Paul Maher, R.I.P.

I recently found out that Paul Maher died in January of this year at the age of 62. I am not surprised. In fact, I'm surprised he made it that far.

I'd lost track of Paul over the years and the last time I saw him — it must have been eight years ago at least at Comic-Con — he was sick and barely able to walk. He was selling pieces from his vast collection of memorabilia to raise money for the next in a long series of operations…and I made two observations about him.

One was that no matter how bad things got for him — and they got pretty bad at times — he remained at least outwardly optimistic. The next operation would be the one that would not only save his life but put him back to some amount of good health again. Just as he'd been convinced that the operation before that would make everything right and the operation before that and the one before that…

The other noteworthy observation came when I tried to purchase a few things, partly because I wanted them but partly to help his cause. All his adult life, Paul was a maniacal collector. By that, I mean he had to have everything relating to his chosen mania, which was Children's Television, and he had to have multiple copies. I kept taking cash out of my wallet and Paul kept trying to give me the items for nothing because he knew they'd be going to someone who loved and appreciated them.

This is a man who, let's remember, was trying to raise money for an operation he believed would save his life. I had to force payment on him…and even then, he insisted on giving me discounts off the marked prices.

Paul Maher loved cartoons, kid shows, anything for kids. He had a special place of worship in his heart for folks like Sheriff John and Engineer Bill and other hosts of local kids' shows when he was growing up.

He would go anywhere and spend anything, including money he didn't have, to accrue such items, all in furtherance of his goal.  That was to somewhere, someday have a Museum of Children's Television. It would be nice to think that had he not had to deal with the stark reality of a bad heart, that dream would be open and operating somewhere today.

paulmaher01
Mr. and Mrs. Walter Lantz and Paul Maher

Paul was for a time a professional mime and puppeteer. For a while there, he worked up at the Universal Studios Tour, playing Charlie Chaplin for tourists and posing with them for photos. Interesting story how he got the gig: He took the tour one time and noted that in the post-tour area where the patrons milled and saw exhibits, there was a guy staggering about dressed as the Frankenstein Monster. There was a woman dressed like Marilyn Monroe. There were other Hollywood icons but no Chaplin.

Having decided that would be his new career, at least for a while, Paul found his way to the fellow at Universal who could hire such a person and made his case. He was turned down.

"No" had an interesting definition to Paul Maher. It more or less meant, "Not now, you'll have to try harder."  He went home, devised a Chaplin suit for himself and the next day, he reported for a job he did not have. This meant stuffing the Chaplin outfit in a satchel, going up to Universal and paying to ride the tour…and then after the tour, when he got to the post-tour area, he'd go to the men's room, change into Charlie and spend the rest of the day tramping about, performing and posing.

After a few weeks, someone at Universal noticed that their Chaplin impersonator was a big hit and decided to find out who'd had the bright idea to hire him. It turned out no one had.  Security guards hauled him off to an office where he was interrogated, threatened with arrest…and ultimately hired.

A few years later, he turned up at Hanna-Barbera, which is where I met him.  His bio (link somewhere below) says he was there six years but I recall it more like six months. With the same kind of perseverance that got him the Chaplin gig, he pestered Bill Hanna into creating a position for him: Librarian/Archivist. There are many stories about why he was let go but they pretty much came down to his becoming obsessed with rescuing Hanna-Barbera history from its warehouse and storage rooms.  He took his mission way too far, overstepping his bounds and displeasing Mr. Hanna.

He had more longevity when he landed a similar position with Walter Lantz, the then-retired producer of Woody Woodpecker and other cartoons. Lantz had tons of material in storage and Paul organized and catalogued it all…and wound up owning crates of Woody Woodpecker toys and dolls and comic books, most of them autographed.

Every time he came across an artifact of Children's Television, he wanted it signed by everyone with even a tenuous connection to the show or characters depicted.  When he found out I'd worked on Scooby Doo, he started bringing me boxes of Scooby Doo merchandise to sign.  He'd hand me a Scooby doll and I'd say, "Paul, I had nothing to do with the design or manufacture of this doll."  He'd say, "You wrote his comic book and TV show.  Please sign it."  He would call Daws Butler or June Foray or some other great of the animation or kidvid fields and ask if he could drop by and get "some things" signed. Paul was a hard guy to refuse even though when he did show up, he'd have hundreds of items for them to write on.

At one point, he told me he had over 3,000 Woody Woodpecker comic books — multiple copies of many — all autographed by Mr. Lantz. He also had thousands of similarly-autographed toys. If you were ever wondering what Walter Lantz did in his last years, there's your answer: He wrote his name on things for Paul Maher.

In 1980, I helped him organize a one day event — a Festival of Children's Television at the Bonaventure Hotel downtown. It was a benefit for the L.A. Children's Hospital — a day of films and talks and appearances by former kid show hosts and folks in animation.  Paul did a great job with the P.R. and a great job rounding up guests and exhibits and it was an amazing gathering.  Alas though, it didn't raise much money for the hospital and it didn't get enough attention to bring forth a backer for the museum he had in mind to build, which was more or less the reason Paul did it.  More on that museum idea in a moment.

Then not long after that, he bought Walt Disney's garage.

According to Disney history, when Walt moved to Southern California in July of 1923, he lived with an uncle in a house at at 4406 Kingswell Avenue in the Los Feliz area. Walt's original idea was to find some way to break into the moving picture business and when he had no immediate success, he decided to make his own. In the rear of his uncle's home was a one-car garage and in it, he set up a small animation studio. It had to be small because the garage was very tiny.  After a while, he moved the operation into a room in a real estate office a few blocks away.

