Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Briefly Noted...

Early this morn, I embedded a video of my favorite episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show. What I didn't know is that hulu, the company that hosts these videos, is not accessible outside the U.S. About a dozen folks from other lands wrote to ask which episode I'd embedded. Answer: "It May Look Like a Walnut."

In truth, there are at least a dozen episodes of that series I could have identified as my favorite and not have been fibbing by too much: The one where Laura went on the game show and told the world that Alan Brady was bald...the one where Mel Cooley was fired...the one about Buddy's practical joking...the one where the writers almost went to work for a snail...and others I could mention. But this week, the one about the walnuts is my favorite.

• Posted at 10:15 PM · LINK

Where I'll Be

This weekend, I'll be in New York, New York appearing at The National, a fine comic convention at the Hotel Pennsylvania. I'll be hosting panels on Saturday. I'll be hanging around on Sunday and maybe part of Friday. Before I return to L.A., I'll also visit publishers, go to Broadway shows, see friends...and I think I'm even going to have lunch or beverages with Fred Kaplan, whose Slate articles I'm always recommending to you. Expect intermittent reports (the hotel has lousy Internet connectivity) which should include reviews of South Pacific and Gypsy.

Then, no conventions 'til February. I'll be at the Wondercon in San Francisco from 2/27 through March first, then the next one I've said I'll attend is the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo, which is April 25-26. There may be one other in there but I think I'm getting conventioned-out, and all my good shirts are too full of holes from name badges.

• Posted at 10:42 AM · LINK

Later Wednesday Morning

Over at fivethirtyeight.com, demon number cruncher Nate Silver concludes that the success of Proposition 8 in California — the one that banned same-sex wedlock — was not, as some have concluded, due to a higher-than-usual black vote. Silver thinks it's generational. Older voters went for Proposition 8, younger ones didn't.

That makes sense and it's also encouraging. The last time Gay Marriage lost a statewide vote in California, it lost by 22 points. This time, it was a little less than 5 points. It's disappointing that it lost at all but at least things are moving in the right direction.

I have no idea how likely the various court challenges are to overturn Prop H8, as people are now calling it. (It took me a minute to figure that one out, too.) But there is something unseemly, or perhaps self-defeating, in trying to invert something that was an expression of, after all, The Will of the People. Seems to me Gay Marriage will never be a settled matter in this state until it becomes The Will of the People via a clear, inarguable victory at the polls. Maybe all the energy that's now going into blocking traffic and siccing lawyers on the matter would be better put into amassing bucks to back a proposition on the next ballot.

I don't know when that next ballot could be...but by then, a few more of the older voters will have died out. And just in case there is some merit to the theory that black turnout for Obama helped Proposition 8...well, that shouldn't be a factor next time, either. Court challenges might take just as long — and even if successful, reinstating same-sex weddings that way is merely going to muddy the issue. I'm sure there are some people out there who bought the following argument: Never mind gays getting married...the reason to vote for 8 is that we want to show those damned courts that they can't overturn our vote.

Even if only 2% of those who voted for 8 had that in mind, that's almost half the winning margin. Take that concern off the table and figure that by the next election, more older voters will be out of the mix...and it seems to me Gay Marriage could win with the electorate, no matter how much money the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints threw at it. Wouldn't that be better? The trouble with winning via legal challenges is that it becomes a victory based on technicalities, not on human enlightenment. This one deserves to win because enough people in California come to their senses, not because an attorney finds a loophole.

• Posted at 10:27 AM · LINK

Early Wednesday Morning

So it's a week after the election and we still don't know for sure where Missouri's electoral votes are going to land. A few news sites have awarded them to John McCain but most haven't...and I wonder if the ones that have would have called that state if it did matter.

It's interesting to imagine a scenario where they did. Let's say Obama won all the states Kerry won plus Iowa and Nevada, McCain took everything else except Missouri...and Missouri was still in the balance. That would put Obama at 264, McCain at 263 and the entire nation on pins and needles, waiting for Missouri to come in and declare our next President. I assume somehow they'd have sped up the counting process there and we'd have a winner by now...but maybe not.

I don't have a punch line for this or even a semi-interesting observation. I just think it's fascinating to note that this could have happened.

Anyone here see John McCain on with Jay Leno last night? I have mixed feelings about that. It's nice to see the "old" John McCain, I guess, but you'd like someone to ask him if he was really proud of the campaign he wound up running. Does he still think Obama is a socialist? Or that Obama voted to cut off funding for our troops? Is he worried about having someone who "pals around with terrorists" in the White House? Leno, of course, is not the guy to ask such questions but I hope someone will. Jay did ask if he regretted the choice of Sarah Palin and of course, McCain said no. He's proud of her and expects her to have a career on the national scene in some way. Somehow, I don't believe either part of that.

• Posted at 3:06 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

As I don't think I've mentioned here lately, I teach a Comedy Writing class down at U.S.C. once a week. We do things like read Henny Youngman jokes aloud and discuss which ones are funny and why...or we watch and critique clips or the students write assignments which we read in class. I spend a lot of time discussing my aberrant philosophies not only on how to write something but how to shepherd it through the process of reaching an audience without losing all amusement value in the process.

At today's class, we're going to watch an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show — the one I've embedded below — twice. First time through is just for enjoyment. Second time through, we'll be following it line-by-line in the script (I have copies) and we'll be pausing and discussing how this or that worked. I did this last semester and the students seemed to profit from the experience.

One reason I picked this episode, apart from it being one of the best installments of maybe my all-time favorite TV show, is that Carl Reiner wrote it and then it was performed and filmed, pretty much as written. There were very few changes made, mainly for clarity or to eliminate redundancy. During the era when I wrote sitcoms, it was pretty much assumed that the script on the first day of rehearsal was meant to be beaten and pummeled and rewritten many times, stem to stern, before it went before the cameras. In fact, if you had a great line, you learned not to put it into the script until later in the week. That way, it stood a chance of survival.

They reportedly had weeks on The Dick Van Dyke Show when the scripts underwent extensive renovation but they were not the norm. Most weeks went as this one must have, where they pretty much filmed the script the writer wrote. Here's one week when they did and things turned out fine...

• Posted at 1:07 AM · LINK

November 11, 2008 • Current • November 13, 2008