Category Archives: Video Links

The infamous (infamous for being cancelled due to political content) Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour is coming out on DVD. The show ran three seasons and the first release gives us the episodes from the third and final one. I guess they figure that if that season — the controversial one — doesn't sell, there's no point in bringing out the other years. If you'd like to pre-order a copy from Amazon, you can do that by clicking here.

Anyway, TV reporter Will Harris met Tom Smothers recently and heard him say that he was doubtful the shows would hold up for a present-day audience. Harris told him he was wrong and they subsequently did this interview, discussing the matter further.

I'm curious to see them not so much because they may have changed but because I have. Hard as it may be for some to believe from this blog, I was pretty right-wing back in '69 when these shows aired and I didn't find them that humorous. In truth, there was only a little political humor in each show but it annoyed me enough to impair my enjoyment of the entire program. By the time I changed my mind and moved to the opposite side of the street at the Vietnam protests, Tom and Dickie were off the air. I'm eager to watch these shows now and see if they're better than I thought at the time.

Here's a little more than a minute of some of the show's guests performing its theme song. It's pretty funny…and how often do you get to see David Frye these days? Or Jack E. Leonard in a dog suit? This is from the final episode, which aired 4/20/69.

This runs a little over twenty minutes. It's an interview that Jack Paar did in the early nineties, discussing his career. He was apparently on board the QE2 and it was taped and nicely intercut with clips from his old shows. It's in three parts which should play in sequence in the little player I've embedded below.

I always found Mr. Paar fascinating — an opinion shared by much of America back when he hosted The Tonight Show and his subsequent prime-time series. There was a catch phrase at the time — "What is Jack Paar really like?" People all over America wondered about that. One time, I put it to his frequent guest, Jonathan Winters. I asked Mr. Winters, "What is Jack Paar really like?" and he said, "Just as weird as he appears on television." I suspect if you'd asked Paar that about Winters, you would have gotten the same answer.

A lot of readers of this site have thanked or cursed me for telling them about the Archive of American Television website where one can watch online oral histories of the teevee business. The cursers were angry because I've cost them dozens and dozens of hours, directing them to a trove of goodies they now must watch.

I'll be cursed for the same reason by mentioning authors@google, a library of interviews — most of them, around an hour in length — with authors who've appeared for interviews 'n' speeches at one of the Google buildings. They range from best-selling writers and presidential candidates to folks you've never heard of. They will even, in about five weeks, include me.

Check the list and you're sure to find plenty that will interest you. I could embed any of a hundred here but here's a recent chat with Stan Lee. Most of it's about his recent book of funny captions on political photos but, hey, it's Stan Lee. He talks more about comics near the end.

Turns out there are a lot of folks out there who remember Jackie Vernon. A lot of them wrote to say I should have reminded all that he was the voice of Frosty the Snowman in the popular Christmas special of the same name. I also probably should have linked you to this post, which I wrote back in '04 about Mr. Vernon. Unfortunately, the link in there to an article by his son no longer works.

Comedy writer Arnie Kogen writes to say…

Read your piece today about Jackie Vernon. I wrote for Jackie in the mid 1960's. Wrote material for his appearances on Paar and Ed Sullivan. He paid about as swiftly as he spoke. Verrrry slowly. His classic material was not mine. That of course was the "slide show" with his guide, Guido, also his pick up lines at the beach "Excuse me, Miss, I seem to have lost my Congressional Medal of Honor around here somewhere" and, for me, his greatest line of all: He was once arrested on New Year's Eve in Times Sguare — for loitering.

The best part of the Congressional Medal of Honor joke was the follow-up line: "Oh, well. I have another one at home."

I wish I could link to that classic "slide" routine but there doesn't seem to be a video of it online anywhere. He did a little of a later version of it in this ten minute hunk from that Young at Heart Comedians Special…

You can waste a heckuva lot of your life watching video interviews conducted by the Archive of American Television, which is a project of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences — i.e., the Emmy People. They sent out interviewers to record oral histories with everyone important in the TV field they could snag and a lot of these conversations are available online. These are not short chats. Some of them are six hours or longer, and there are some very good people to be heard.

A complete list of the ones you can watch right now can be found here, and every week or so they put a few more up. They recently released an interview with Herbert Stempel, who was one of the contestants at the center of the quiz show scandals…and they just posted the interview George Carlin did with them in December of last year.

