Here's a funny stand-up spot that Jena Friedman did recently on Conan O'Brien's show. Thanks to Bruce Reznick for letting me know about this…

The Nate 'n Al Delicatessen in Beverly Hills is about to be sold…maybe. And maybe it will close, maybe it will move or maybe it will stay right where it is and continue serving the same fine grub. It could even go Vegan and start making its pastrami out of tofu for all we know.

What we do know from this report over at Eater L.A. is that someone says one of the owners says they're in talks to sell. That's enough to put a lot of longtime locals into a bit of a panic.

The deli everyone refers to as just "Nate 'n Al's" is a fine place with many great memories for some of us. My parents loved eating there and whenever we went in, there was a long wait but your table, when you got it, usually had a great view of Milton Berle or Jack Benny or Jan Murray or Doris Day. For a decade or so, I never went there for a breakfast meeting without sitting near Doris Day. The waitresses were also stars. Some of them had been there so long, it made you wonder if deli food didn't promote longevity.

It's no longer as hard to get a table and the current show biz community hasn't embraced the place the way an earlier generation did. But it's still a great deli and I hope it remains what it is…and also where it is unless, of course, new owners want to move it to within walking distance of my home.

Years ago here, I put up a section called Incessantly Asked Questions in which I attempted to answer, once and for all, questions about comics and animation that I found myself answering over and over on the web. It worked pretty well for its purpose, which was to spare me answering the same question twenty times. Instead, I could just link questioners to the appropriate page. But somehow, I never got around to adding to the IAQ section as I'd planned.

Well, I just added a new (and very long) answer to a question I keep being asked on Facebook. It's about the unused cover that Jack Kirby drew for Thor #144 in 1967. People who see it seem to think that Jack sat down one day and made up a cover drawing, took it in to Stan Lee and Stan said, "No, that's lousy" and he rejected it so Jack wasn't paid. There's also a rumor that the inker refused to ink it because it was so complicated…and since they couldn't get it inked, they couldn't use it. Or something like that.

If you wanna know what really happened, here's the link to a new IAQ page. And if you come across someone else who wonders about that cover, please do us all a favor and link them to that page. I'll be adding a few more to the IAQ section in the future.

Last week was not a good week for Donald Trump. Given how many shoes seem to be droppable in his many and varied scandals, I suspect we'll be saying that for most weeks to come. Here's some stuff…

• Nate Silver attempts to answer the unanswerable question as to how much Russian meddling had to do with Trump winning the presidency. He doesn't really know and I doubt anyone ever will.
• A year ago, correspondents for Slate made a lot of predictions about Trump's first year and now it's time to score how they did. Not bad, guys…
• Obama's chief economist Jason Furman thinks Trump's forecasts for the American economy are absurd. One wonders if anyone's chief economist (including Trump's) really believes them.
• Trump's National Security Adviser Says Proof of Russian Election Meddling Is "Incontrovertible." Trump apparently says that's Fake News and we shouldn't listen to his National Security Adviser. Is it? If so, why is this person his National Security Adviser?
• Since it's Presidents Day, the New York Times asked scholars to rank our presidents, best to worst. Trump did not do well even among Republican scholars. I always regard any of these rankings as click bait and not much more but if you're baited to click, here's the link.
• Thomas Friedman dives into the theory that Trump is either being blackmailed by Russia, could be blackmailed by Russia or is really, really foolish with regard to Russia. I'm not sure which one I'd fear most.
• Must Trump testify in Robert Mueller's investigations? Joe Conason thinks he does and Conason's probably right. Which doesn't mean he will.

John Oliver had a strong season-opener last night, focusing on the hard-to-argue premise that Trump is becoming the most mocked and ridiculed person on this planet. If you didn't see it, the show reruns many times this week. I suspect once a week at Comedy Central, they have a little ritual where everyone responsible for letting Oliver get away gathers in a room and they just kick each other for forty-five minutes.

