John Oliver returns to the air this Sunday to start his new season. In this interview, he talks about all sorts of things, including his contempt for the White House Correspondents Dinner.

With regard to the issue of "fake news," it seems to me we need some new terminology here. People are trying to draw a parallel between Kellyanne Conway talking about imaginary massacres and a comedian like Stephen Colbert joking that Donald Trump gave an engagement ring to Vladimir Putin. They're calling both "fake news" as if they're the same but one is intended to deceive and one to amuse. And most of the ones intended to amuse are built on the presumption that the audience knows it's an outrageous exaggeration or distortion. Maybe we should just call one "false news" and the other, "joke news." It's a shame we may need to make that distinction.

Boy, I wish I had a good anecdote about meeting the man who billed himself as "The World's Foremost Authority" and didn't even seem to be an authority on anything, including what he was the World's Foremost Authority of. But I sure thought he was funny and anyone who can make it to the age of 102 deserves a certain amount of respect.

There was a time in the sixties when talk shows would fight over who was going to book the Professor next because he was always hilarious. But he was almost always disruptive, hijacking the show and taking it into an utter chaos that the producers did not expect, leaving the host (whoever it was) unable to control or even participate in his own show.

I remember one time on The Mike Douglas Show when the Professor — and this was obviously unplanned — suddenly decided to seize control of one of the cameras and show the world the right way to do that job. As Douglas tried in vain to conduct a serious interview with the next guest, there was the previous guest giving us views of audience members' knees, grungy parts of the studio, the nostril hair of the host, cue cards telling the host what to ask as he was asking it, etc. I think they finally stopped Corey as he was trying to shove the camera he'd commandeered out the studio door and down the hall towards a men's room.

They didn't have him on for a long time after that. One by one, a lot of those shows decided to not have him on. Sometimes, you can be too funny for your own good.

We took yesterday off from this, not that there weren't plenty of items that could be posted here…

1. As Eric Levitz points out, Trump seems to be doing a great job of alienating foreign leaders — and for no good reason.
2. The more I see of Mike Pence, the more I think impeaching Trump is a bad idea. As William Saletan notes, Pence has become really committed to spinning the phony facts and worldview of this administration.
3. As Kevin Drum notes, the Trump administration is trying real hard to sell the idea that there are terrorist attacks all around us, many unreported by the press for its own, ulterior motives. They seem to think they can scare Americans into letting Trump do any damned thing he wants as our only chance at survival.
4. And if there is another terrorist attack, Trump is already blaming it wholly on those who won't let him pass unconstitutional laws.

And lastly, a bit of good news: The notion that the most important thing in the world was to immediately destroy Obamacare has subsided. It's become pretty obvious, even to Republicans, that they have nothing to replace it with that's better and won't make a large segment of America worse-off and furious. Jonathan Chait has more.

And it may qualify as good news to some: Not long ago, covering Donald Trump speeches was really good for the ratings of TV news shows. Now, it's not so good but you know whose ratings are way up? Saturday Night Live, Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Last week, Colbert beat Jimmy Fallon in total viewers and Trump-bashing seems to be the reason. That means we'll be seeing a lot more of it…on those shows and others. Alec Baldwin hosts SNL this coming Saturday.

Johnny Carson shows you how to welcome a new sponsor…

One good thing Donald Trump may do for America is that he may destroy one institution that could use a little destroying — the White House Correspondents Dinner. I used to find these amusing and maybe, back then, they were. But as we get more politicized in this country, it seems phonier and phonier for the President of the United States to come in, appear before a tuxedo-clad pack of journalists and shmoozers, and roast them and himself lovingly. And then some poor comedian has to get up, follow the star attraction, and entertain a roomful of folks who dread what he might say about them and would much rather be mingling anyway.

There seems to be some question as to whether this dinner will even be held this year and if so, if the President of the United States, will show up and fill his customary role. With Trump out there now saying essentially that any negative news about him or his administration is a deliberate lie, I don't see that ceremony happening, at least in its usual form.

