Watching TV Land episodes of The Flip Wilson Show, I am reminded of how much I once liked one of his guests, deadpan comedian Jackie Vernon. (Did I say "deadpan"? Compared to Vernon, Buster Keaton was Roberto Benigni. Jackie got one of his biggest laughs just by coming out on stage and saying, "To look at me now, you'd never believe that I used to be a dull guy." He'd often follow that by saying, "At parties, I'd stay in the room with the coats…memorize labels…") Vernon, whose real name was Ralph Verrone, was a former musician who began doing stand-up in the mid-fifties. He quickly built up a good following in night clubs and at Friars' Roasts and then made the leap to television.

Legend has it that so many "big time" comics were cribbing lines from him that the producers of The Ed Sullivan Show and all the top talk shows figured, "We're already booking Vernon's material…we might as well book Vernon." He claimed authorship of one of the most-stolen jokes of all time: "I used to be an atheist but I gave it up. No holidays."

Vernon's act was, usually, a masterpiece of taking your time and remaining in character. On the Flip Wilson episode I just watched, he was obviously rushed and was therefore about half as funny as usual…but that was still pretty funny. He did his "vacation slides" bit, which consisted of him standing on stage with a clicker, describing slides that you couldn't see…

Here I am touring the Everglades. That's my guide. Guido the Guide. Here's Guido leading me around a bed of quicksand…" [CLICK!]

Here's Guido from the waist up… [CLICK!]

There's his hat. [CLICK!]

Now, here's the rescue party rushing to Guido's aid… [CLICK!]

And here's the rescue party from the waist up… [CLICK!]

And here's a bunch of hats and ropes…

If I heard it once, I heard it fifty times and it always made me laugh. Everything about that guy made me laugh. Unfortunately, he never seemed able to parlay the act into anything bigger than playing night clubs and making the occasional comedy album. He may be best remembered for providing the voice of Frosty the Snowman in the 1969 cartoon special. Here's a warm, funny article by his son, David, who recalls watching the show and bursting into tears at the end when Frosty melted. He thought his father had been killed but his mother reassured him, "He's not dead…he's in Chicago working the Playboy Club." Jackie would probably have said that was better but not by much.

I used to see Vernon lunching over at Farmers Market and even got the nerve once to approach him and chat for about five minutes. All I remember is that I told him I could quote all his routines by heart and he chuckled and said, "You and Milton Berle." That very evening, I saw Berle on Merv Griffin's show and he did the "atheist/no holidays" joke.

I saw him perform once in Vegas. It was at the old Marina Hotel, which they tore down to build the new MGM Grand. He was in a burlesque revue called "Babes Ahoy," which disappointed me a bit since what I really wanted was to just see him do stand-up, even if it meant hearing the routines I knew so well from his albums and TV appearances. Fortunately, he did about twenty hilarious minutes on his own…and to my surprise, he didn't do one joke I'd ever heard before. This would have been around 1985. He passed away in '87.

Since he never did sitcoms and since variety shows are so rarely rerun, his best work has been long forgotten. He really does seem to be recalled mostly from that cartoon special and its sequel. Maybe some CD company will see the wisdom of reissuing his albums, especially A Wet Bird Never Flies at Night and A Man and His Watermelon. They were as funny as anything ever put on vinyl, and proved conclusively that he was not a dull guy.

Here's an article by Joshua Green that will tell you all sorts of things about John Edwards.

Here's one account of how the New York Post went so awry with its cover story on Kerry's choice of running mate.

My Congressguy, Henry Waxman, writes about Congressional Oversight. Quick summary: Nothing was too trivial or too expensive for Congress to investigate when the President was named Clinton but they now do their darnedest not to uncover anything which might embarrass George W. Bush.

Woke up this morning to very predictable news. A New England Democratic presidential nominee has picked a Southerner for his running mate. Some Republicans think this was the worst possible choice. And the New York Post got it wrong.

I don't know from focus groups, and I'm already sick of hearing "he's a trial lawyer," spoken as if the guy was a child molester. But Edwards always struck me as the most energetic, interesting campaigner in the pack. Kerry's campaign needs that badly, plus it's sure easy to imagine Edwards ripping Dick Cheney to confetti in a head-to-head debate.

Anyway, I'm pretty happy. So is whoever in the current Saturday Night Live cast is best suited to play Edwards.

Here's a terrific website full of online videos of campaign commercials of the past. They even have the infamous "daisy girl" commercial for Lyndon Johnson which implied that Barry Goldwater would start a nuclear war that would kill small, cute children. Do not go to this site unless you're prepared to spend some time. And don't thank me. Thank Robert Spina, who sent me the link.

Love him or hate him…or be like me and feel very conflicted…but you might like to know that Michael Moore has opened a weblog. Betcha it's one of those that after the first few entries doesn't get updated very often.