One day in 1981, Paul Maher was looking at slides of historical landmarks and he saw a photo of the garage, which to him was "The first Walt Disney studio." Some would insist that Walt's first studio was back in Kansas, and the current Disney Studio more or less recognized the realty office as its founding location.  Still, one could say that garage was Walt's first studio, at least in California.

disneygarage01

Paul did not live far away so he went to the address and discovered that the house was being renovated and that the garage was slated for demolition. Instantly, he decided it had to be saved and he had to be the one to do it.  He located the owner and offered to buy the garage and move it. The owner agreed to a selling price of $6400, which is what it would cost to build a new garage in its place some day…but Paul also had to agree to lease the house for several years. He didn't have that kind of money but he signed the deal anyway and moved in.  The garage would remain at that address as long as he did.

For over a year, Paul tried to stay afloat in a house he couldn't afford as he tried to use the garage to attract someone or some group with money. His first choice was that they would finance his dream — a Museum of Children's Television with him as the curator, his collection as the core of the exhibits and Walt Disney's First Studio (arguably) as the star attraction. As his financial situation got more precarious, he began to focus on his second-choice dream: Selling the garage to someone who'd pay him a lot of money for it and put in on display somewhere appropriate.

That didn't happen, either. He called newspapers and sent out press releases and bombarded people at Disney and…well, there were no offers.

One day in the midst of this, I gave into Paul's urging and went over to see the place. He sat me down in this home he couldn't afford and told me more about the museum.  In his mind, he was but months from breaking ground on it and all the stuff in that house — crates and crates of photos and comic books and coloring books and toys and records — would be on display there. Then he took me out back to show me the garage. It was small and very old and there was nothing about it to indicate that either Walter Elias Disney or even any animation equipment had ever been inside. Once we were, Paul said, "I'll leave you alone in here for a while" and he went back into the house.

I thought he was making a phone call or using the bathroom or something…but after twenty minutes, I went back in there and found him doing paperwork. "Done already?" he asked.

"What did you think I was doing out there?" I asked.

He looked at me like I'd asked a very stupid question and he answered, "Meditating." Then he explained that Disney artists and fans had been coming by and asking if they could just stand out in the garage — there was nothing on which to sit — and try to somehow get in touch with the spirit of Walt Disney or the greatness of the cartoons that had begun in that sacred building…or something.

I said, "It's an old garage."

I didn't mean that in a bad way. That's simply what it was: An old garage. It was perhaps a historically significant old garage but it was still an old garage. We went into the house, Paul showed me more of his latest acquisitions in the area of animation collectibles, and then I went home.

Soon after, he revved up his P.R. skills again to publicize an auction of the garage with a minimum bid of $10,000. He told me he expected to clear ten times that but he didn't. There were no bids at all. Soon after though, a group of Disney fans raised and offered $8500 and Paul took it, broke his lease on the house and moved out. At great expense, the garage was removed from its foundation and relocated to a storage facility while he and its purchasers looked for a suitable place to exhibit it.

I kept getting updates from him. One day, he phoned to report the garage was going to be in a special exhibit at Disneyland. Then he called me a week later to say it was going to be on the Disney Studios lot somewhere near the Animation Building. Wherever it went, that would only be its temporary location. It would eventually stand in the Museum of Children's Television. The garage eventually wound up at the Stanley Ranch Museum in Garden Grove, which is operated by the Garden Grove Historical Society. As far as I know, it's still there, just a few miles from Disneyland.

Paul wound up working for a time as a caretaker or manager or in some capacity at the Wattles Mansion, which is a huge, preserved home in Hollywood that is the centerpiece of a park. It's a cultural monument used for film locations and private functions. At no point has it ever been turned into a Museum of Children's Television as Paul had hoped.  At some point, he and his collection moved to Las Vegas.

In the nineties, he suffered an aortic aneurysm and began devoting his entire life to saving his entire life. He had a series of operations and treatments and that's when he began selling off items he'd earmarked for the dreamed-of museum. He died (like I said) earlier this year and his estate is still selling off remnants of that wonderful collection.

You can read more about Paul Maher at this site. I really liked the guy. Even people who thought he was pushy when he expected them to autograph hundreds of comic books and toys liked Paul…for the most part.

His heart, faulty though it was, was always in the right place even if his enthusiasm never quite found its proper location. It was so sad to see him devote so much time and energy and what little cash he ever had to further a dream that never materialized. It was even sadder to see him after his medical problems had made it difficult to walk and talk and he was getting by on sheer determination. Fortunately, he had a lot of it.

Oh — and an awful lot of Woody Woodpecker toys signed by Walter Lantz. I hope they found good homes. Paul would have been happy to know that.

More on Maher

A P.S. on the Bill Maher/Politically Incorrect riff I posted an hour ago.  Two months ago, demon broadcaster Paul Harris did a good interview on this topic with Mr. Maher.  You can hear excerpts from this on-line at Paul's website.  If you're interested, go do this.

Kid Vid

I am now about to cause some of you to spend a lot of time on a webpage other than mine.

Less than a year ago here, I told you about an old pal of mine, a large-hearted, industrious gent named Paul Maher. Paul was a devout fan of entertainment that fell under the general classification of "children's television" and he died some time back without realizing his dream, which was to erect a museum devoted to such material. He spent much of his life amassing artifacts and material for his dream.

One of the things Paul did was to videotape — at a time when that was not as easy to do as it is now — interviews with folks who'd worked in children's television, mostly in animation. Someone has put a number of his interviews online on this page, including long ones with Don Messick and Larry Harmon, and shorter ones with folks like Paul Winchell, Alex Lovy, Ward Kimball and Grim Natwick. Not all of his subjects' names are spelled correctly. I haven't watched them all yet but on the ones I've watched, the voice you'll hear asking the questions is Paul's.

