This is Albert Brooks guesting on The Tonight Show on 2/24/1983. I linked to a shorter version of this about ten years ago but this is the complete segment which includes more jokes, including one for which Standards and Practices futzed up a few words they didn't want heard.

The great thing about this clip is to watch Johnny Carson's reactions…and to remember that Mr. Brooks had probably not tested this routine before. He was always fearless, going onto national TV shows with material he'd never tried-out in front of an audience. There was one night on The Tonight Show when Rob Reiner was guest-hosting and Brooks came on with a bit that absolutely died. But that was rare for him and this time, things couldn't have gone much better…

I'm going to stop answering questions from folks who don't sign something that at least resembles a real name — but "Bobo" writes to ask…

I live in Kentucky and the only dream I have in life is to do cartoon voices. I don't want to do anything else but voices for cartoons. In the past, you said on your blog that to do that, you had to live in Los Angeles but since COVID, a lot of the business has converted to people recording in their home studios and working on ZOOM. I have a great studio here in my basement in Kentucky. Can I now have a real career in cartoon voice work from here? I know there are a number of very successful voice actors now who live in other cities and work on shows that were formerly recorded with local talent in L.A.

First off, "Bobo," I don't think there's anyone who makes a decent living doing cartoon voices. The folks you think do are folks who do cartoon voices and narration and dubbing and looping and audiobooks and commercials and announcing and a dozen other jobs where one's voice is heard. Mel Blanc…Daws Butler…Paul Frees…June Foray…none of those folks were ever only cartoon voice actors. Some of them, at times, didn't even make most of their income that way.

Also: There are probably a couple I don't know about but every currently-working-a-lot cartoon voice actor I know who doesn't live in or around Los Angeles did when they got established in the field. Then they moved back to Wherever and worked remotely.

To your real question: Yes, it is much easier now than it used to be for voice actors to "phone it in" but you are putting yourself at a disadvantage. It's not as big a disadvantage as it used to be but it's still a disadvantage. With time, it will probably become less of one but I can't say for sure how much. There will still be shows that want you present in their studio on their microphones. There will still be video game producers that want you to come in and put on motion-capture devices so they can record your lip and body movements.

That said, I need to add this: I have never and will never encourage anyone to uproot their life and move to Los Angeles (or anywhere) to pursue any career in any corner of show business. The vast majority of those stories end in failure…and I don't mean 60% or 70%. It's more like 90% and up. I also don't encourage anyone to invest in the time and expense of building a great home recording studio. It may pay off and it may not. It's like a lot of things in life: Only you can decide whether or not to take the gamble. Because it's always a gamble.

A little more about The Groundlings…

Something else you should know about this fine organization: It isn't just sketch comedians who come out of it. There are actors of all kinds (including the cartoon voice kind) and also writers and directors like my friends Cheri and Bill Steinkellner. And like any acting troupe/school, not everyone who goes in comes out a success.

There was a period when a lot of folks who wanted to be movie stars thought that the stepping stone to that coveted profession was getting on Saturday Night Live…and the stepping stone to that coveted profession was joining The Groundlings. So the group had a lot of applications from students who had limited interest in improv comedy were signing up for classes…there and at other improv troupes around the country.

If you think that way, you probably miss the point and value of learning improvisation. It can be very valuable, not just for learning to act but for learning how to listen to and relate to other human beings. If that holds any interest for you…

My father, as anyone who reads my blog is well aware, worked for the Internal Revenue Service and hated his job. Hated it, hated it, hated it. The only good thing about it, he said, was that it gave him a stable, dependable paycheck. It was not a large one but it was large enough to pay the mortgage on the house, buy us insurance, groceries, clothes and other necessities of life and allow him to take occasional vacations and every once in a great while, splurge for a modest luxury.

We didn't want for anything but that was largely because we didn't want anything that expensive. And he used to play the stock market, ostensibly to try and up his income but for him, I think it was more like a sport.

We had a family friend who took an imaginary ten thousand dollars and made imaginary investments in about twenty stocks. He would dutifully track how they went up or down…but there was no actual money gambled or won. He seemed very pleased when he could report that his "investment portfolio" had made a thousand imaginary dollars in one year. My father was skeptical of these claims because his friend never tried it with actual money…only the pretend kind.