In 1959, Groucho Marx published an autobiography called Groucho and Me.  It was a pretty funny book and if you never read it, I'd suggest getting a copy and rectifying that oversight.  If you do, you'll notice a frequent usage of the name "Delaney."  Every time Groucho doesn't recall someone's name or wants to change it for legal-type reasons, that person becomes Delaney.  Here, scanned right out of a copy, is one such example…

I probably read this book around 1964 or 1965 when my love of the Marx Brothers was just starting to kick in.  Among the many things I picked up from Groucho was the use of the name.  As I began writing stories — published or otherwise — I often named a character Delaney or made reference to Delaney's Market or Delaney Avenue. It was as good a name as any.

When my friend Rob Solomon asked me to help him name his fanzine and to art-direct covers for it, I suggested it be called Delaney. The cover below at left is from one issue. Another friend, Dan Gheno, penciled this cover and I did the inking and all the lettering, including the Delaney title logo.

In a lot of the comic books I've written since I started in 1970, I've had characters named Delaney. One example of many was in a limited series I did back in 1993 with Sergio Aragonés called The Mighty Magnor. One of the heroes, as you'll see above right, was named C.J. Delaney.

A number of folks have noticed my repeated use of the name Delaney, which is fine with me. Better they notice that than my tendency to reuse the same jokes over and over. One or two of them have even noticed the most widely-seen usage of the name in something I worked on. Back on the seventies' TV series, Welcome Back, Kotter, reference was occasionally made to — and an actor once played on-camera — Mr. Kotter's old high school pal, Dino "Crazy" Delaney. Since I was a story editor on that show for a while, you'd probably assume that name came from me —

— and if you assumed that, you'd be incorrect. I agree that it seems logical but not everything that seems logical is so. I had nothing to do with the naming of Dino "Crazy" Delaney. In fact, he was mentioned on the show before I ever saw it, let alone worked on it. Just one of those coincidences.

Still, two or three times in my life, someone has made that deduction to me and I have to tell them they're wrong. A few months ago, a fellow who says he's doing a book on Welcome Back, Kotter wrote me not to ask me any questions whatsoever about working on the show but to verify that I, as he'd brilliantly deduced, must have named Dino "Crazy" Delaney. When I told him I hadn't, we got into a very silly e-mail argument with him telling me I had to be wrong because I had this pattern of naming characters Delaney so it was, as he put it, "absolutely, totally obvious" that I had named the character. I'm not sure if I convinced him I didn't. We'll find out if/when this book comes out.

But where did the Delaney come from? Well, one of the producers when I worked on Kotter was a clever guy named George Yanok. Many years after that show, I was browsing through my buddy Lee Goldberg's book, Unsold TV Pilots, and I noticed that a year or two before, George had co-written a TV-Movie/pilot called Delaney…

It starred Ed Lauter as Bud Delaney, a private eye in the Dashiell Hammett/Raymond Chandler tradition. So did George name Dino "Crazy" Delaney? Well, isn't it "absolutely, totally obvious?"

Here's a story I don't think I've told before here. Some years ago, I was at a party full of Hollywood-type people and I was introduced to Betty White. Told that I was the producer of The Garfield Show, she instantly said to me, "Why haven't I been on The Garfield Show?" I smiled and said, "Because you're on everything else!" I don't think any TV actor at whatever age she was then has ever been in more demand than Betty White was at the time.

We wound up talking about other things and parting. Then a little later, she came up to me and said, "I hope you know I was only half-serious when I asked you, 'Why haven't I been on The Garfield Show.'" I said, "I assumed as much but just out of curiosity…what about the other half? You're on like twenty-seven TV shows these days. We pay scale to all our guest stars. If I did want to hire you, are you even available? And are you available for that money?"

She thought for a second and said, "No, I guess I'm not. The money wouldn't matter all that much but I just don't really have the time." Then she asked me, "Do you have any experience with feral cats?"

I told her about the small herd of them I feed in my backyard. She said, "Well, then maybe you're aware of this. Looking for food is hardwired into most feral cats. Their lives revolve around finding the next meal so even if you feed one and she stuffs herself, a minute later, she's thinking, 'Where is food? Where do I find food?' They can't help themselves. I'm afraid most actors are like that. Even when they have a job, they're thinking, 'Where is my next one?'"

"When we were doing The Golden Girls, there was a point where we were picked-up for two more seasons and I had all these other things I was doing. I was turning down offer after offer because I just didn't have the time open. And still, there were moments when a little voice in me was wondering, 'What are you going to do when this ends?' Actors…at times, we're all like feral cats!"

