The La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts is a lovely theater that puts on very good shows. I like everything about it except its location which is too damn close to Disneyland for the traffic to not be a big drawback. Still, I may try to get down there before October 13 to see their latest offering, the musical of the movie Grumpy Old Men.

This a musical that has yet to make it to Broadway. Maybe it will and maybe it won't. It pops up in regional productions here and there and will probably continue to do so until someone with bottomless pockets decides it's ready for the big time. It has a book by Dan Remmes and music by Neil Berg…and no disrespect to those gents but what interests me is that the songs have lyrics by my pal, the late Nick Meglin.

Nick, after he retired as editor of MAD magazine, worked long and hard on this show and it's very, very sad that he left us, especially when he was but a few months from seeing it actually produced in an actual theater with actual actors. The actual actors in this production include Hal Linden, Cathy Rigby and Ken Page. See? Here they are in a piece of its advertising artwork…

I wasn't particularly a fan of the movie on which it's based but I'm a fan of those three performers. And of course, I'm a fan of Nick's. Traffic or no traffic, I would certainly drive down there to have another lunch with him.

Wanna know what's up with MAD? Issue #10 comes out October 8 and it will be available in comic book shops and certain specialty shops and by mail but it will not be on mainstream newsstands. This is not the last issue as many have understood and a person on the MAD staff with whom I recently spoke seemed pretty frustrated that people think that. To be accurate, this person said, this is the last issue with all-new content.

There is confusion aplenty here. I pointed out to this person that in recent years of declining sales, MAD has often snuck in "classic" reprints so it's been quite a while since MAD consistently had all-new content. It would also be wrong to believe as many do that MAD will henceforth be all-reprint since #11 and issues to follow will have new covers and some new content. Sergio Aragonés is still working on material for them and others are, as well.  The mag will just be mostly-reprint.

And even that, I suspect, will not last forever.  This is not a news item.  It's just me suspecting…but I'd bet a front tooth implant for Alfred E. Neuman that we will see the day soon when MAD shifts back to all or mostly-new material.  The magazine's star caricaturist Tom Richmond says on his blog that "There will be no more new movie or TV parodies." That's true right now but it'll change. MAD will not become more popular as it has less and less to do with the world today.

The Voctave folks offer their version of "Moon River." I'm thinking of trying to get into a group like this if I can only figure a way to improve my singing about eighty thousand percent…

• Every time a new Trump scandal pops up, you can almost hear Republican leaders thinking, "Oh, God! What we could do with this if a Democrat did it!"

Today for some reason is Batman Day. There have been periods in my life when every day seemed like Batman Day.

I got a few messages from folks asking me what my favorite version of Batman is. There have been a lot to choose from…too many, in my opinion. A character is defined by what's right for him (or her) and what's wrong for the character…and given all the different interpretations that have made it into print, I think there's really nothing now that's wrong for Batman. Has anyone made him into a paranoid mongoose with a lisp yet? If not, wait. It'll be a mini-series in our lifetimes. To me, each variant undefines Batman another notch.

That said, I find it helpful to divide Batman into two eras. There was the period before 1964 when everything was signed by Bob Kane and the artists drew in a broader, cartoonier style that was supposed to emulate how Bob Kane would have drawn it if Bob Kane had drawn it. From that era, I preferred the more serious detective-type stories and mainly the ones drawn by Dick Sprang or Jerry Robinson.

After '64, no one was trying to draw like Bob Kane — even the guy ghosting the comics that Bob Kane was allegedly drawing. Again, I liked the more serious detective-type stories…and the ones where Batman outsmarted the villain instead of out-crazying him. The more mentally disturbed the hero was, the less I liked him or thought of him as Batman. My favorite tales from this era were drawn by Neal Adams, Irv Novick, Jim Aparo, Don Newton, Gene Colan and a few others…but only a few.

A number of times in my life, I was asked to write Batman stories for DC. Each of those times, I declined because I honestly wasn't sure who Batman was at that moment at that company. In hindsight, me doing a version that did not match what others were doing with him might not have bothered the editors there much but it probably would have inhibited my writing a lot. I don't think I would have done a very good job at it.

Hello. I seem to be getting back into my old pattern of blogging. I'm finishing up a long piece on a bit of comic book history which I'll be posting in a day or so. I've been busy with an awful lot of different matters, some of them mundane to the extreme…if that isn't an oxymoron.

Just a reminder: Today, I'll be at the Dark Delicacies bookshop out in what the wonderful Gary Owens used to describe as "Beautiful Downtown Burbank." I'll be interviewing Jeff Abraham and Burt Kearns about their new book, The Show Won't Go On. Details here.

Hey, if you're in or around L.A., this might interest you: I've written before here about a local group called the Musical Theater Guild. They take great old musicals that aren't being produced much these days and they one-performance concert versions of them: No sets, not much in the way of costumes, small casts, actors often reading from scripts, appallingly little rehearsal. Tomorrow night, I'm going out to the Alex Theater in Glendale to see how the hell they're going to do one of my favorite musicals, Barnum, with almost no budget and a cast of nine people who had one day of rehearsal. I know they'll pull it off. I just don't know how.

If you're as curious as I am, tickets are still available here.