I thought my father's investments, even though they did involve real money, weren't all that different from his friend's. It was a sport more than an actual attempt to up his income. The amounts weren't huge. Sometimes, he was up a hundred and he was happy. Sometimes, he was down a hundred and he wasn't that unhappy. After all, it was just a hundred and he still had those dependable I.R.S. paychecks followed later by a pretty nice pension.

If I read the paperwork I have of his correctly, he basically broke even over his lifetime. At no point did I see any evidence that anything changed in our lives because of his investments. There were dividend checks once or twice a year but they were all for ten or fifteen dollars..or less.

But he sure enjoyed watching the stock market. His broker worked in a big office in Westwood Village and my father liked to go there on those rare mornings when he had a day off from his job. They'd treat him like an important investor, greeting him by name. Someone would offer him a free cup of coffee and a sweet roll. Someone would give him bits of "insider" financial news. His broker would make time to tell him how well his stocks were doing, how he'd been so wise with his selections.

The broker used the word "solid" a lot. The stocks my father had chosen (with this broker's advice) were solid. The companies were solid. The companies' plans for growth were solid. My father liked hearing that and he also liked sitting in what they called "the gallery" there. It was a cluster of about twelve chairs that faced the east wall of the office. That wall was covered, floor to ceiling, with little stock ticker widgets that would display the names of stocks and their current selling price. You could watch hundreds of transactions on it with both the stocks and the amounts changing every few seconds.

He liked to sit there with his coffee and his sweet roll and watch for the latest numbers on his stocks. He might be there for a half-hour before he spotted one on that big wall for a brief moment but it excited him when he did. And he was positively ecstatic if that stock had gone up two cents a share.

The morning of Thursday, July 26, 1962 — or maybe a day later — he took me with him to the brokers' office. I know that date because after he parked the car, we stopped in at a drug store that was then on the corner of Westwood Boulevard and Weyburn so I could buy some comic books. I am absolutely positive that my purchases that morning included Action Comics #292 and Adventure Comics #300 and those comics went on sale on 7/26/62. It is inconceivable that I would not have acquired them with 24 hours of them going on sale. Adventure #300 was the first issue to contain an ongoing strip about The Legion of Super-Heroes.

On that day, I was just shy of ten years and five months of age. I cannot remember one blessed thing I learned in school at the age of ten but I can remember where I bought certain comic books back then. The mind retains essential information.

I got my comics, then we walked down about five doors to the brokerage. My father was greeted by name. Someone offered him coffee and two sweet rolls, one for me. Someone came by to give him bits of "insider" financial news. His broker came over to tell him his stocks were solid and to flatter him for having such a fine-looking son.

The man went on for about five minutes on both topics: Your stocks are solid. My, you have a fine-looking son. Your stocks are solid. My, you have a fine-looking son. Your stocks are solid. My, you have a fine-looking son…and oh, did I mention that your stocks are solid?

Before long, my father and I were sitting in the gallery area. His eyes were on the big board where any minute, he might learn that he was a whopping six cents wealthier. I was reading my comic books and chewing on my sweet roll when suddenly, there was a loud tire screech outside, followed by the sound of metal hitting metal, followed by the sound of glass shattering…

…followed by a bright red 1960 Buick LeSabre crashing through the front floor-to-ceiling window of the brokerage office.

Instantly, there was no front floor-to-ceiling window of the brokerage office. There were pieces of glass everywhere and a lot of panic and the Buick destroyed a couple of desks before it came to a halt.

It came nowhere near us but we still reacted as if it might. My father threw his arms over me and we kind of tumbled off our chairs onto the floor. I remember thinking that if the car did get as far as us, we were no safer on the floor than we would have been on those chairs. But it was a nice bit of heroism, nonetheless. I also remember a lot of panic and everyone in the brokers' office asking everyone else, "Are you okay? Are you okay?" Everyone seemed to be okay…shaken-up but okay.

The LeSabre just sat there, about two-thirds of the way into the office with its rear third on the sidewalk outside and pedestrians looking amazed as they cautiously detoured around it. The driver of the Buick did not get out and no one approached the car until two police cars arrived, sirens blaring. Seconds later, a third siren announced the arrival of an ambulance which someone said was from U.C.L.A. Medical Center, about two whole blocks away.