Those of you interested in comic book history may be especially interested in his chats with Pete Alvarado and Owen Fitzgerald. Because they worked almost exclusively on comics that didn't have credits, both are not as well-known as they should be. They were among the most prolific comic book illustrators of their time, especially Pete, who I wrote about here.

Owen may have been the fastest comic book artist I ever worked with — and yes, that's including Jack Kirby and Sergio Aragonés. Among the many comics he drew were the early issues of DC's Adventures of Bob Hope and for long periods, he ghosted the Dennis the Menace comic books and Sunday pages for Hank Ketcham. I worked with Pete on Gold Key comics and with both men at Hanna-Barbera and since both have passed, I'm so glad Paul shot these videos of them.

Make a point of watching at least the beginning of Owen's video. He draws Alvin of Alvin and the Chipmunks and as you'll see, he doesn't approach the drawing the "normal" way, which would be to rough in the head shape and then place the features. When he drew — and I saw him do this — he would just start anywhere, almost at random. Sergio sometimes does that and Kirby did, too. Most other artists cannot.

Another odd thing about Owen: He could draw anything as long as he couldn't see it. At Hanna-Barbera, he was constantly being handed model sheets and drawings of new characters he would have to draw and he would look at them, put them away and draw the characters perfectly from memory. He could not do it with the model sheet in front of him. Just an amazing talent.

Paul shot videos of many amazing talents. Go browse the page and if you can, drop something in their donation box. I'm not sure who's running things there but if they're carrying on Paul's work, they deserve your support. In fact, while you're over on that site, go to the main page, click on one of the characters there and you'll see the kind of things Paul collected.

Chucko the Clown, R.I.P.

As if losing Lloyd Thaxton wasn't bad enough, another legend of Los Angeles TV has left us. Charles Runyon had a great run (1955-1964) as Chucko the Birthday Clown on KABC and KTTV (Channels 7 and 11, respectively). Chucko was a superstar of local birthday party gigs before Channel 7 hired him, probably inspired by the successes of Bozo and other clowns as kids' show hosts. They called in every performer they could locate in that profession — there were a lot of them back then — for a huge audition…and Runyon won.

His show changed formats and time slots often but most of the time, it was a big, on-air birthday party for a studio full of kids born on that date. For a time, it was on at 7 AM and done live, so you can imagine what parents had to do to get their birthday kids up and dressed and down to the KABC studios in time for the broadcast.

What I remember of it: Chucko himself was delightful but he ran crummy cartoons — mostly aged Paul Terry shorts with Farmer Al Falfa — and not very many of them per hour. The bulk of his show was frequently too much about the kids to hold my attention.

I had little interest in watching a bunch of children my age showing their stage fright as they answered pointless questions about how old they were, if they had any pets, what they wanted to be when they grew up, etc. I had even less interest in watching them play games. Every so often though, Chucko would sing a song or do a skit or interview a grown-up guest and when he did that stuff, he was funny and fun. I recall him being enormously clever when props would fail or things would otherwise go wrong and he'd ad-lib his way around the calamity. It was one of those shows — like the one Soupy Sales did in, I think, the same studio at KABC — where you could often hear the crew convulsed with laughter as the host improvised madly.

As this obit notes, Chucko left local TV in '64. I remember a friend's parents tried to book him to appear at a weekend birthday party around then, only to discover that he was booked solid for months and that his price was rather steep. A year or two later, he affiliated with Jungleland, an amusement park out in Thousand Oaks where one could ride on rides and see a lot of live animals. Jungleland was suffering financially when he signed on and his presence reportedly gave it a big boost but wasn't enough to save the failing enterprise. (It was hurt by a rash of bad publicity. A black panther escaped and terrorized the neighborhood and later, Jayne Mansfield's son was mauled by a lion there.)

When the place closed down in '69, Runyon moved to Oregon. Years later, the great comic book artist Carl Barks moved to the same town, to a home about two blocks from the Runyons. There is however no evidence that the two men, who accounted for a lot of happy hours in my childhood, ever met.

In the eighties, a couple of folks I know — producer-writer Bruce Kimmel and kids' TV historian Paul Maher — assembled a loving tribute to the kids' show hosts of Los Angeles TV…a special called Weekday Heroes. The segment on Chucko the Birthday Clown will tell you more about this fine entertainer than I ever could. Here it is. That's Tony Dow of Leave it to Beaver acting as host…

VIDEO MISSING

ASK me: Comedians Live!

Jess Wainwright wrote to ask me this:

I can't find it on your blog now but I know I read it somewhere that one should never judge a comedian by five minutes on some talk show. You said you need to see them live and in person doing a long set. Can you tell us some of the comedians you've been impressed with seeing them live like that and maybe some who were less than impressive?

Sure. I can't find where I said that either just now but the example I probably gave was Sam Kinison. I thought he was awful on TV, even on HBO where he could cuss as much as he liked. A couple times though, my buddy Len Wein and I went to see Sam at the Comedy Store. He had an impact live that simply did not come through over television and he needed to take his time and not try to get a laugh every thirty seconds. He would tell these long, rambling stories that were always worth the wait to get to the part where he was riotously funny.

But it always had to be in something of an intimate room. The last time I saw him in person was in the big showroom at Bally's. The room was too big for him and the crowd was too drunk. A lot of his on-time stage was taken up with the crowd imitating his famous screams and Sam screaming back at them. It made me think of one time when Steve Martin was asked why he'd given up performing stand-up. He said something like — this is not an exact quote — "My act turned into forty minutes of the audience yelling my catch-phrases at me!"