The network formerly known as the Game Show Network is currently on its second go-round of vintage What's My Line? episodes. They ran them all (all they had, at least) one time through, and now their Black-and-White Overnight bloc is running them again. First time around, we made special note of the episode on which journalist Dorothy Kilgallen made her last appearance. She did her last broadcast on Sunday evening, 11/7/65. Then she went home and died. The timing and nature of her death was so odd that it prompted all sorts of conspiracy theories.

She had recently been looking into the assassination of John F. Kennedy and a number of assassophiles speculated — apparently without any real basis in fact — that she was murdered because she was about to blow the Oswald-as-lone-gunman theory wide open. This conjecture appears to have petered out from lack of evidence…but I thought I should mention that GSN is back in its rotation to the final Kilgallen episodes. That last appearance should be the one broadcast this coming Wednesday morning, followed the next day by the one on which her passing was discussed. But GSN occasionally does odd things so we may be a day off here. (Last time these aired, I posted this item and also this one.)

Hello. Hope you had a safe 'n' sane Fourth of July. My wonderful friend Carolyn and I spent the evening up at the Hollywood Bowl, listening to a rousing selection of patriotic songs (and a few ringers) and watching the closing fireworks display which was so loud, you couldn't hear the Sousa marches the orchestra was playing at the time. But it was a heckuva fireworks presentation and a terrific evening of music. Along with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra (John Mauceri, conductor) the performers were Marilyn Horne, Brian Stokes Mitchell and a band of characters from Sesame Street.

Mitchell, one of my favorite Broadway-type performers, was in especially fine voice, even better than when I saw him in Ragtime and Kiss Me, Kate. I didn't get to see his recent stint in a revival of Man of La Mancha…and judging from the way he sang "The Impossible Dream" at the Bowl, I think I missed something wonderful. I've heard that song sung by some of the best but I've never heard it sung better. The guy really is an amazing talent.

Speaking of Impossible Dreams, Stokes (as everyone calls him, I hear) pulled off quite a feat last night. There he was, singing up a storm on the stage of the Hollywood Bowl for its Independence Day program. At the same time, he was the narrator for the Macy's Fireworks Celebration which was broadcast live from New York last evening. How did he accomplish this bi-coastal feat? Beats me. He doesn't explain over at his website, which — by the way — was nicely designed by my pal Daniel Will-Harris.

Marilyn Horne was terrific, too…but you know who I was really thrilled to see? That is, assuming it was him: Caroll Spinney. When I heard they were going to have Sesame Street characters at the Bowl, I figured we'd get some third-string touring apprentice Muppeteers, not the original Big Bird. Well, I think it was Mr. Spinney in the suit. It said it was in the program book but I wasn't 100% sure that it wasn't a good impersonator. At one point, Oscar the Grouch (the other role Spinney originated) made a brief cameo appearance and that sure didn't sound like the real Oscar to me…which made me more skeptical about who was playing Big Bird. I finally decided it was Spinney but that someone else played Oscar because it would have been too awkward for him to get out of the Big Bird costume to do Oscar's two lines, then get back in. That's my story and, as the saying goes, I'm sticking to it. The rest of the Muppet Crew was great. Kevin Clash, the original (and, I think, only) Elmo played Elmo. Fran Brill played Zoe and Carmen Osbahr played Rosita. A gent named Eric Jacobson played Grover, doing a darn good job of imitating Frank Oz, who first performed the character. (And it says in my program book that the Additional Muppeteers were Alice Dinean, Drew Massey, Paul McGinnis and Matt Vogel, for those of you charting such things.) They put on a real fine show, and the audience loved singing along on some of the classic Sesame Street tunes.

One other "star" of the evening was the new bandshell covering the stage of the Hollywood Bowl. It just recently replaced one that dated back to 1929, though that one underwent extensive refurbishment and alteration over the years. The "all new for 2004" model is larger and visually stunning, though I can't vouch for its allegedly improved acoustics. Maybe we were just sitting in the wrong place, or maybe the sound crew hasn't mastered its intricacies yet, but I kept wanting to grab up the remote and tap the Volume Up button. Everything was audible but it fell a wee notch shy of the perfect level. I have tickets again for a few weeks from now and I hope it's a tiny bit louder.

Since they will eventually dig up every single thing John Kerry has ever done, you might as well know this now: He was once in a rock band. Jerry Osborne has all the details, including a photo and the cover of their one album, at his weblog. (Thanks, Phil Conley!)

Dick Cheney is out there bashing John Kerry as being "on the left, out of the mainstream and out of touch with the conservative values of the heartland." I suspect there's some truth to that with regard to some values.

On the other hand, I'd like to see someone ask Cheney about some other values. Going off to defend America in a war versus escaping the draft via deferments because you had "other priorities," for example. I escaped the draft myself (high lottery number) and never felt there was anything wrong with that. But when it was Clinton against Dole, it was the guy in the uniform who supposedly represented the values of the heartland, and I don't think anything's changed now except which one is the Democrat and which one is the Republican.