I understand that. There are times I used to wish the writing business ever worked like some professions where you could know with some certainty what you'd be doing for the next five or ten years. I turned down staff jobs at Disney and Hanna-Barbera that at the time looked like jobs I could have stayed in until I hit retirement age. Well now, I'm approaching retirement age — without the slightest thought of retiring — and I realize I wouldn't have been at either company 'til now. Hanna-Barbera isn't even there anymore and Disney has reshuffled so much that I don't think anyone who I thought had a "job for life" there in 1980 lasted in it into this century.

How it is in other fields, I haven't a clue…but in entertainment and publishing, we all seem to be wand'ring nomads, camping here or there for a time and then looking for something else. About 98% of the time I like it that way, especially since I learned to not think like a feral cat. Which reminds me I have to go feed a couple…

Every once in a while, I like to watch a little of The Price is Right…and I'm one of those people (probably a minority) who thinks Drew Carey is a better host than Bob Barker. I couldn't take the show on a regular basis with either host but I usually feel it's harmless fun and I'm fascinated at the sheer skill on display with its production. This is a very difficult show to do in terms of getting the cameras and the prizes and models all in the right place here…and then having everything in a different place thirty seconds later.

I snuck into a few tapings years ago and if I had the connections to do so again, I think I'd go back for another visit because they keep making things faster and smoother…and boy, the show just goes like gangbusters even with the occasional tape stops. The director and the stage crew are all amazing.

Here's a segment from last May when a kid named Ryan set a new record playing Plinko. As you can see, Ryan is a tiny bit enthusiastic. The contestants who get called to "Come on down" from the audience are picked by the producers from the line outside and one of the skills on display in the show is the ability to pick interesting players. If you ever go to a "taping," try acting just like Ryan when the producers come down the line to talk to people. If you do it convincingly, or maybe even if you don't, you'll probably get picked.

One tiny thing I noticed watching this clip is that Ryan is wearing a wireless microphone. At the top of the show, four contestants are called out of the audience and of course, none of them are miked. We hear them because of the visible microphones on the edge of the stage. One wins and comes up on the stage and I'm guessing that if the first on-stage game involved the contestant moving around on stage or away from Drew Carey — as Ryan must do to drop his Plinko chips — they would stop tape and put a wireless mike on that contestant.

Then they put wireless mikes on the other contestants in case one of them gets up on stage and might stray from the range of Drew's handheld mike. The black lady who's added to Contestants' Row to start this segment isn't wearing a mike but I'm guessing she had one on by the next time she bid. I just like noticing little things like that.

Here's Ryan setting a new record for Plinko and screaming "Oh, my God" a lot. I think what I like about this is that it's absolutely honest. No one told the kid to act like that. His excitement is real. The audience reaction to him is real. You're actually watching what may be the high point in some person's life…

Busy day, starting with watching the news of the new indictments in the Russia hacking story. Everyone on the news seems to be saying Trump now has to abandon the argument that it's all a hoax and "Fake News." I kept hearing some version of, "Well, this establishes that there's a 'there' there!" I'm thinking this makes it a lot harder to get rid of Robert Mueller since you can't now say he's not doing his job (though some will, of course) and it will be awkward to abort his prosecution of the Russian Nationals he indicted. Which doesn't mean they won't try it.

And more sex scandals for Trump? And all this stuff about lax security clearances in the administration of a man who howled about how Hillary couldn't be trusted with state secrets? Not a good week to be Donald.

Let's see what else I have to write about. My buddy Rick Scheckman tells me he has a video on old Carson Tonight Show from '65 or '66 where Harry Von Zell fills in for Ed McMahon. I also remember Jack Lescoulie doing it as well as a couple of NBC booth announcers. Do we know if Bill Wendell or Don Pardo ever filled in for Ed?

Dick Van Dyke's show at the Catalina Bar and Grill in Hollywood on 2/27 sold out pretty fast. If my e-mail is any indication, I will know about half the people in the house that night.

Puppet Up!, a show I've raved about many times here, is doing one show in Green Bay, Wisconsin on March 9. Tickets are available on this page, probably not for long.