I never saw Martin perform on a stage but here's a partial list of comics I have seen in long, live sets: Jay Leno, George Carlin, Robert Klein, Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, Jim Jefferies, Lewis Black, Ricky Gervais, Paula Poundstone, Bill Maher, Marc Maron, Richard Lewis, Richard Jeni, Dennis Miller, Jackie Mason, Rita Rudner, Bill Kirchenbauer, Jeff Altman, Louis Anderson, Mike Birbiglia, Roseanne Barr, Louis C.K., Robin Williams, Paul Rodriguez, Paul Mooney, Gallagher, Don Rickles, Shelley Berman, Bob Newhart, David Spade, Richard Belzer and at least another twenty I'm forgetting.

Less than impressive? Roseanne Barr didn't get a laugh the time I saw her and it was, of course, all our fault. Dennis Miller (and this was before he got political) rattled off a lot of old hunks I knew from his HBO specials with the attitude of "Can I get my check and get outta here?" Jackie Mason was brilliantly funny the first time I saw him. He was dreadful — and filled with a lot of hate for certain people he talked about — the second time.

Rickles was awful the first time I saw him. It was during a period of his life when he was trying to put insult comedy behind him and to do mostly song and dance. He also spent much of his time on stage scolding us like children for not understanding that Frank Sinatra was the greatest human being who ever walked the Earth with Jesus Christ a distant second. The second time I saw him, he was back to Classic Rickles and it was much better but still not quite up to the legend.

Mr. Belzer left me untickled, as did Mr. Spade. Maybe those were just off nights. I saw Maher being not too impressive when he was new and I saw him be much, much better later.

My two favorites who are touring these days are Jim Jefferies and Lewis Black. And I didn't put him on the list above but the most I ever laughed in my life was one night in the mid-seventies at (I think) the Troubadour over on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was one of the last times Albert Brooks ever did stand-up and I can still make myself laugh by repeating a few well-remembered lines from that show to myself. If I think of some more, I'll post a follow-up to this answer.

ASK me

Science Fiction

I generally like Bill Maher's show but I have a big reservation: Maher's promotion of — shall we say — "questionable science." He does a good job debunking bogus political arguments and "facts," then turns around and promotes theories of health that have about as much credibility as those who claim Barack Obama is a gay Commie Infiltrator born in Kenya.

Last Friday night, he had on a man Samir Chachoua who claims to have found a cure for AIDS that's being supressed by the medical establishment. Our chum Paul Harris does a good job summarizing the segment and why the man's claims are not to be believed. He also directs us to this article by David Gorski who goes into greater detail. It's very disappointing that Maher doesn't apply the same skepticism to wild medical and science claims that he does to things said by Donald Trump.

Today's Political/Medical Commentary

Though I neither have nor ever wanted children, I am interested in all the anti-vaccination arguments. If nothing else, it's interesting how so many people, as with the Climate Change debate, will place emotional feelings — what they want to have be true — ahead of or on an equal footing with overwhelming scientific consensus.

There's a certain kind of skepticism towards What The Experts Say that is healthy and which should be encouraged. Where I have a problem with Skeptics sometimes is when they start with — and refuse to budge off the presumption — that the Popular Opinion or the government's position are lies just because they're the Popular Opinion or the government's position. Many lifetimes ago, I spent some time amongst Kennedy Assassination Buffs who were willing to consider absolutely any theory of J.F.K.'s killing — a few even involving Martians — as long as it wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald as lone assassin.

That one was off the table. It was automatically wrong because "they" believed it. If you asked some of these folks what day it was, they would have checked the newspaper, seen it said Monday and then told you, "It's any day but Monday. You're a fool if you think it's Monday!" I thought some of them just felt hipper and smarter than the masses if they didn't believe what the masses believed. Personally, I think that it's fine to believe Popular Opinion is wrong but you need a better reason than just that it's Popular Opinion.

I can imagine a rational anti-vaccination argument. Some doctors (probably a lot more than a few) could come to the conclusion that a given vaccination is ineffective or has bad side effects that outweigh its benefits. At least on the cable news shows, I'm not hearing any of those. They seem to be trotting out parents who think that if their kids never get a shot, they'll never get a sickness. Or you get the old "If the government says so, it's wrong" argument. We should remind those people that it's the government that tells us what day to vote. Maybe that'll make them go to the polls a week too late to cast ballots.

My friend Paul Harris has announced he will never watch Bill Maher again due to Maher's anti-vaccine statements. I don't know if Paul saw the show last night when Maher seemed to be walking back certain of his assertions on this topic but I share some of Paul's view. I haven't reached the stage yet of not watching but I do think people should be getting their medical advice from doctors they trust — preferably, in one-on-one relationships — rather than from talking heads on cable channels. Hell, I'd even concede that Bill Maher's advice could be absolutely right for Bill Maher's body. That doesn't mean it's right for everyone who tunes in his show because they think he's funny.

Recommended Reading

Paul Waldman writes about the lack of great Conservative novelists and humorists and I think he's on to something. I don't necessarily buy the explanations of why artists are more prone to Liberalism but I do think it's true. And I can't get near this topic without hauling out my old line about how doing comedy from a right-wing viewpoint would be like trying to write a Marx Brothers movie and make Margaret Dumont the funny one.

But yeah…there's a big difference between trying to create comedy from a Conservative perch and having folks who already have a Conservative worldview try to create comedy. I also don't think a right-wing comic these days would please his target audience if he slammed his own side as often as guys like Maher and Stewart skewer theirs.

Ooh! Ooh!

Here's another one of my unprovable theories. Every few days in this country, you see some pundit or political candidate or public figure say something really outrageous or insane…and attention-grabbing. It can be an uninformed male's understanding of rape or it can be some borderline-racist putdown of minorities or it can be darn near anything Pat Robertson or Donald Trump says about anything. But it evokes anger and calls to apologize and it makes you wonder, not why does the person think that but how could they be so stupid as to say it?