Comedian John Mulaney has the perfect analogy for what's going on in our country today…

…time for at least some of us to start thinking about Comic-Con International 2020, which will take place July 23-26 in, of course, San Diego. If you were a paid attendee for 2019, you may be eligible to sign up for Returning Registration. This page will tell you all about it.

Me, I have no conventions planned until WonderCon in Anaheim, which is April 10-12.

Confused about this whole thing with Joe Biden and the Ukraine? Me too. But I feel a little less confused since I read Louis Jacobson explain things over at Politifact.

There are still seats available for the screening of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World on Sunday evening, September 29, in its natural habitat. The Cinerama Dome theater on Sunset in Hollywood was built to show this movie and assuming they're showing the same DCP print they ran last year, you couldn't see this movie in a better place with better audio and video.

Though I was involved in the Criterion DVD/Blu Ray release and highly recommend it, I recommend it as an adjunct to viewing it on a big, real movie screen with a big, real movie audience. It's really a shared experience and I can't imagine how anyone could appreciate it at home, no matter how big your screen is and no matter how many people you invite over. If you're within commuting distance of Sunset and Vine and want to order tickets, here's where you can do that. I will see you there.

In 1967, writer-musician Mason Williams released a song called "Classical Gas" and the following year, it became quite a big hit. Part of its popularity no doubt flowed from what we would now call a "music video" though at the time, that was not a term in the common lexicon. Working with a filmmaker named Dan McLaughlin, Williams made a film that set his song to the visual of 3000 great works of art, each of them on the screen for but a fraction of a second.

Williams was then the Head Writer for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on CBS and the video debuted on The Summer Brothers Smothers Show, which was a summer replacement series that filled Tom and Dick's time slot for a while in the summer of '68. Glen Campbell was the host.

This, uploaded to YouTube by Mason Williams himself, is that 3 minute and 10 second video. If you are familiar with the tune from its frequent radio play, you may notice that this is a different recording of the song. There are several. If you go to Spotify to listen to "Classic Gas" by Mason Williams, there's a version that's 2:36, another that's 3:08 and one that's 3:31 and I don't think any of them are this one. My thanks to Maggie Thompson who discovered this was online…

• Harvey Weinstein's attorney says his client's "whole life has been ruined [because] he never gets to be Harvey Weinstein ever again." Okay, fine. Now, how do we ensure that no one else does?

What's going on with Iran and Saudi Arabia? Fred Kaplan, as usual, is the man with the overview. I wish someone in Washington seemed to have one.

If you're wise enough to visit this website, I figure you're wise enough to watch John Oliver every week…but just in case, here's his segment from last Sunday night about immigration. The most interesting thing about it is that he explains how it actually works and makes the point that the folks discussing it in the public arena — Mr. Trump, especially — don't know. Nor do they care.

There are people out there who simply hate the concept of foreigners coming to our land…and there are enough of these haters that some find it profitable, in terms of money and/or votes, to fan the flames of that hatred. So the whole process gets described, not the way it is but in a way to stir up that anger. Oliver's segment will change none of these minds but it's still nice to have around…

One of my favorite comedian-persons, Ricky Gervais, tweeted the following not long ago…

Please stop saying "You can't joke about anything anymore". You can. You can joke about whatever the fuck you like. And some people won't like it and they will tell you they don't like it. And then it's up to you whether you give a fuck or not. And so on. It's a good system.

I think I agree with that the way he meant it but with one little codicil. There's an increasing tendency, I think, to believe that if you tell a joke about some sensitive subject and folks don't laugh, it's their fault for being too friggin' sensitive. Well, maybe it's that but maybe the joke just wasn't funny. That's also a possibility. I mean, not every joke about dead babies or people with unfortunate physical conditions is hilarious.

There was a period in my life, long ago and far away, when I spent a fair amount of time at the Comedy Store and other venues where new comedians were showcasing and painstakingly trying to be seen. A lot of the guys I was around went on to decent success — and a surprising amount of them, I now think, attained the level of success they deserved. That is to say B+ comics had B+ careers, C- comedians had C- careers and so on. Often when that didn't happen, there was a clear and visible reason why not…like the comedian being too heavy into drinks 'n' drugs or the comedian being difficult to work with. It wasn't because of how good they were on stage.

One of the recurring problems, it seemed to me, was to take this attitude: I am always funny. If the audience doesn't laugh, they're a bunch of idiots or they're a bunch of squares or they're a bunch of losers…something like that. There was one up-and-coming/going nowhere comic who consistently evoked only mild laughter on stage and it was always the crowd's fault for not being smarter and hipper and more appreciative of true comic genius. Don't try to figure out who it was. I don't remember his name and you probably never knew it.

There is such a thing as a bad audience but as I once heard Jay Leno tell a roomful of comics who envied where he then was in his career, "If you get them [bad audiences] all the time, maybe the problem isn't with them." There's also such a thing as a wrong audience — or the wrong material for the room. I suspect if Ricky Gervais somehow got booked to play a retirement community where the average age was Deceased, he'd tell fewer dick jokes.

I love most of what some call "shock" or "edgy" comedians. My current favorite is probably Jim Jefferies who does it with more thought and genuine insight than anyone else I've seen lately. Gervais is good too. I don't think either of them if they bombed would blame it on the audience being too uptight or "politically correct" or anything like that. They know that to be outrageous and to "push the envelope" (as they say) to the point of offending some is not the point of comedy. It can be a nice bonus but it's not an excuse for not being funny.