The entire Carlin interview runs three hours and like I said, you can find and watch it online. Here's the last five minutes of it, including a couple of questions that are especially poignant in light of his passing a few months after this interrogation…

Back in the sixties, one of my favorite comedians was a deadpan guy named Jackie Vernon. Mr. Vernon was one of those comics who was around for years, developing his act and approach in the worst bars and night clubs…until finally he hit, hit big and became a much-quoted comedy star. A couple of the jokes you'll see in this clip may sound to you like old lines that you've heard a million times…but I actually think they originated with Jackie.

I was an avid fan and I can still quote most of his first record album — A Wet Bird Never Flies at Night — from memory. Most of the lines in our clip today are from his act as it stood at the time he recorded it for that album. (That's a bad sentence so let me try it this way: Vernon had a pretty stock, well-polished routine that he used for years. The lines in this clip are from that routine and the whole routine is on that album. There. That's clearer.)

I only got to see him perform once in person. It was at the old Marina Hotel in Las Vegas, which used to stand on the site where the MGM Grand is now situated. He was in a burlesque revue which was called "Babes Ahoy" because it had a bit of a navy theme, as did the hotel-casino. Mostly, he did old Minsky's-type routines with women whose shirts mysteriously disappeared…but at one point, he came out and did about fifteen minutes of pure standup with no topless ladies on the stage with him. It was his "vacation slides" routine with all new (to me) lines and I probably laughed as hard at that fifteen minutes as I ever have at anything in my life.

He passed away in 1987 and it's rare to see any of his work these days. So it's great to be able to point you to even this 2.5 minutes of it…

Over in The New York Times, they have a nice profile of Jon Stewart and that show of his. Note if you will that a certain amount of the show's success is probably attributable to the fifteen TiVos they have in the office. I'm guessing CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, Fox News, CNN, CNN Headline, Court TV, CSpan1, CSpan2, MSNBC, CNBC, ESPN, Comedy Central and one they can program to catch special shows on other channels.

So let's reach way back for today's clip. We're bringing you one of my favorite moments on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. This is from December 10, 2001 and it features the dilemma that eventually catches up with every show that relies on guests: What do you do when a guest doesn't show up? Watch that they did.

Someone took one of those "piano roll" recordings of George Gershwin playing "Rhapsody in Blue" and created a montage of New York photos to go with it. Nicely done. It's thirteen and a half minutes in two parts which should play one after the other in the player I've embedded below…

Hey, let's watch a pretty good Popeye cartoon, shall we? This is "The Paneless Window Washer," which was released January 22, 1937. Jack Mercer is the voice of the squinty sailor, Mae Questel is the voice of Ms. Oyl and Bluto is Gus Wickie.

In case you don't know: These Fleischer-produced Popeye cartoons were sorta unique in that most of the voice work was done after the cartoon was animated. At Disney or Warner's, the tracks were recorded and then the animators made lips move in accord with what the actors had done. At Fleischer's, they might prescore a musical number but most of the dialogue was done "to picture" with the actors dubbing completed animation. That's why lips often are not in sync and sometimes don't move at all. Years later, when the Fleischer Brothers were ousted from their own studio, new management went to recording the voices in advance and that eliminated most of the wonderful little asides and sounds that Mercer would mutter under his breath. They really help make this cartoon work.

I have often made mention here of a fellow named Frank Ferrante, who wanders this great nation of ours, impersonating Julius "Groucho" Marx. I'm ordinarily not a fan of impressions that go on more than about three minutes but Frank doesn't do an impression. He really turns himself into the grouchiest of all Marx Brothers and his show is a delight.

In the past, you've had to take my word for it. Now, I can show you seven minutes of what I've been raving about. Take a peek and then check out this schedule to see when Frank will be hackenbushing his way into your area. (According to the list, he'll be in Blowing Rock, North Carolina next week. I don't imagine he'll be referencing the name of the city at all during his performance.)

This is a clip from a 1984 cable show — The Young at Heart Comedians Special, I think it was called. David Brenner was the host and it featured seven veteran comedians (i.e., older gents) doing their acts. Part of the format was that while one guy was on stage performing, the camera would cut to the others backstage, sitting around and talking. In this segment, you'll see backstage chatter from Jackie Vernon, Jackie Gayle, Henny Youngman, Norm Crosby, Shelley Berman and George Gobel, along with Brenner.

Onstage is one of my all-time favorites, Carl Ballantine, aka "The Amazing Ballantine," performer of what was deliberately the most inept and hilarious magic act ever. I wish you could see his whole routine uninterrupted and untruncated but this is all we have to offer.

It is worth noting, by the way, that though the show was done nearly a quarter of a century ago, two of the "young at heart" comics — Norm Crosby and Shelley Berman — are still actively performing, plus Ballantine still works as an actor and is occasionally coerced into hauling out the old act. I got to work with Carl a few times and we occasionally have a meal. He's just as funny off-stage as he is on…which as you'll see in this clip is pretty darned funny.