I mean, I understand that there are folks out there who hate people with different-colored skin or who attend a different house of worship. What I used to wonder more about is why they weren't smart enough to avoid saying what they said the way they said it. This is especially true of those who are courting votes. You'd think, for example, that every male seeking public office would have learned to steer clear of the topic of rape. You'd think their advisors would have said to them, "No matter how obvious or reasonable it may seem to you, it will come across to many as insensitive and foolish." You'd think Donald Trump would have realized he couldn't engage Bill Maher in a public fight and not come off looking to much of America like a stuffy anal sphincter.

And here's where my theory comes in. I've come to think that while some folks may say outrageous things because they think it'll get them attention and sell books (Ann Coulter comes to mind), I think a lot of them are guilty of Joe E. Ross Disease.

joeeross01

You remember Joe E. Ross, the star of Car 54, Where Are You?, It's About Time and nothing else. Mr. Ross was very funny on those shows and very funny before them with intermittent appearances on Sgt. Bilko. His career dwindled to darn near nothing after the short-lived It's About Time, in large part because he got a reputation in show business for (a) being utterly unreliable and (b) having no sense of time and place.

Regarding (a), it was said he was never on time, never knew his lines and never changed when he was told to shape up or ship out. His biggest role was on Car 54, which ran two seasons. Had it been picked up for a third, Ross would not have been picked up with it. The show's producer-creator Nat Hiken had simply had enough of the guy.

But his career was probably harmed more by (b). It was said that he never once thought, of anything that came out of his mouth, "Hmm, this might not be the right audience for this." Having starred for a time in burlesque, he had a repertoire of filthy jokes — appropriate for those venues, inappropriate for others. He didn't care. The Sgt. Bilko show was shot in front of a live audience for its first few seasons. Then they started filming without one. After every two filmed-without-one episodes were edited, they'd send the films, some audio engineers and a cast member to some sort of theater with some sort of audience. The cast member would welcome the crowd, warm them up with a comedy routine, then the episodes would be shown and the live laughter would be recorded and dubbed onto the shows.

That was how it worked every time…except the week they sent Joe E. Ross.

He got up there before an audience of older and middle-age people — with some children present — and began telling jokes that would make Lenny Bruce blush: jokes about sex with nuns and hookers servicing sailors and…well, you know that kind of joke. You may even tell that kind of joke…but I bet you'd have the good sense not to tell them to your grandparents.

Joe E. Ross did this kind of thing all over the place because he had no such sense. When people ran in horror from the hall, he just kind of wondered what had gone wrong. Everyone had howled at those same jokes when he'd told them at a stag party the week before.

Which brings us to my theory. Some of those shocking/stupid things said by public figures are obviously calculated to get ratings or sell books or otherwise make money. But I think a lot of them are things which when said in the right room in front of the right crowds drew cheers and ovations and fealty. The mistake, like Ross's, was in thinking they'd play as well in a bigger room to a wider range of people. All those nutcase Pat Robertson quotes over the years were things he said on his TV broadcasts without his studio audience moaning or hooting. They just didn't play well beyond the flock.

This is the scary thing to me about someone who gets up and yells that there's incontrovertible evidence that Barack Obama is a Kenyan-born Socialist Muslim who had Andrew Breitbart murdered. It's not that that person is looney. It's that there are auditoriums in this country where that rhetoric played well for that person…places where they cheered their agreement. In most cases, I don't think people believe rubbish because their leaders say it. I think the "leaders" say it because people believe it. It's what enables them to retain their status as "leaders" with all the perks (the money, the attention, etc.) that are attached.

There are though, let's admit, two key differences between someone like Michele Bachmann or Rand Paul and Joe E. Ross, one being that Ross eventually paid a price for his insensitivity to his audiences. Nowadays, you can make a very good living telling a minority of Americans what they want to hear. Most people in this country think Obama's a pretty good president but you can sell a lot of books to the ones who don't. An awful lot of books. In some areas, you can get elected.

And the other difference is that Joe E. Ross was funny. Sometimes, he was funny in the wrong place and/or at the wrong time. But he made me laugh, whereas Donald Trump doesn't. Not even with that hair of his. I'd trade him for Joe E. Ross any day.

COL279

Political Humor

by Mark Evanier

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 3/3/00
Comics Buyer's Guide

In case you haven't noticed, there's a presidential campaign going on in this country. There has been for some time. I think a couple of those guys have been on the stump since about an hour after the polls closed, four years ago.

As I write this, we're a good nine months from marking final ballots but the Mardi Gras is at full volume, soon to grow even louder. I'm fascinated by how the so-called pundits discuss the race this far from Voting Day. (I'm also amazed that anyone listens to them, given their recent batting averages. You wouldn't waste $3.99 a minute on a psychic hotline that was wrong as often as any of the predictors on ABC's This Week.)

Still, someone's tuning in as "the talking heads" are asked who's going to win in November. They generally come back with a two-part answer, Part One of which goes something like this…

"Well, this early, it's still anyone's game. This far before the '92 election, Bush looked unbeatable and before that, in '88, the polls had Dukakis with a lead well into double-digits. A lot of things can happen between now and the conventions, let alone before Election Day."

That's how Part One goes. Part Two is often a fairly-firm prediction on who's going to win.

I especially love the guys who've already called the Giuliani-Clinton match-up in the New York Senate race. As of today, neither has officially announced, not one commercial has been aired and not one debate has been scheduled. But apparently, none of that can possibly impact the election in any way, according to the folks who think Rudy can't be beaten or that Hillary has a lock on it.

To be honest, certain losers are already losers; they just haven't admitted it yet. As I'm writing this, Gary Bauer is announcing his withdrawal from a race that everyone but Gary Bauer seemed to know he was never in. Steve Forbes is insisting he's "in this race to stay" so he'll probably be the next out. Alan Keyes sounds like he may remain a candidate until long after they finish counting all those ballots that won't have his name on them.

