Has anyone ever told you you're funny? Well, maybe this is your chance to step up to big pay with the help of Albert Brooks' Famous School for Comedians…

As someone who used to go to Las Vegas often, I'm curious about what it's like these days when The Pandemic is over as far as some are concerned, no matter what some experts say. I have no plans to go and find out for myself and after reading T.M. Shine's report on Las Vegas, I'm more confused than ever.

In the meantime: The White House COVID team put out a list of "Select High-Burden Core-Based Statistical Areas" and Vegas was numero uno as "the nation's worst metro area with more than one million people for transmission of the coronavirus." The Las Vegas Advisor reports: "Masks are now recommended, though not mandated, for everyone in Las Vegas and several casinos, including the Venetian and Westgate, are now requiring all employees to wear masks again."

Jordan Klepper with another segment on guns…

A number of folks on Facebook and Twitter were featuring the above sign today. It strikes me as one of the few arguments I've seen that might actually prompt a few anti-vaxxers to go get the jab. A lot of them seem to have their political worldviews wrapped up in this issue. It's not so much that getting the shot or not getting the shot might affect whether or not you get a killer disease. It's that not getting the shot will certainly save the American way of life from Communist Takeover.

I am not exaggerating about some of these people. I think some of them are the same folks who insisted that legalizing Gay Marriage would completely destroy the entire institution of marriage within two years. It's now been thirteen years, two months and two days and I'm waiting.

My phone just rang. One of the umpteen filter-things I employ to weed out robocalls and frauds identified it in the Caller I.D. as "Spam Risk." On a whim, I answered anyway…

ME: Hello.

HIM: May I speak to Mark Evanier please?

ME: That's me. Who are you?

HIM: I'm calling from Quicken Loans about new opportunities to refinance your home.

ME: The caller I.D. said you were a Spam Risk.

HIM: Oh. We get that a lot. Our offers are so unbelievably good that people don't believe them and they report us.

ME: Hey, that's good. Don't call again.

And I hung up on him. But I was impressed with how fast he came up with that…or maybe remembered it.

My post about "Never attribute to deviousness that which can be explained by incompetence" (this post) brought a lot of thoughtful e-mails and I thought I'd share a few with you. This one is from Carl Cafarelli…

My own preferred way of phrasing this is that we often attribute to a Machiavelli what is actually the work of the Three Stooges. Keep fighting the good fight.

And here's one from Tim Kinseth…

Agree completely about conspiracy theories. Some people are so paranoid and some people just have to have a bad guy. The thing with all the J.F.K. conspiracy nuts was the belief that something as monumental and earth-shattering as the death of the President of the United States could not possibly have been caused by one loser guy with a cheap rifle. It had to be some whole nation or awesome force. When I argued the matter with friends, they'd come back with the claim that the lack of evidence of a massive conspiracy proved there was a massive conspiracy because only a massive conspiracy could hide evidence that well.

And finally, here's my old pal Pat O'Neill…

Another important point to consider when dealing with conspiracy theories is summed up in "correlation is not causation." Just because two things occur together — even if that happens frequently — does not mean one caused the other. One example of this I recall from my youth was when people would claim that rockets launched from Cape Kennedy were causing the weather conditions that resulted in hurricanes making landfall in Florida.

Yeah. We see a lot of that from anti-vaxxers these days. Someone got a shot of Pfizer and died four weeks later…so naturally, it had to be the shot. At the same time, they dismiss the cause-and-effect of COVID-19 rates rising in areas with low vaccination rates. That just might be correlation equaling causation.

I think Tim above is right: Some people need bad guys. They have to blame every bad thing on someone…usually the same someone. I even have to remind fellow Trump-dislikers that you can't blame every bad thing that happens on the guy. He might not be responsible for DoorDash screwing up my order last night. Tucker Carlson might be right. It must have been Joe Biden doing that.

Thanks to all who wrote in.

Alex Duquette performs a medley of ten Hanna-Barbera theme songs in two minutes…

"Monster Mash," recorded by Bobby "Boris" Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers, came out in 1962 but it was played often enough on KHJ — probably around Halloween — that years later, it made it onto my mixtape. Mr. Pickett, who died in 2007, recorded other songs, mostly with a monster theme, but "Monster Mash" was such a smash that people cite him as an example of a "one-hit wonder."

I have a memory of sitting at a table next to Mr. Pickett at a horror convention — perhaps a two-day thing that was held at a public school in Lawndale, California one weekend in 1977. It was run by author George Clayton Johnson.  He called it ClaytonCon 1 and as I recall, the honored guests outnumbered the paying ones by a notable ratio, at least while I was there.

Maybe it wasn't that con but at some convention, I sat and chatted with "Boris" and he talked about all the things he'd done besides "Monster Mash" — a pretty impressive list, as I recall. But when people came by his table, all they wanted to talk about was "Monster Mash" and most weren't there to purchase the copies of his album and other goodies he was selling. Everyone just wanted to prove to him that they knew the song by heart and most of 'em wanted to show him their bad impression of him doing his bad impression of Karloff.

I felt sorry for the guy but then I remembered how many recording artists in this world — or wanna-be recording artists — never record anything that makes the Top 100, let alone goes to #1 as his did. One hit is infinitely better than zero hits.  So here's one the biggest novelty records of all time from American Bandstand for October 13, 1964…

And now here's a bonus — a novelty record based on a novelty record! You may remember my friends in Big Daddy, the local band that takes everything recorded after John F. Kennedy was shot and redoes it so it sounds like a record that came out before John F. Kennedy was shot. A few years ago, they took "The Music of the Night" from Phantom of the Opera and did some surgery to make it sound like "Monster Mash." I like both songs better when mashed this way…

Lately, everywhere I look, I seem to see people talking about conspiracies. "A" happens and then "B" happens and though there's no obvious connection between the two, someone finds a way to link them and to suggest that they're all a plot by Master Planner "C."