Stephen Colbert is campaigning a little to host it. I have the feeling that if someone there has a list of potential hosts in preferred order, my name is ahead of his. And ahead of me is everyone else on this planet.

But I don't think it would be a bad thing if this dinner went away. It's built on the faulty premise that these two institutions — the presidency and the press — may quarrel at times but down deep, they had a true respect for one another. I'm not sure if that was always a faulty premise but it sure is, these days.

Ken Provost sent me this…

Thank you for the lovely piece about Dan Spiegle. He was one of the best comic artists ever and didn't receive sufficient accolades and attention because he didn't work on Batman or the X-Men. I really like how you seem to have felt privileged to have so many opportunities to work with him.

I hope this question doesn't seem insensitive but as you are well aware, we are losing the comic book makers of his generation. No disrespect is meant to the many fine writers and artists who have come along since that generation's heyday but I can't help feel there was something different about the men and women who made the first thirty years of comic books. I would think you were in a unique position to observe what that was and I wonder if you could write a little about that. Thank you as always for the blog and the fact that yours doesn't keep nagging me to buy things, especially things based on my past browsing history.

Yes, there was definitely something different about the folks of whom you speak. For one thing, most of them got into comics because they loved doing that kind of work. Some got in to make a living while they aspired to something better and then were unable to get out. But no one started writing or drawing comic books because they thought it would make them rich or famous because even as late as the seventies, that did not seem possible. It would have been like getting a job as a guard in a men's prison because you thought it would make you a millionaire, plus it would be a great way to meet cute chicks.

At Comic-Con as you probably know, I've had the opportunity to interview a lot of comic book writers and artists of comics' early days and one recurring theme for me is a certain amazement that they have followers. Nick Cardy was practically moved to tears several times when he first came out to San Diego and had grown, adult professionals lining up to say to him, "I discovered your work when I was ten and I followed it and you were a big influence on me becoming a professional artist." Nick was especially stunned that people were asking for his autograph or offering him money to do commissions. All those years he was drawing Aquaman, he never dreamed it meant so much to so many.

One thing I've come to believe strongly about those writers and artists is that it's a mistake to leap from "I didn't like that guy's work" to "Obviously, that guy was just hacking it out for the paycheck." I would guess that was true of less than 5% of the talent in the generation of which we speak. There were a number of people whose work I didn't like but I came to see that it was not because they weren't trying to do good work. Some of them were trying like hell, spending hours on a page and redoing it and redoing it to make it better. They just weren't very skilled. And some of them were just egregiously miscast or misinstructed by their editors.

When you become aware of how poorly they were paid and how badly they were sometimes treated, it's amazing that so many of them drew and wrote so well and worked so hard at it. Very few guys who were paid the minimum did the minimum. At times, I find myself wondering not "Why was this one artist so bad?" but "Why were so many of the others any good at all?" That is still to me the defining question about the generation we're losing.

I don't usually link to Saturday Night Live sketches from the previous night because I figure (a) if you care about them, you've seen them and (b) most of them aren't that great. And yes, I know (b) means I'm agreeing with Donald J. Trump and that alone makes my opinion highly suspect. But this one with Melissa McCarthy — of all possible castings — as White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer struck me as particularly on-target.

In a way, I feel sorry for Mr. Spicer…though not too sorry since he had to know what the job involved when he accepted it. It involves going out in a nice suit and tie, standing before the nation's cameras and then dodging and spinning what are usually pretty fair questions. All press secretaries have to do some of that but it's got to be super-hard to do in service of the current White House occupant.

If Trump is saying 2+2 equals 19, Spicer has to stand at his podium and insist that, yes, 2+2 is inarguably 19 and only a biased, unprofessional press would even suggest otherwise. He doesn't have the power to say, "Yeah, it's four. I don't know where he got that." If he did, he'd be fired within the hour and Trump would tweet bad things about him.