The answer to the question, "Who's going to be elected?" is a little tougher. The correct rejoinder is probably, "Nobody knows." However, as I once heard a pundit — I think it was Jack Germond — say on some panel show, "We have to say something. We're not paid to say, 'I don't know,' even though we usually don't know."

The New Hampshire primary was a few days ago. In 1984, Gary Hart topped all comers from his party in that state just as in '92, Paul Tsongas beat Bill Clinton and in '96, Pat Buchanan defeated Bob Dole. None of those "winners" even got their party's nomination. Still, last week everyone was acting as if winning New Hampshire was like coming off the football field, way ahead at half-time.

So what has been decided in the race to date? Only one thing I can see: The shorthand caricatures.

Allow me to elucidate…


There was a time not all that long ago, when you heard very little topical political humor on television. The main source was Johnny Carson's monologues and, some weeks, Saturday Night Live. Oh, and there are always those Mark Russell specials that PBS airs to make the pledge breaks seem funny by comparison. But all in all, there wasn't a lot.

Today on what's often a five-a-week basis, you have Jay Leno, Bill Maher, Dave Letterman (health problems, notwithstanding), Conan O'Brien, maybe Craig Kilborn, occasionally Martin Short and, over on Comedy Central, Jon Stewart. You also have Dennis Miller and Chris Rock playing tag-team on HBO, and I think there are a couple others I'm forgetting.

Also, Saturday Night Live is more political than ever. It now seems to be de rigeur that they have one cast member who can portray whoever's currently in the White House. Each of the regulars is learning one candidate and probably praying that fellow gets in, thereby ensuring the performer four more years on SNL. I feel sorry for whichever black guy gets to play Alan Keyes.

There's no way to measure it but I'd guesstimate TV writers are outputting ten times as many topical jokes about political figures as were required 20 years ago. Johnny, after all, only did a few per monologue and only worked four (sometimes, three) nights a week.

The proliferation is great because I love political humor…but only up to a point. The point where I stop is that which reduces an entire candidate to a shorthand caricature, defined by one "hook." Here are some of the shorthand caricatures we've seen in recent years:

Bill Clinton is horny. Bob Dole is ancient. Al Gore is stiff and boring. Dan Quayle is stupid. Ross Perot is out of his mind. Ted Kennedy is a fat drunk. Janet Reno is a man.

For some reason, possibly because the jokes are about her appearance and not about anything she does, the digs at Ms. Reno strike me as over-the-line and, at times, perilously close to misogyny. If they were about her actions as Attorney General — where, God knows, there's plenty to criticize — it would be a different matter.

As for the others, I suspect they're funny because there's a nugget of truth to them…and the nuggets are probably all about the same size. The slams of the politicians you like are approximately as valid as the ones about the political figures you despise.

Jokes based on shorthand caricatures do not always constitute political humor. This is because of that yawning chasm…the demand that must be filled.

Writing jokes every day or night to fill monologues is tough work. Any halfway-decent comedy writer can come up with something pithy and applicable if inspiration hits. But when it's Noon and they tell you, "You have to hand in 20 jokes by 2:00," that's when you go for the old shorthand caricatures.

In jokesmithing, one finds certain recurring templates…like the Fat Joke. Fat Jokes are easy to write and, at any given time, there's always one prominent person whose girth lends themselves to Fat Jokes. I can recall when they were all about Kate Smith, a hefty singer who was famous for belting "God Bless America" and who was, they said, about the size of the original thirteen colonies, plus the District of Columbia.

At some point, she either grew too old or died and the Fat Jokes were all switched over to Orson Welles. For a time, you could watch TV for a month and not know that Welles had made timeless, acclaimed movies…but you sure heard a lot about him being overweight.

Since Mr. Welles passed away, I can't recall anyone having quite the same monopoly, though Dom DeLuise has appeared in almost as many Fat Jokes as Burt Reynolds movies. Oprah Winfrey and Rush Limbaugh had a corner on the market for about three years there until each started to lose weight, and Monica Lewinsky and Fergie were the target of many until their recent Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers campaigns. Somewhere in there, John Candy and Chris Farley showed their poor sportsmanship by dying.

These days, Fat Jokes pretty much rotate between Louie Anderson, Nell Carter, Roseanne, Marlon Brando, Al Roker, Rosie O'Donnell, Ted Kennedy and the current, all-purpose proper noun in any joke about a person's physical appearance, Linda Tripp.

There are also, of course, Skinny Jokes. You can still view some of the Skinny Jokes about Frank Sinatra in old Warner Brothers cartoons. These days, they're all about Kate Moss, Calista Flockhart and all supermodels. These don't have quite the sting of Fat Jokes since almost everyone wants to be skinny and almost nobody wants to be fat.

And there are Large Breasted Jokes. They were once all about Raquel Welch…then they were about Dolly Parton. Pamela Lee was next in line but she had her implants removed. So lately, I'm hearing Britney Spears.

And there's also usually one prominent male singer who gets kidded for having a high voice. I can recall watching the Wayne Newton jokes turn into Michael Jackson jokes after a brief stopover as Tiny Tim jokes. Back in the days of radio, they were Dennis Day jokes, I believe. The "feminine voice" jokes about Mr. Jackson seem to have ceased because he's given comedy writers so many other ways in which to mock him.

A lot of these jokes aren't really about the people they're about. It's the same way that all those Polish jokes we heard for years really had nothing to do with anyone of Polish extraction. It was just a name to fill out a joke.