(An aside to the three people who write to complain every time I link to a clip or article that contains a wee bit of profanity: This one does. Instead of getting outraged, you might consider that this is how much of this country talks and that a lot of good, decent people see nothing wrong with it. Please stop sending me those messages.)

On June 20, 1965, a once-in-a-lifetime concert was televised as a closed-circuit event to raise bucks for Dismas House of St. Louis, a halfway house for ex-convicts. It was a meeting of the fabled "Rat Pack" with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis sharing the stage at the Kiel Opera House in St. Louis, doing pretty much what they did in Vegas, only this time with cameras taking it all in. There isn't much footage of the Rat Pack in Las Vegas…and certainly no complete performances. The St. Louis event is pretty much the best record of those gents in action.

Unfortunately, they were without the services of fellow Rat Packer Joey Bishop, who was out with a bad back. Fortunately, they got a kid named Johnny Carson to take over Joey's role in the proceedings. Our clip today is a few minutes of a musical number and it's notable that Johnny, who was never much of a singer, agreed to try and perform alongside the big boys.

After the '65 telecast, the show was never seen again…not until the nineties when producer Paul Brownstein tracked down a print of it that had been sitting in a closet in St. Louis. Every time I run into Paul, I find myself thanking him for finding and/or preserving some old TV show which would otherwise have been lost. I don't think I've thanked him for this one…so thanks, Paul. Here's a few minutes of the Rat Pack at their rattiest and packiest…

This one runs an hour and I don't expect you to watch it all…but someone posted to YouTube, an entire David Letterman Show from September 12, 1980. This was Dave's morning show, the one he did for NBC that went largely unwatched…and I don't think it's hard to see why. He's the wrong guy for the time slot and he's also a little too smartass. You get the feeling that he doesn't even take his own show seriously so why should you? Plus, he feels all alone out there…no sidekick, no bandleader with whom he has any rapport, etc. Doesn't it feel like half the staff didn't show up for work that day but they made Dave go out and do his show anyway? Add to this the largely non-responsive studio audience and you have a rather cold, impersonal program that probably wouldn't work in any daypart but was certainly all wrong for weekday morns. And just to really finish it off, you had these news breaks that often led to awkward transititions back to comedy and light banter.

A year or two earlier, I'd become a big fan of Mr. Letterman's, seeing him act as emcee (or sometimes just a performer) at The Comedy Store up on Sunset. On that stage, he came off as polished and professional, especially compared to some of the other comics…and of course, it was amusing to see him act like we were all foolish to be there and it was even more ridiculous for a grown man to be doing what he was doing. That was The Comedy Store and it was late and half the audience was drunk, anyway. On NBC's daytime schedule, the same attitude drove viewers to reruns of The Jeffersons or whatever was over on CBS.

(I just checked and I was right: Reruns of The Jeffersons. Dave's show started as 90 minutes on June 23, 1980 and was cut to 60 minutes after about six weeks. It ran as an hour show until October 24 of that year, whereupon its time slot was handed over to two game shows, Las Vegas Gambit and Blockbuster. After that, NBC kept Letterman on the payroll until February 1, 1982 when he took over Tom Snyder's spot after Mr. Carson.)

So this is an interesting bit of history and like I said, I don't expect you to watch the whole thing. It's in seven parts and they should play, one after the other, in the player I've embedded below. You might watch a little of the opening and then leap ahead to the start of Part Four where Dave does a remote segment with some New York street vendors. Take a gander.

I know some people would rather I just linked to light, happy video clips of wacky commercials and silly songs…but there are some things on the web you oughta see. Whether you like 'em or not.

Here are three video reports on "The Surge" from a gentleman named Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, a native of Baghdad who's employed by the Guardian in the U.K. Like all of you, I would love to believe the mantra of "The Surge is working" but an awful lot of evidence suggest that it's only been effective in reducing the humiliation of those in this country who backed the U.S. efforts in Iraq and made grandiose, impossible claims about "winning." It's a way for those who never want to believe their country does the wrong thing (at least when a Republican is in the White House) to stick their fingers in their ears and sing "la la la" loud enough to drown out the reality.

The three parts should play one after the other in the embedded player below. They total about thirteen and a half minutes. If someone would like to suggest an article or video that affords another view of this situation, please do.

Here's thirty seconds of very odd animation…an anti-drug commercial produced by Hanna-Barbera around 1970. Do we think this caused any kid anywhere to hesitate one second before using drugs? I don't. It might even have made some think that drug use looks like fun.