Speaking of shows I rave about, Frank Ferrante will be doing An Evening With Groucho on April 23 and 24 at the North Coast Rep Theater in Solana Beach, California. Go here to learn more and to order tix. I'll be at the Monday night performance.

And lastly for now: I'm looking forward to John Oliver's show returning to the air this Sunday…but what is he going to talk about? It's not like anything has happened in the world since he went on hiatus.

Here's a great interview with Lewis Black in which he talks about, among other topics, how little money there is in writing plays, what it's like to perform comedy in front of Dick Cheney, and how he got arrested for driving around New York with topless women.  Caution: Contains the kind of language you'd expect in an interview with Lewis Black.

I was just re-reading the piece before this, the one about mass shootings, and I decided I botched the ending. Asking "How do we put an end to mass shootings?" is the wrong question. It's like asking, "How do we make sure there are no more auto accidents or muggings on the street or bank robberies?" We are never going to totally eliminate such things so to ask those questions is to set ourselves up for impossible tasks and certain failure.

With government, the questions should all be in the form of "How do we lessen this or that awful thing?" A law accomplishes something if it leads to 50 people dying a year instead of 500. We've passed many laws that have reduced things like drunk driving or counterfeiting. Those are good laws even if they don't rid us of 100% of those crimes.

We will never stop all mass shootings but we can probably lessen them. This means opening the possibility of laws that might make it harder for someone like the kid in Florida to get his mitts on an AR-15. It probably means reinstituting the assault rifle ban and undoing laws like the recent one that made it easier for the mentally ill to obtain weapons.

I am not talking about confiscating all guns or grabbing them away from folks who are sane, know how to use them and may even need them. Gun Control is not Gun Elimination.

And to make any of that happen, we have to elect Senators and Governors and other officials, including a President, who are more worried about losing their offices because they're on the wrong side of the N.R.A. than if they're on the right side. That's it. Nothing's going to pass as long as they're more afraid of the N.R.A. and similar institutions than they are of voters who want the availability of guns controlled more.

I don't know if that can be changed. But like I said in the last post, we need to be pragmatic…and I think the pragmatic view is that that has to happen before anything can change. I am not saying it will; just that I'm not sure anything else is going to matter.

After a mass shooting is an emotional time, even for those of us who didn't know anyone anywhere near the massacre. The folks who don't want anything done that might inhibit their ability to have as many guns of any kind they want have to say largely-meaningless things like "our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families" and (of course) "Now is not the right time to discuss gun control." When they say the latter, they then have to dodge the question, "Well, when is the right time?" since they don't think any time is ever the right time.

Those of us who'd like to see something change have a problem, too. We have to come up with at least some idea of what to do and we're torn between big ideas involving gun confiscation and bans and little ideas like background checks. The trouble with the latter is that they won't do that much good and you can never really be sure how many mass murderers were discouraged by them. The trouble with the former is that they won't happen and even mentioning them causes a lot of folks to rush out and stock up on more guns.

But both sides do have one piece of common ground. We're all afraid of being shot. We who want to reduce the number of guns around have the same goal as those who feel they need more of them: Not being shot. Even most people who just love the idea of owning a dozen AR-15s do not want to be shot.

We hear that each year in this country, there are more than 100 gun deaths per million people…an awful number. But something like two-thirds of those are suicides. As my feeble, never-going-to-go-anywhere suggestion, I would like to toss out the idea that we need to separate those out and not lump the suicides in with the homicides.

It's not that the suicides by gun aren't tragic and awful and all that but there's a difference there. We who are afraid of being shot are not all that afraid of shooting ourselves. Most of us can say with 100% certainty that we are not going to shoot ourselves. And if someone who owns a gun is worried they might, they can seriously reduce the chance of that by getting rid of that gun. Even the most ardent N.R.A.-loving gun advocate will probably not deny you your right to not have a gun in your home. He might even buy yours off you.

I'm just wondering if in those cases — two-thirds of all gun deaths, remember — we don't focus too much on the gun and not enough on the person who might want to turn that gun on themselves. Maybe we need more counseling. Maybe we need to provide more alternatives to someone who is terminally depressed and/or in way too much trouble to get out of by themselves. I just feel like those are gun deaths we can reduce without going mano-a-mano with the "cold dead fingers" people.

