Category Archives: Video Links

Here's a master at work: Shelley Berman performing one of my favorites among his many fine routines. A whole new generation knows him from Boston Legal and Curb Your Enthusiasm and that's fine. But they really oughta know him for this kind of thing. If you do, you'll want to check out his Facebook fan page and his newly-redesigned website. And if you see on either that he's performing near you — something he doesn't do nearly enough of these days — go. He still does brilliant material like this…

You'll probably see this on other sites. It's only one of the greatest baseball fielding plays ever…

Here's what I believe is the first Captain Crunch commercial. The cereal and the advertising campaign were both introduced in 1963 with the Jay Ward Studios producing the latter. That's the great Daws Butler voicing the Captain. William Conrad did the opening announce and I think the whispers of Seadog were supplied by Bill Scott, though who can tell for sure? In the years to come, the cereal would be a big hit, leading to infinite variations in different flavors and to many clever commercials as long as Jay's outfit did them. The ads took a noticeable plunge when they were taken over by others.

Here's my pal Christine Pedi starring in a new version of Lady Gaga and Beyoncé's "Telephone." If you're not familiar with the original (I wasn't), here's a link to the "explicit" version. Personally, I like the one with Christine better…

Just watch this. It's only two minutes…

Our London correspondent Shelly Goldstein highly recommends the new West End production of Sweet Charity. Here's a little sample…and by the way, the video is not flawed. British actors really do sing with their mouths out of sync, especially when portraying hippies…

Stephen Colbert's show is really, really good at selling books (so is Jon Stewart's) which explains why some authors go on, knowing they may well be made to look at least semi-foolish. Last week, Dr. Colbert had on Laura Ingraham, who has the best-selling non-fiction book on the New York Times list, The Obama Diaries. The book is a batch of phony diary entires by Barack (and Michelle and Joe Biden and others) that allegedly fell mysteriously into the custody of Ms. Ingraham and if the Times were really a left-wing — or even impartial — newspaper, they'd have it in the fiction category where it rightly belongs.

If the excerpts I've read are typical, it's a pretty tawdry work, catering to every myth that Obama's opponents want to spread about him. It's one of the frustrations of politics that so much of it is how facile someone is at "defining" (i.e., selling a phony portrait of) the opposition. Democrats do it too but Republicans are better at it. They know how to convince a sizeable portion of the U.S. that they shouldn't vote for Michael Dukakis because he likes to let black rapists out of prison, they shouldn't vote for Al Gore because he thinks he invented the Internet and they shouldn't vote for John Kerry because he really didn't earn those medals. It didn't work well enough against Clinton though and it hasn't been fatal (so far) for Obama…but it's still annoying. If those men were hammered for things they actually said or did, it would be a different matter.

And yes, note I said Democrats do it, too. But I don't think the Obama folks lied about McCain nearly as much as McCain lied about Obama. Or at least they didn't do as good a job of it. (Actually, I think McCain self-destructed by hugging Bush, pandering to the Palin crowd and just looking like he couldn't remember what he'd said the day before.)

Anyway, Ingraham's out flogging her book that says that Obama is everything Sean Hannity says he is and enough people want to hear this to make it a best-seller. She apparently thought the Colbert Bump would be so valuable it would be worth the risk of going on his show. She also apparently thought that her old connection to Stephen via Dartmouth would protect her. She leads off with it to try and get on his good side and then later, when he's making her look pretty damn bad, she brings it up again to attempt a change of subject. Here's Stephen Colbert being very funny at the expense of his guest. And probably helping her sell even more books…

Here's a few minutes from a 1962 Canadian TV show in which Bert Lahr, Buster Keaton and Eddie Foy discuss what's funny. They were in Canada in '62 making a dreadful movie called Ten Girls Ago, providing comic support for the leading man, who was Dion of the rock 'n' roll group, Dion and the Belmonts. It was Lahr's last completed film (he died during the filming of the subsequent The Night They Raided Minsky's) and the producers ran out of money and stiffed the actors for their final week's salary. Yet here they are discussing important things like why it's funny to hit someone with a pie…

From a recent BBC Special celebrating the 80th birthday of Mr. Stephen Sondheim: Simon Russell Beale, Daniel Evans, Julian Ovenden, and Bryn Terfel perform "Everybody Ought To Have a Maid" from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum…

Here's just the thing to get you in the mood to enjoy a good movie…

Jack Nicholson talks about One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. That's one of those movies I need to watch again one of these days. I remember seeing it when it first came out and I enjoyed it but it took a lot out of me. I went with a lady named Lynne to see it up in Westwood and after it, we were both glad we'd seen it but emotionally drained. We didn't even want to park somewhere and make out. She wanted to go home and sleep alone for a month and I wanted to go play Basketball with a big Indian.

Every so often, a movie can do that to you and it isn't always the movie alone doing it to you. Some nights, there's something in the air and when the right film (or play) connects with the mood…well, we were both flattened by it but in a (mostly) good way.

Haven't seen it again since that night. It feels to me like one of those films you can't view on a casual basis. You can't have it playing on the TV and take it in with one eye and ear while doing something else. You have to commit to it and I've never gotten around to that. One of these days or nights, I'll have to clear the time and see if it has anywhere near the same impact on me today. In the meantime, here's Jack…

As I mentioned back here, a musical comedy called It's a Bird, It's a Plane It's Superman debuted on Broadway in 1966 and ran for a disappointing 129 performances. Still, the show has had a pretty long afterlife for something that closed so quickly on the Great White Way. The fame of the title character seems to have a lot to do with that…and the fact that it's ideally suited for college and community theater groups. The cast is mostly young. It doesn't require skilled choreography. The sets and costumes can be done on the cheap, especially by making it all very comic-bookish. The biggest challenge in staging comes if you actually try to fly your star around the stage, and there are ingenious ways to avoid that.

Recently, the Dallas Theater Center staged a new, highly-publicized "revisal" with an amended book by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. I didn't see it but the reviews were generally good and suggest a possible new life for the show. Here's another backstage video from the production, which just closed…

And while we're at it, here's an interview with the show's composer, Charles Strouse…

Cows.

Fourteen years (or so) of Lewis Black on The Daily Show…

Penn and Teller did a presentation at the Comic-Con. Here's a few minutes of it…