The police hauled the driver, apparently unhurt, out of the Buick. They put handcuffs on him and stuffed him in the back seat of one of their black-and-white units. Officials of the brokers' office talked with two of the officers for about ten minutes — or as long as it took the other two to walk around the office asking everyone if they were okay. Everyone still seemed to be okay. The ambulance was sent away as unnecessary.

One of the brokers who spoke to the officers was my father's broker. As the police departed, the broker came over to us to ask if we were okay and he told my father, "Former client. Very unhappy his investments didn't go well. They weren't solid like yours"…

…whereupon he launched into a replay, darn near verbatim, of what he'd said fifteen minutes earlier: Your stocks are solid. My, you have a fine-looking son. Your stocks are solid. My, you have a fine-looking son. Your stocks are solid. My, you have a fine-looking son…and oh, did I mention that your stocks are solid?

He concluded his summation by saying, of the angry former customer, "His stocks weren't solid like yours."

My father said, "Apparently, they were solid enough that he was able to afford a Buick LeSabre."

The broker laughed. In fact, he laughed at everything my father said and again told him his stocks were solid and he had a fine-looking son. Then he left us and my father turned to me and said, "What you just heard from that man…that's called 'Stroking the client.' Never confuse it with people actually talking to you."

It was some of the best advice my father ever gave me. What a lot of people say to you in this world is no more or no less than what they believe you want to hear. I remember this every time I see the cover of Action Comics #292 or Adventure Comics #300…and hopefully also when I don't.

March 28, 1985. Johnny Carson has on five members of the L.A.-based improv troupe, The Groundlings. I believe someone — I dunno who — told me this was an experiment. Mr. Carson and/or his staff were thinking it might attract some of the Saturday Night Live audience to his program if he had on a group like this on a regular basis. I guess he ultimately decided against it.

The Groundlings started in 1974 as sort of a local answer to the Second City group in Chicago. It soon evolved into a local fixture with shows and classes…and you can still attend either or both in their theater over on Melrose Avenue. The list of performers who passed through that group and went onto some amount of stardom includes Laraine Newman, Will Ferrell, Ana Gasteyer, Kathy Griffin, Lisa Kudrow, Julia Sweeney, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Pat Morita, Cheri Oteri, Chris Kattan, Edie McClurg, Chris Parnell, Tress MacNeille, Paul Reubens, Cassandra Peterson, Kristen Wiig and on and on and on.

This video features five then-current members: Jon Lovitz (doing the bit and character that would soon land him on SNL), Tim Stack, Mindy Sterling, Don Woodward and Kate Benton. I saw (and sometimes worked with) an awful lot of talented performers in that theater over the years. I would hate to have been the person who had to decide which five of the then-current troupe got to appear on The Tonight Show…

Another good question from Brian Dreger. You should all thank this man because without him, this blog wouldn't be updated as often as it is…

In an old post you wrote: "…Joe Barbera thought of me as a live-action writer. At that time — it changed now and then — he felt live-action writers kind of automatically didn't know how to write for animation."

Is there that big of a difference, or was that just Barbera's paranoia/over-thinking of the writing process? I can see differences in maybe the length of scenes and the content between commercial breaks, but if a writer can write humor for a live-action sitcom, wouldn't that automatically mean you could do it for animation (provided you had an interest in the characters and their situations, etc). Is it just a difference in script structure, or do the jokes/situations need to be different?

There is/was an animated show called King of the Hill, and I always thought that the stories didn't really need to be animated because it was mostly just a sitcom about a family and their friends.

Is there a difference?

Well, first off, in writing — and also in acting and other arts — there's a tendency to define people by what they've done and especially by what they've done lately. You could be good at twelve different things but the folks who've only seen you do one of them might think that's the extent of your abilities. Each different kind of writing carries with it certain qualities that you may or may not be able to master.

One key difference between writing live-action and animation is a matter of budgets. If you write, "A 100-foot glowing green ape stalks up to a house and rips off the roof," that's kind of expensive and difficult to do in a live-action movie. In a cartoon, it costs exactly the same as "A man walks in to deliver a pizza." And in a cartoon, you're more concerned with visuals. You have to keep your characters moving and you don't want to spend a lot of time with them standing in one place and talking.