It's not much but it's something…and that's usually better than nothing. For more on the third of all gun deaths which scare us, read what Dylan Matthews has to say. I don't have a scintilla of a clue as to how to deal with that but I think we need more pragmatism and the Matthews piece seems very pragmatic to me.

This has been "Today's Post About Yesterday's Mass Shooting." Stay tuned for the next installment of "Today's Post About Yesterday's Mass Shooting," coming way too soon to this blog!

Kabir Bhatia has a question…

I figure you can answer this. When Johnny Carson was hosting The Tonight Show, what was the order of succession for people to fill in for Ed McMahon? I have it as:
Doc, Tommy Newsom, Ed Shaugnessy. What about beyond that? Was it different when the show was in New York?

When the show was in New York and Ed McMahon was out, they'd bring in a substitute announcer. Jack Lescoulie did it a few times as did a number of different staff guys at NBC.

Once they'd relocated to Burbank, Ed began getting a lot of outside offers and taking more and more nights off. Johnny decided it didn't work to put an outsider in that slot so they set up a simple rule. When Ed was out, Doc Severinsen would move over from bandleader to act as announcer while band member Tommy Newsom would serve as bandleader. If Ed was there and Doc wasn't, Tommy would serve as bandleader. If Doc was serving as announcer and Tommy was out, another band member — Shelly Cohen — would be the bandleader.

I don't recall Ed Shaugnessy, who was the Tonight Show drummer for a long time, ever announcing. I do have a vague memory of him being bandleader a few nights when both Doc and Tommy couldn't do it. And maybe one other guy from the band got to do it once or twice. But usually the line of succession for bandleader was Doc, Tommy and Shelly — in that order.

An old Tonight Show staff member told me the following. One night, both Ed and Doc were off and so Tommy Newsom was the announcer and Shelly Cohen led the band. I think this happened more than once and Johnny was very unhappy about it. Tommy was a great musician and arranger but he wasn't great as an announcer…and there were two other problems.

One was that part of the announcer's duty was to handle the audience warm-up and one night when Tommy announced and the audience didn't laugh a lot at Johnny, that was blamed on Tommy's limited ability as a warm-up guy. Also, whenever Tommy announced or was out in front of the band, it inevitably led to jokes about him being dull and boring. Johnny had decided that those bits with Tommy were getting dull and boring and that Tommy should no longer announce or front the band — or appear in sketches as he sometimes did.

Ed and Doc were told to knock off their extra-curricular activities and Ed (especially) had to be there any time Johnny was hosting. Ed moved all his outside gigs (Star Search, Budweiser, Publishers Clearing House, etc.) to the nights when guest hosts were there. Doc stopped taking nights off and when Ed wasn't present, Doc would serve as bandleader and announcer. Tommy Newsom — still in the band — could step in if Doc was out due to illness, which I'm not sure ever happened once these new rules were in place.

Before they got this system working, there were a few nights when they needed a fill-in announcer and they tried using Carol Wayne — which didn't work at all — and there was one night when producer Fred DeCordova was the announcer. And I guess it's safe to tell you that the person who told me most of this stuff was Fred DeCordova. After Leno took over, Freddie stayed on for a time as a consultant and he seemed to have nothing to do but tell stories to people like me who ran into him in the halls.

During Jay Leno's long run as substitute host, he occasionally had Ed McMahon there as his announcer but usually, it was Doc doing double duty as announcer and bandleader. I heard a story once — I can't vouch for its accuracy — that there was talk of adding someone else to the team who could serve as Jay's announcer-sidekick and possibly even be there if needed for a Carson night. Furthermore, the story goes, the main person mentioned for this position was Phil Hartman, who was then ready to leave Saturday Night Live.

Hartman, it is said, felt he'd gone as far as he could on that show and wanted to live full-time at his home in Los Angeles (out in Encino, actually) for personal reasons and also to get a film career going. This is one of those stories that made the rounds in two different versions and that always causes me to wonder if either is true.