In the past, we had some White House Press Secretaries who had a little more wiggle room to concede distortions and to walk back falsehoods. Gerald Ford's first press secretary even resigned after Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. They kept sending terHorst out to deny such a thing was under consideration and then when Ford did it, terHorst felt he'd been sent out to lie too many times and got out. Usually though, those guys have the task of defending the indefensible. Spicer is more graceless than most but that's kind of the theme of this administration. Here's the sketch…

• Here is my annual, infallible Super Bowl prediction: I will not be watching. You still have time to get a bet down on this and win big.

This afternoon, I had to return something to a Target store and when I got there, there was a huge mass of people around the entrance. I thought I'd stumbled upon some sort of pre-Super Bowl sale but when I got closer, it turned out to be a mob of people signing petitions for and discussing the impeachment of Donald Trump. I don't think that's going to happen but he sure has set some kind of record for people to be mentioning the "I" word. Here are four things today that have folks rankled…

1. It seems like everyone is outraged when a member of the opposition party spends taxpayer dollars on vacations and living like royalty but they never object when someone in their party does it. Trump may cause some Republicans to break that rule…or at least be very uncomfy when called upon to defend Donald's expenses and what it costs us for Melania to live in New York. See here.
2. William Saletan explains how Trump is trying to convince Christians to act more like a persecuted minority that only he can save. I do not understand why people who always said they vote for the candidate who seems to share their religious values don't see that Trump could not care any less about that kind of thing except as an issue to be exploited for personal gain.
3. Matt Taibbi explains how Trump, who ran on promises to fervently watchdog Wall Street, is now devoted to making sure they get every single thing they want.
4. And Mike Pence is attending the Super Bowl in Houston. Whadda ya wanna bet that something happens with the crowd or some spectators or the half-time show that results in Trump being outraged that the Vice-President wasn't shown the proper respect? No one loves to try and put his opponents on the defensive more than Trump. He's still milking that quickly-retracted story that he had a bust of Martin Luther King removed from the White House as proof that every bad thing the press says about him is a lie. So says the man who says all sorts of things that aren't true and never retracts any of them.

• We don't need "extreme vetting" of immigrants. We already have that. What we need is "extreme vetting" of Trump's cabinet.

David Bianculli recalls The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour which went on the air in 1967, developed a strong following against formidable competition…and soon got yanked off the air, not because nobody was watching but because certain people didn't like what was being said on it.

I remember having strongly-mixed reactions to the show. I liked a lot of the comedy on it, especially segments that featured the supremely deadpan Mr. Pat Paulsen. My politics at the time though could probably be best described as extremely Conservative but with an extremely low opinion of the Conservative leaders of the time. (Though my political views have changed considerably, one constant has been my belief that just because someone says things I agree with doesn't mean that that person is a good person, competent, honest or even sincere about what they say. In fact, I'm kinda suspicious of anyone who doesn't think they have some weasels in their own ranks.)

We had a neighbor lady down the street who thought that show was a bigger threat to America than, say, someone dropping a nuclear bomb on us. She used to get upset at things like if TV Guide said Jack Benny was going to be on that program…well, that meant that Jack Benny was a traitor who had sold out to The Enemy. Her problem essentially was a belief that the show involved young people criticizing older people. If you were in your twenties or thirties, you should always defer to people in their forties or older…and Tom and Dick Smothers were very bad people because they had the nerve to find fault with Congress or the President of the United States.

I never even tried to engage her in a discussion about this. I was much younger than she was and therefore not entitled to a contrary opinion. I did of course notice the major flaw in her argument, which was that there were older people who thought the President and Congress were wrong, and all the Brothers were doing was saying the same thing. But some beliefs are more emotion than logic and you waste your time trying to be logical with those people.

