that produced his show, Chico and the Man, and while I don't think anyone there expected the guy to take his own life, no one seemed all that stunned that something dark and tragic occurred. The warning signs were there.
And then you have something like this. I never met Richard Jeni. I'm not sure I ever even saw him perform live, though I know that recently, when I saw he was playing the Improv in Hollywood or the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach, I thought, "Hey, maybe I'll get a group together and we'll go see him." (Let that be a lesson to me about putting things off 'til the next time.) Maybe there was a dark side that never showed itself on stage. Maybe those who knew him well aren't stunned at the news, I dunno. It's just a kick in the gut for some of us.
In case you didn't hear, Premiere magazine is shutting down. And so, after only three issues, is the new Cracked.
George S. Kaufman reportedly once said that if you wanted to get even with someone who did you wrong, you should convince them to invest heavily in new productions of Ibsen plays. I think I'll tell everyone I don't like that it's a dandy time to start a new magazine.
Robert Kagan writes that the "surge" in Iraq has been a great success, while Glenn Greenwald reminds us how Robert Kagan has been wrong about Iraq, every step of the way.
Here's another one of those cartoons I wrote that shouldn't be on YouTube but the lawyers haven't gotten around to ordering its removal. This is "Picnic Panic," which was a fifth season episode and one of the occasional all-music cartoons we did. Lorenzo Music performed the voice of Garfield and Thom Huge did the voice of Garfield's long-suffering owner, Jon. Thom also did the picnicker at the end. I wrote the lyrics and a very gifted musician named Ed Bogas wrote the tune, did the musical score (that's mostly him you hear playing) and sang for the ants. This cartoon is full of singing ants...
My buddy Jerry Beck got together a bunch of vintage Cocoa Puffs commercials that feature the voice of the great Chuck McCann. He does both Gramps and the Cocoa Puffs bird in these spots you can view over at Cartoon Brew.
March 12, 2007