Most humor is at the expense of someone and that bothers me if the joke fails to meet three basic requirements. One is that it be told in an appropriate venue. Dirty jokes are fine but not in church. You don't go up to the grieving widow at a funeral and tell her the one about the midget undertaker, the two hookers and the dead clown. For one thing, she wouldn't get it.

Secondly, no person or persons should be unduly or recklessly targeted. The trouble with those Polish jokes is that they were moron jokes that were all arbitrarily focused on one group. The people who told them didn't even think Polish folks were any of the things the jokes said they were. They just thoughtlessly plugged in the nationality. Humor is like a weapon, dangerous in the hands of amateurs. Never point it at the wrong person inadvertently.

And lastly and most important: A joke should be funny. It doesn't have to be fall-down, hold-your-gut, laugh-'til-you-upchuck funny — a slight giggle will suffice — but it should be funny to whoever's hearing or reading it. At least a little.


This brings us back to the subject of political jokes and —

Hold it. Did I say there were three requirements for a joke? Well, I was wrong. There are four, but the fourth only applies to political humor. That's the one that says that a public figure should not only be defined by his or her shorthand caricature. In other words, let's try to write the occasional joke about Bill Clinton that isn't about cheating on his wife.

As we look ahead to the 2000 elections, the returns aren't in but the shorthand caricatures sure seem to be. I'll run down the field of candidates for you and give the current template for jokes about them:

Al Gore is still stiff and boring. John McCain has an uncontrollable temper. Bill Bradley is on the verge of a heart attack. Steve Forbes is a very wealthy zombie. Alan Keyes is a screaming maniac. Pat Buchanan is a Nazi.

The only "undecided" seems to be George W. Bush. The forces that designate such things haven't determined if he's going to be portrayed as a drunken, cocaine-abusing frat boy…or if comedians get to recycle their Quayle jokes and portray him as stupid. By the time we get to the Super Tuesday primaries, this should all be settled.

The jokes we're hearing — and will continue to hear for nine months, long past the stage we're all sick of them — are fine if they meet the above requirements — the fourth one, especially. Still, I increasingly worry that some voters won't get past the shorthand caricatures…won't realize that these are jokes that do not give a total picture of someone who might occupy the highest office in our land.

This is what the worst kind of campaign advertising does…seeking to define the opposition by one negative, not-always-accurate characteristic. We get enough of that without political humor further dumbing-down the electoral process.


By now, some of you may be wondering: What does any of this have to do with comic books? And the answer is that it has nothing to do with comic books. Isn't that amazing?

Comic books have long been accused — often with some justification, I'm sad to say — with being only about shorthand caricatures: This is the good guy, this is the bad guy. Often, they have shorthand personalities with shorthand outlooks on life, which is the kind of thing film critics are flagging when they say a movie has "comic book characterization."

With political discourse in this country devolving the same way — with candidates and vital issues being distilled down to facile one-liners — one would assume that comics would gravitate towards more stories spinning off what's happening in the news. And if one assumed that, one would be out of one's mind. Comic books, as far as I can see, avoid current events at all costs.

I used to think this was because of the "lead time" in printing comics. Leno finalizes his monologue only hours before the right hand side of the country sees it. If I put a topical joke in a comic I write today, it'll be a month or three before the artists finish and a few months more before it gets to readers. So that would be a good reason to not attempt topical material.

But it isn't the reason. The reason is that they think that readers either don't want it or wouldn't understand it…or, more likely, both. It's like we have to shut out the Real World so we can write about the DC Universe.

I've tried a few times with the simplest, most innocuous references to what's going on in the world today and who's doing it…and boy, does it upset some people. You get these hysterical e-mails from folks who think that any mention of anything that might ever be discussed on The McNeil/Lehrer Report is "propaganda." They almost always grossly overreact and/or misunderstand what you wrote.

Sergio and I got some angry mail when we did an issue of Groo that was inspired by the debate over N.A.F.T.A. Almost exactly half the complaints accused us of propagandizing for N.A.F.T.A. and the other half were incensed that we were against it. It didn't seem to dawn on either group that the two of us didn't agree on the issue so we were discussing the pros and cons without advocating either.

Publishers and editors don't say, "Don't do this," but some do discourage it, if only for fear of losing a sale or two. Other writers have expressed to me similar frustrations and it's a shame. It's a shame any time a writer with something to say is prevented from saying it.

Last Thought Before Bedtime

On one episode of his show a few weeks ago, Bill Maher offered some guest million-to-one odds that Herman Cain would not be…I forget if it was President of the United States or just the Republican nominee. But either way, he won. He does not have to pay that guest one million dollars on a dollar bet.

I always thought it was a safe wager. I frankly never understood why anyone was behind that guy. I understand support for Romney or Paul or Gingrich or Perry or even Bachmann…but Cain? He had no experience in government and no evident interest in learning about it. Asked what he would do about most problems, his answer was usually something like, "I'll get together experts who will advise me." Hey, you and I could do that. It wasn't so much that he didn't know what was up with Libya as that he didn't see why anyone would expect him to know. He was the only candidate who acted like "What would you do about Iraq?" was a "gotcha" question.

And then he'd complain that no one was discussing the important issues.

Good night, Internet. See you in the morning.

About Last Night

Here's a photo from the event I've been writing about here. In the front row, you have — reading left to right — Shelley Berman, Jonathan Winters, George Carlin, Mort Sahl and Harry Shearer. Behind them, it's Richard Lewis, Jay Leno, Norm Crosby, Hugh Hefner, Ross Shafer, Drew Carey and Albert Brooks. And then way in the back, you have your Kevin Nealon.

Hefner wasn't a performer. He was just there as a friend and patron. Ross Shafer was one of the organizers of the gala. Somehow, Paula Poundstone, Bill Maher and Jack Riley didn't get into this shot…but isn't it a great picture, anyway?