When I worked at or around Hanna-Barbera, there was an apocryphal story that Woody Allen had once been hired to write an episode of The Flintstones. This absolutely never happened but as the tale was told, he'd essentially written an episode of The Honeymooners but set in the Stone Age. It all took place in one room with the characters just talking and gesturing. Jackie Gleason and Art Carney were a lot more interesting and expressive in one room — and dare I say "animated?" — than Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble. Gleason's expressions and Carney's gestures provided the visual fun. Mssrs. Flintstone and Rubble couldn't do much of that but they could interact with dinosaurs.

Joe Barbera's beliefs about hiring live-action writers to write cartoons were based on past experiences…and those experiences were that some people who could write for Carol Burnett could write for Scooby Doo and some couldn't. But for reasons I'm not sure I can fully explain — and I doubt Joe could — there were times when they didn't want folks with live-action credits on their résumés and there were times when they very much did.

If you forced me to guess, I'd say it had something to do with what the buyers at the network wanted at any given moment. Saying, "We've got this writer who's worked on a lot of hit prime-time shows" impressed some people at some networks and it was a minus to others. When my most recent credit in television was Welcome Back, Kotter, that excited the execs buying cartoon shows at NBC and it may have been a negative with one guy over at CBS who, I think, only lasted in his job for a few months. This kind of thing changes as the personnel at the network changes…which sometimes is quite often.

When I was a story editor in animation, I employed some folks who were mainly writers for live-action and some who were mainly animation writers. Some in each category handed in great work and some in each category handed in pages that needed extensive revision. One of the writers I worked with on Richie Rich was Paul Haggis, who went on to a pretty impressive career writing and producing live-action movies. His cartoon scripts were fine, too.

But there was another guy — I won't mention his name — who had written some very successful TV comedy shows (live-action) but his animation scripts had the same problem as that mythical Woody Allen Flintstones script: All talk, no visuals. There are all these silly beliefs based on the notion that all writers who have something in common are the same…like "Women can't write action-adventure" or "Men can't write romance." The truth is always that some can and some can't. And even some of those who can't at some times can at others.

Baby pandas — the dictionary definition of "cute"…

Mutt has now accepted my settlement proposal. Why can't all election disputes be settled this easily?

Two guys I know are having a friendly — and I hope it stays that way — argument over a bet they made. We'll call them Mutt and Jeff. Mutt bet Jeff an expensive dinner that Kevin McCarthy would become Speaker of the House. Jeff bet against him but they both agree Jeff's phrasing was "I'll bet that he never gets 218 votes."

So now Mutt is claiming victory because McCarthy got elected and Jeff is claiming victory because McCarthy never got to 218 votes. McCarthy won on the fifteenth (!) ballot with 216 because six G.O.P. holdouts voted "Present." You see the problem.

Last night, they exchanged a series of e-mails with each claiming to have won the wager…and just when it began to get a bit heated, Mutt suggested that they pick some mutual friend to play "judge" in this matter and Jeff suggested me. Mutt agreed and each of them sent me the whole message thread and a pledge that, no matter how I ruled, they would abide by my decision and remain my friend. They said nothing about remaining friends with each other.

Following due deliberation, I just sent each the following…

Unless there are Dominion voting machines involved or Mike Lindell comes up with more of his always-airtight evidence of voter fraud, I'm going to rule that you both were right so you both won. Go to dinner. Get separate checks. And each of you pays the other guy's check (including tip) as long as the total isn't more than 20% higher than the one you run up. If it is, the person who ran up the check pays the overage.

That is my final ruling. Court stands adjourned.

As I was writing this post, Jeff e-mailed me that he will comply. We're waiting to hear from Mutt.

A profile of my favorite chef — or at least he was when I was nine — Hector Boyardee…

• I have worked on eight TV shows that had less episodes than CNN's "The Vote for Speaker."

The PBS series American Experience is currently featuring an episode called "The Lie Detector," all about the invention of that machine and the uses to which it has been put, not always for good. I always knew the device was inadmissible in court because of its dubious accuracy but I hadn't known of some of the damage it has done to justice and human lives.