Cheney also seems to love companies like Walmart as a model of how American business should operate. Walmart has done a good job of moving into a town, driving the small merchants (the "Mom and Pop" shops) into insolvency, then lowering the general wage scale of an area. Oh, yeah — and they no longer cling to Sam Walton's once-expressed goal of trying to keep manufacturing jobs in America. We all love lower prices, which Walmart is sometimes able to deliver, but I don't think they consider that a perfect trade-off in the heartlands.

And there are an awful lot of allegations about the Iraq War — lying, profiteering, human rights violations, poor strategizing, etc. — that I don't think are much exalted anywhere in the country. Nor is running up a massive deficit or causing former allies to hate us.

I sure hope Kerry and his running mate, whoever it is, don't get caught up in the game of defending the right to burn the flag. I'd much rather see them assert that doing right by the nation and its people is a value that trumps those "red meat" issues. Dukakis (and to some extent, Gore) made the mistake of going on the defense about their faith and patriotism and courage. In one debate, Joe Lieberman stood there like Venus De Milo, saying nothing as Cheney asserted he'd never made a dime off the government. If the Democrats play it that way again, they deserve to lose. And they will.

It doesn't get much mention in the "mainstream" comic book community but there's a thriving world out there of Christian-oriented comic books. My pal Nate Butler maintains a webpage about some of the more important figures in this area, and has recently added a new page about the late Al Hartley, who is perhaps best known for writing and drawing the Christian Spire comics of Archie, Jughead and the gang.

My friend Earl and I spent this evening plowing through crates of old videotapes that I've had in storage for, in some cases, two decades. I'm transferring everything I want to keep to DVD and getting rid of the tapes themselves. Over the last few months, I've converted most of the labelled tapes that contain stuff worth keeping and tonight, we went through a few boxes of unlabelled ones to see what was on them.

Lots of interesting finds in those boxes, some of which caused me to wonder, "Why the hell did I keep that?" There were also loads of shows and movies I kept, blithely unaware I would someday be able to buy high-quality copies. I kept episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus and The Dick Van Dyke Show and I had several bad bootleg videos of Disney features. It seemed like a big deal to have these in 1979. Now you can get much better copies at K-Mart.

But we also found things that aren't out on DVD and probably never will be…like I seem to have a tape of National Lampoon's Disco Beaver From Outer Space, which was one of the first original programs made for HBO. It came out in 1978 and the thing I remember most about it takes me back to 1981 when the Writers Guild went on strike over, among other things, fees for made-for-cable shows. I was brought into a Guild strategy meeting because someone thought I knew something about the technology and might help the lawyers figure out how to construct a formula for reruns of cable programming. This National Lampoon special was the best example at hand, so grown men in ties had to keep talking, over and over, about Disco Beaver From Outer Space while the fate of Hollywood employment was left to dangle.

(There were also tapes I didn't find and doubt I will. Does anyone out there have a copy of Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants?)

Here's a question that's probably just for friends in the Los Angeles area. Does anyone have a good use for a lot of old videotapes in the Beta and 3/4" U-Matic format? I have a few hundred Betamax tapes — some store-bought copies, some I taped myself. I also have around a hundred 3/4" tapes I don't want. Most of the latter have stuff on them you wouldn't want and which you'd just tape over. The Betas contain some goodies…but nothing you can't find, generally in better quality, on DVD or VHS. I'm asking folks in the L.A. area because I don't want to go through the hassle of mailing. I'd like someone to come up with a van, haul them off and put them to constructive purpose. Drop me a line if this is you.

I'm working here today with the TV tuned to TV Land's marathon of The Flip Wilson Show. They're rather pleasant with a nice "small" feel — no big sets, no line of dancers, etc. Whatever money they spent, they spent on guest stars…and having worked on a number of shows where the guests had no real affection or respect for the host, I can spot that on this one, they generally do. It's also nice to hear all (or most of) the singers singing live and to see sketches performed with few obvious edits.

These are half-hour versions of what were once hour shows. I'm not sure if they chopped some of the hours in half to create two half-hour reruns or if they just cut each one down. Looks more like the latter since there are few pure musical numbers.

Just noticed George Carlin listed among the writers of an episode in which he did not appear. I seem to vaguely recall that he briefly had a deal to be a frequent guest star and to contribute to the scripts of other installments.

Anyway, I'm going to keep it on while working this weekend. These shows hold up pretty well.

Illustrator John Cullen Murphy passed away yesterday morning at the age of 85. Murphy, as we reported here, recently drew his last Prince Valiant Sunday page after 34 years on the job and before that, he did a long stint drawing Big Ben Bolt. He was a widely respected artist, both for his comic strip work and his magazine illustration. You had to be good to follow Hal Foster on Prince Valiant, and most folks thought he was a worthy successor. Here's the newspaper obit, here's an interview with Murphy, here's another interview with him, here's a 2001 online chat with him and here's an interview with his son. Earlier this year, Murphy's passing was reported erroneously in a comic news magazine. Sad to hear the story wasn't so much erroneous as a few months premature.