In one version, it didn't happen because Lorne Michaels objected. Even if Hartman wanted to make the switch, Michaels didn't like the idea of another NBC late night show stealing away one of his key cast members. In the other version, the notion was killed because everyone at NBC was afraid it would piss off Michaels so it never became an issue. I would guess that if either version is true, it would have been the latter.

If you like Big Macs at McDonald's (I don't) and if you like the regular hamburgers at Five Guys (I do), you might be interested in this how-to about how to get a Big Mac at Five Guys…

• There's a new app that many of our elected officials are using. Any time there's a mass shooting, it automatically sends out a statement offering "hopes and prayers." And that's all it does…or they do.

Scott King writes with a question about the fine comic book artist, Jim Aparo…

In a recent post, you mentioned that Aparo was very reliable and delivered 214 pages per year, every year.

Doesn't this mean that if he was on a title for a year he would end up one-two issues short? Most comics are/were 20-24 pages which is 240-288 per year, so the editor would have to find a fill in for part of that years run? Or was this the accepted price for having a skilled and reliable artist for the majority of the year.

Actually, Paul Levitz mentioned that Jim Aparo delivered 214 pages a year…but yes. When Aparo was doing the Batman and the Outsiders comic with Mike W. Barr, there were a few fill-in issues by other artists and I think in an issue or two, Aparo penciled but did not letter or ink.

There were also a couple of issues where they had a fifteen-page lead story drawn by Aparo and an eight-page featurette by another artist. I'm sure everyone involved with the comic thought that having Aparo as the regular artist was worth the occasional need to work around him.

This may interest someone. During that period, I was writing or sometimes writing-editing Blackhawk for DC Comics and it was drawn by Dan Spiegle. Dan was fast enough that he could easily have drawn every issue but The Powers That Were Then occasionally wanted him to draw a different book for them…like, I think he did a Sgt. Rock special and he did some educational comics that few people ever saw and a few other things.

They also liked the idea of guest artists in Blackhawk so we did a number of eight-page stories drawn by folks other than Dan, including Dave Cockrum, Alex Toth, John Severin, Howard Chaykin, Mike Sekowsky, Will Meugniot and Doug Wildey.

At the time, a DC comic book was 23 pages plus a cover and almost every story then being published there was twenty-three pages in length. So the following situation would happen again and again and again…

I would get a call from some other DC editor and he would say — and this is a real example — "Mark, I'm in a jam. I need to give Curt Swan a story to draw starting next Monday." This was because Curt had a contract that guaranteed him that when he handed in one assignment, he would immediately get another. It also happened sometimes because a freelancer had an informal understanding with the company or the editor to get work like that.

The editor — in this case, it was Julius Schwartz — wanted to give Curt the next issue of Superman to draw but the writer was running late and the script might not be in and ready for Curt by next Monday. Julie might have had another script to give Curt or some other editor down the hall might have had one but it would have been a twenty-three page script that wasn't needed as urgently as that next issue of Superman.

It would take Curt 2-3 weeks to draw that which would mean 2-3 weeks before Curt got to that next issue of Superman and that was not good for the schedule. Which is why Julie called me. At that moment, those Blackhawk eight-pagers I was doing were just about the only stories being done at DC that were less than 23 pages. If I had one (or could quickly write one) that could be given to Curt on Monday, that would keep him busy for a few days until the Superman script came in. You follow?

I, of course, would say "Sure" and if I didn't have one ready, I'd sit down and write an eight-page Blackhawk story for Mr. Swan to draw…and right after I finished it, Julie would call and say, "Never mind! The Superman script just came in!" And then a week later, a different DC editor would call and say, "I need a script to give Irv Novick next Monday!"

This happened at least, I would guess, eighteen times. The one I wrote for Swan wound up being drawn by Don Newton because a script for whatever comic he was drawing then — Batman, I think — might not be in on time. But before it went to Don, it was going to be busy work for Novick and later for Jim Aparo.

Not all the Blackhawk shorts were done this way. Sometimes, I actually hired the artist and he drew the script I wrote for him. Still, a lot of them were written as per this scenario — because some other script was running late and another editor might have needed it so he didn't have to give some artist a twenty-three pager. Another Secret Behind the Comics!