Last Night

Okay, here's my report on the Mort Sahl Tribute. A group called The Heartland Comedy Foundation is raising bucks for older comedians who are not well off. I don't know about the financial werewithal of Mr. Sahl but last night, they had a benefit in honor of his 80th birthday and get a load of who performed…

  • Jonathan Winters
  • Shelley Berman
  • Albert Brooks
  • Drew Carey
  • George Carlin
  • Norm Crosby
  • Jay Leno
  • Richard Lewis
  • Bill Maher
  • Kevin Nealon
  • Paula Poundstone
  • Mort Sahl

There were also taped appearances by Woody Allen and Don Rickles, and the whole event was well-hosted by Jack Riley with a brief assist from Harry Shearer. (Larry King had been announced to host but was unable to be there. I don't know if it was a joke or not but folks inside the theater and on stage were saying his no-show was because of something having to do with Paris Hilton's appearance on his show Wednesday night.)

How was the Sahl Tribute? About as wonderful as you'd expect it to be, given the line-up. Everyone was good…everyone. Some of the folks who got on late had a rougher time of it since the audience was getting a bit worn out by then…but everyone did well. (Winters went first, playing a character interviewed by Jack Riley. Mr. Sahl, fittingly, went on last. Everyone else appeared in alphabetical order.)

Best performance? I'd pick Albert Brooks with a speech that I thought was easily the most brilliant ten-or-so minutes of the evening. He came out, seemingly pissed-off because he'd prepared an eloquent eulogy. You see, he'd been told (he said) that Mort was dead. Then he arrived at the show, furious to discover that Mort wasn't dead. In fact, as he said this, Mort was sitting out in the second row, right behind Hefner and the obligatory entourage of stunning ladies. Mr. Brooks went on to explain that unlike the other folks appearing on stage that evening, he didn't have a current stand-up act so the eulogy was all he had…and he proceeded to read it anyway, even taking us through a Mourner's Kaddish. I thought some people in the audience were going to die — literally — laughing.

Classiest performance? Jay Leno. He isn't always at the top of his game on The Tonight Show…and I guess you can't be when you're delivering a fresh, untested monologue every night. But dipping into his club act, he did ten or fifteen minutes of killer stand-up and then — here comes the classy part — he did a wonderful, heartfelt little tribute to Sahl and left the stage in a manner that directed his exit applause to the honoree and not to himself. Very nice indeed.

Most sheer laughs, attained by any possible means? Richard Lewis talking about his penis and also Shaquille O'Neal's. Even people who thought it was tasteless were laughing and laughing hard.

Bravest performance? Paula Poundstone, eschewing prepared material in favor of chatting with a stranger in the front row. I've seen her do this before and she has an unerring eye for picking out someone who'll be obtuse and difficult to converse with…which, of course, makes it very funny. Still, given the line-up she was following, it was gutsy to try it in that room. It turned out very funny and even had a warm ending when she finally extracted the information from the guy that he'd founded the first Mort Sahl fan club back in the fifties.

Biggest ovation, not counting Mort Sahl? George Carlin, in part because he wasn't officially billed and his appearance took a lot of the audience by surprise. He did his "Modern Man" riff, spoke lovingly of Mort Sahl's place in comedy and in assisting his own career, then showed a video clip from a 1962 TV appearance in which he (Carlin) did a fine impression of Mort. The runner-up in the "biggest ovation" category was probably Jonathan Winters.

And lastly, there was Mort himself. He spoke of how moved and touched he was by the whole event but couldn't help veering into a few bits of topical humor. The one I remember best — and this is from memory, not verbatim — went as follows…

One of the big perks of doing what I do is that I get to meet all these guys. I met President [George W.] Bush and we got to talking about drinking. He said, "I don't drink anymore. You see, I was born again!" And I couldn't help think…if you were going to be born again, wouldn't you want to be born as something better than George Bush?"

Sahl stressed the point that he isn't dead or retired; that he's still going to be on stages as long as the public will have him. (Here's an article from the other day on what he's up to lately.) And he brought out his wife, who looks to be about one-fourth his age, and the audience sang "Happy Birthday" to him. It was an event that won't be repeated and for those who were there, won't be forgotten.

More on Mort

The other day, I posted an item about an upcoming one-night-only tribute to Mort Sahl. Here's the website and as you can see, the roster of scheduled performers is truly impressive…

Larry King will be the host. This is only possible because I didn't kill him Tuesday evening…although I came close. (I still have the suspender prints on my bumpers.) The rest of the list consists of Albert Brooks, Jay Leno, Drew Carey, Bill Maher, Shelley Berman, David Steinberg, Richard Lewis, Paula Poundstone, Jonathan Winters, David Brenner, Kevin Nealon, Jack Riley and a taped appearance by Woody Allen. I'm told there will also be at least two other very special performers whose names cannot yet be mentioned…and I'm guessing that Mort's going to say a word or two, as well.

The event will not be televised. It will not even be recorded. So I'll be there.

A Party for Mort

Comedy legend Mort Sahl will be honored on June 28 at the Wadsworth Theater in West Los Angeles with a special one-night benefit/tribute, the line-up for which sounds like a veritable Who's Who of comedy. I haven't seen any official list anywhere but the names that have been mentioned include Richard Lewis, Kevin Nealon, Paula Poundstone, Jonathan Winters, George Carlin, Albert Brooks, Shelley Berman, Jay Leno, Bill Maher, David Steinberg, Jack Riley and Robin Williams, along with taped tributes by Woody Allen, Sydney Pollack and Clint Eastwood. I'm guessing Clint will be the funny one.

I also haven't seen any official announcement of where one obtains tickets but I found them for sale on Ticketmaster and they ain't cheap. On the other hand, if most of those people are there, it might well be worth it.