It's possible…but possible does not mean certain or even probable. It's possible that that lottery ticket you purchased will win you $50 million but it's not probable and certainly more than a bit far from certain. Things do happen all on their own. There are coincidences. And there's another factor that has a lot to do with what happens in this world…

That factor is incompetence. There's a lot of it on this planet, sometimes even from people who give every appearance of knowing what they're doing. I am a big believer in the aphorism, "Never attribute to deviousness that which can be explained by incompetence," though I more often modify it to "Don't rush to attribute to deviousness that which can be explained by incompetence."

Back in the seventies, I took a course in criminology just for the heck of it. Our instructor, a former F.B.I. official I believe, spent a lot of time telling us why Real Life was not like an Erle Stanley Gardner novel…or like the way we saw crimes in the movies or on TV. One of his main points was that you can't solve a mystery by assuming that all parties did the logical thing. Even relatively-sane people do not follow obvious rules of logic…and criminals are often far from sane.

Sometimes, you can figure out what they're thinking. Often, you can't. And often, they're not thinking at all.

Lately, I've received a lot of questions about comic book history with folks asking me why some publisher did something that now seems totally illogical. Well, maybe it didn't then. Or maybe there were other factors in play about which we know nothing…

Or maybe the person making the decision was totally illogical. And/or incompetent.

I saw someone on the web the other day trying to figure out Mike Lindell's "endgame." I wouldn't assume The Pillow Guy has one. It strikes me that when he starts a sentence, he doesn't know where he's going en route to the period. You cannot have a Master Plan if you're not to some degree a Master Planner.

And there are Master Planners in the world. I'm not saying there aren't. But there are also incompetents and I think they outnumber the Master Planners…by far.

As many of you are informing me this A.M., I seem to be a character in today's Funky Winkerbean comic strip. What a surprising thing to wake up to.

From The Ed Sullivan Show for March 28, 1965, here's my favorite non-speaking comedy stage act, George Carl…

Our great friend Steve Sherman passed away last month. I wrote about him here and here. A memorial gathering will be held on Sunday afternoon, August 8th, here in the Los Angeles area. If it would be appropriate for you to be there and you'd like to attend, drop me a note and someone will get in touch with you about the details.

I apologize I don't have a better photo of Don Jurwich — preferably one without me in it. That was taken at a Christmas Party thrown by the Animation Guild a few years ago, the last time I saw Don. He was semi-retired from animation and was very happy to be painting what he wanted to paint instead of writing, producing or directing cartoons that someone else wanted him to do. He did a lot of that because he was so good that everyone wanted to hire him.

Don, who died yesterday at the age of 87, had a tremendous career in cartoons. It included working for most of the studios in Los Angeles but long stints with Jay Ward (where he worked on George of the Jungle) and Hanna-Barbera (where he worked on dozens of shows including Super-Friends, Scooby Doo, The Smurfs and so many others).

He was one of those guys — I encountered many of these in animation — who'd gotten stuck in executive-type positions, dealing with the networks and overseas animation studios and budget problems when he would rather have been just writing and drawing. Another producer there once said to me, "Don has to spend ten hours fixing a storyboard by someone else when it would have taken him five hours to draw it himself right in the first place."

But he was a tremendous talent and a supporter of tremendous talent. At H-B, he gave an awful lot of young artists their first jobs

I can't do Don's story justice but maybe Don can. Some time back, he sat for a two-part interview on his career. The two parts total a little less than an hour and if you're interested in the reality of the cartoon business and how it worked in years past, you couldn't learn more than you'll learn listening to this fine man.

Any number of you who read this post yesterday wrote to remind me that Stacey Abrams, who was among those nominated for a Voiceover Emmy, is not even a live-action actress. She's a politician and activist and former member of the Georgia House of Representatives. I probably should have said something about that but my mind was on my main thesis, which is that the nominators were nominating celebrities instead of real voice actors.

Also, my view is not that it's wrong to nominate famous people or on-camera performers. Some of them, as I noted, occasionally give outstanding performances. I think it's wrong to favor them to the exclusion of folks who are first and foremost voiceover artists. I have no idea what show Ms. Abrams was nominated for and I'm pretty sure I never saw it…so I have no opinion on whether her performance was Emmy-worthy. The problem for me is not Stacey Abrams. It's a judging process that appears to overlook superlative work done by lesser-knowns.

I should probably have said something else here which I think I've said before on this blog. I think people take awards and nominations and especially supposed "snubs" way too seriously. I served briefly on a committee for the TV Academy that was trying to survey the process and recommend improvements to it. As far as I know, the committee never came to agreement on anything that was worth submitting to the Board of Governors or whoever we supposedly were advising.

What I learned was how random and political and (most of all) subjective the process was. Expecting it to yield the nominees and winners you think are wise decisions is like expecting a bunch of pussycats to do what you want them to do. They might…but only by chance. I do not disdain the Emmys or any awards. I just think people take them too seriously. Maybe in this case, I did.

Here's another one of these.  It's the openings to 36 (actually, more than 36) shows that were on NBC in the Fall of 1960…