I think time has vindicated most of what the Smothers Brothers said and did. Their various "comeback" attempts at TV didn't soar, possibly because they were nowhere near as good as the original show. One time when I was at a party with Tommy Smothers, I heard someone say to him, "In the long run, you won your battle." And he replied, "Yeah, but we lost our show."

• I'm not afraid of immigrants. I am however afraid of the people who want to protect me from immigrants.

A recent interview with one of my favorite performers, Audra McDonald…

Keith Enright has a question about the Criterion release of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World on DVD and Blu Ray. As you may recall, I am heard on the commentary track. (If you don't have a copy, I highly recommend it. You can order a copy of it here. And now, let's tackle Keith's question…

Maybe my memory is failing and you can just point me to a previous post, but I'm wondering if you have any further stories about working with Criterion on this? I'm a huge Criterion fanatic and have also loved this movie since childhood. I have the previous MGM Laserdisc boxset as well as the Criterion set and consider them both essential to telling the story of the film.

I think the Criterion set is amazing and I love that you're a part of it. Any tidbits on how you got involved, whether they paid you in discs, or if you were involved in anything that didn't make it to the final product?

There were a few hunks of the commentary track that didn't make it in due to time limits. People think that such tracks are recorded in real time while the commenters are watching it once…and some are. This one was done in long chunks in three sessions and we did some sections over and over until everyone was satisfied with them. Then there was a lot of editing to move certain speeches closer to the on-screen action they were describing. I was very impressed with how Criterion sets a high standard and then spends the time and money necessary to achieve it.

They paid me in money and sent me some discs. And how I got involved is not that interesting a story. My friend Mike Schlesinger was at a film screening and he ran into a friend of his — Karen Stetler, who is a producer for Criterion. She told him, "We're doing a restored version of Mad World." He said, "You have to have a commentary track by Mark Evanier and me." She said fine. They called me and I said yes and suggested we also get Paul Scrabo on the track. They said yes.

We recorded the track over several days…in the same recording studio where I voice-direct The Garfield Show and most of the other cartoons I've done. It felt a little odd to be on the wrong side of the glass but I got used to it after an hour or so.

If I didn't make it clear in past posts, let me state clearly that this was one of the great thrills of my life, being involved in the super-deluxe release of a movie that meant so much to me. Don't tell Karen but I would have paid them for the privilege. If you don't like this movie, fine. I probably don't like at least one of your favorite films and you're not going to convince me it's not wonderful just as I'm not going to convince you that yours is not a great movie. I'm just real, real glad that I had the chance to "give back" a little to this film.

I've decided to try something. Let's see if it works. Rather than post on and off all day about things Trump and his crew are doing that I find outrageous, I'm going to try doing one post per day listing four of them.

Maybe then I won't spend all day thinking about The Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight. This will at least benefit those of you who come to this site to read the stuff about comics and late night shows and Frank Ferrante and the evils of cole slaw…and want to just skip over items that remind them who's in the White House and what they're doing. Here are today's four…

1. Trump believes it will help the economy if investment counselors are unburdened by rules that prevent them from screwing over their clients with faulty advice.  Actually, it might be easier to just mail all your money to Goldman Sachs.  Jonathan Chait has more.
2. Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway went on with Chris Matthews and talked about how two Iraqis engineered "The Bowling Green Massacre" and that's why we need to all line up behind Donald Trump, the only man who can prevent you from being massacred like those poor people in Bowling Green.  As Kevin Drum notes, not only was this massacre a fantasy but it's one that some people will refuse to believe did not occur.
3. Daniel Larison notes that Trump's idea of foreign policy is just to act real tough with everyone for no good reason. "Omni-directional belligerence," he calls it and it seems to be based on the premise that acting real tough is the same thing as being real tough…and appearing real tough is better than being real smart.
4. And finally for today: Donald Trump is a lousy cosplayer. His Thor outfit (see above) is just pathetic.

That's Today's Four Bad Things From Your Trump Administration. Tune in tomorrow for four more. Sadly, I don't think I'll have any trouble finding four more each day.