I had also heard that William Marston — famous in my circle as the creator of Wonder Woman — was one of the "inventors" of the lie detector. According to this documentary, that's probably giving him way too much credit but there's much info on Marston in the show…and yes, they mention Wonder Woman. They also say he did it for DC Comics, which is not exactly true. He did it for a company called All-American Comics which was funded by and later absorbed by DC Comics.

You can probably catch this program on your local PBS channel for the next few days and it also seems to be streaming online from a number of sources.

The fine writer of comic books and other things, Kurt Busiek, has this to add to my piece on why the X-Men comic was almost certainly not an imitation of DC's Doom Patrol…

In addition to the stuff you've pointed out, I can't see where someone thinking the Doom Patrol was a cool idea would decide that the bits to copy were the wheelchair and the name of a group of villains.

The Brotherhood of Evil and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants also debuted the same month, which would make it even harder to swipe, even if either party thought it'd be a good idea. I mean, I can see someone thinking, "Brotherhood of Evil is a great name, I want something like that," and inventing the Monastery of Menace or the Lodge of Licentiousness. But just adding a word to a name the other guy's using is…pretty obvious. Not to mention that everyone involved was more creative than that.

And if Goodman wanted another book like F.F., as he did, Lee and Kirby didn't need to hurry-up and swipe a book that had just come out. Kirby (if not Lee, as well) had been reading pulp S.F. with stories of mutants feared and hated by ordinary people, fighting against worser mutants to save the world (and themselves) in the form of Kuttner's Baldy stories (which featured bald telepaths, even), Van Vogt's Slan, Sturgeon's More Than Human, Shiras's Children of the Atom…they had lots of other material to draw from, and they'd even both done stories about mutants before.

Some people have pointed out that the X-Men's blue-and-yellow costumes and the Doom Patrol's red-and-white costumes have a similar design — but the X-Men had theirs first; the D.P. started out in F.F.-like coveralls.

It doesn't make any sense from the POV of a creator.

It sure doesn't. And something else I might have emphasized is that folks who did comic books back then rarely read what their competitors were doing. Devout comic book fans read everything but don't realize that most comic book creators didn't and probably still don't.

I have no trouble believing that Stan Lee hadn't seen The Fly from the Archie company before the creation of Spider-Man. Heck, an editor at DC Comics almost never read the books supervised by the other editors there, even the ones with whom he shared an office. Publishers looked at their competitors' sales figures and would sometimes order up similar books because of that.

There seems to be an ongoing debate among some historians as to how Martin Goodman at Marvel found out that Justice League of America and before that, Challengers of the Unknown were selling well for DC. There was this fabled golf game between Goodman and Jack Liebowitz at DC in which the latter supposedly bragged about the numbers, prompting Goodman to race back to his office and tell Stan Lee he wanted a super-hero team book.

That golf game almost certainly never occurred. Goodman never said it did and Liebowitz said it didn't. What I think happened was that someone asked Stan how they came to start Fantastic Four and he said something like, "Oh, Martin found out DC had this book that was selling well. He probably had lunch with Jack Liebowitz or played golf with him or something," and the part about playing golf became enshrined in Marvel history. The simpler explanation is that the sales figures were no secret. Anyone who cared could find them out…and DC and Marvel then had the same distributor which made it even easier.

Here's what Goodman's company would put out when he saw the numbers on Pine Comics' Dennis the Menace comic and Harvey's Casper the Friendly Ghost…

He did not find out they were hits by playing golf with anyone. And that kind of thing came from someone looking at sales reports, not someone looking at a competitor's comic book and saying, "Hey, that's a great idea for a comic! Let's steal that!" There might be an exception somewhere in history but that would be rare.

And to some extent, what was happening here was not theft of an idea but an attempt to confuse buyers into purchasing your knock-off instead of the other company's real thing. It was like all those records in the sixties that hoped the customers would think they were buying The Beatles when it was actually The Beetles or The Fab Four. Anyway, thanks, Kurt.

A company called FilmRise Television has put every episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show up on YouTube. I'm assuming they have the legal right to do this so look at this page and select the one (or more) you want to watch. Here's one of my favorites — especially the ending…

• Kevin McCarthy is losing ground. Now, he doesn't have enough votes to send out for pizza.