The Daily Show is on hiatus until Monday, January 5, 2026. but here are its hosts (minus Jon Stewart) discussing the year gone by…

Meanwhile, John Oliver's show is on hiatus until, apparently, February of 2026. No specific date has been mentioned but in the past, he's usually come back around Valentine's Day so that would suggest 2/15/26.

In last eight years, every time the show has gone on hiatus, they've released another year's worth of old episodes to YouTube and you can still watch (and if you know how to do so) download Seasons 1-8 here. But they've apparently stopped doing that since Season 9 has not been posted. I know not why.

Several people told me last night that the killer of the Reiners was son Nick but it didn't seem like something that should be spread or even believed until the police had said or done something. Well, as I'm sure you've heard, Nick has now been charged. I guess that explains all the weirdness last evening when the Reiner family and the mayor of Los Angeles were saying that the two victims in the house were Rob and Michele Reiner but the official police spokesperson was refusing to confirm it…or really say anything. They knew almost instantly who probably dunnit and perhaps overdid trying to make a clean arrest.

This morning, the Internet is filled to overflowing with compassionate (albeit still shocked) love for those victims and, of course, a lot of tasteless, hateful spins. We could all have predicted that the guy in the White House would hear the news and think, "Hmm…how do I make this about me?"

But read the pieces from the people who knew and loved Rob Reiner — or even the ones from folks who never had the pleasure of meeting him and just loved the guy they saw on TV and all the fine television and movies with which he was involved. They got it right.

Friends are calling me in shock this evening…and not just friends who knew Rob Reiner well. The man was enormously well-liked…as an actor, a director, an activist and just a very pleasant, happy (most of the time) human being. I didn't know him very well but he was the kind of person you'd run into and you could just start talking to him like the two of you knew each other. His father was like that, too.

No one deserves to die like that but it's especially inappropriate for someone as creative and funny and friendly as Rob Reiner. He was a good man…a very good man.

So now the Reiner family has confirmed the deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner but we have a spokesguy from the Detectives Division giving a press conference now saying he can't confirm anything including the identity of the victims. They sent this guy out to field questions but to not answer them.

This is maddening. Here's a news bulletin that was released an hour or so ago…

Two people were found dead Sunday afternoon inside a Brentwood home owned by director and actor Rob Reiner, multiple law enforcement sources disclosed today. The L.A. Fire Department said a man and a woman were found deceased inside, approximately 78 and 68 years old.

L.A.P.D. Robbery Homicide Division detectives were assigned to the case. Several other L.A.P.D. officials said they were aware of the investigation but could not share any information. There is a large police presence at the home Sunday evening.

No details on the identity of the victims…just that they were approximately 78 and 68 years old. And one can't help but note that Rob Reiner is 78 years old and his wife is approximately 68. As of this moment, no legit source is saying the two victims are Reiner and his wife. People magazine has and I guess it's possible that they have some source that CNN, The L.A. Times, the local news stations, etc. don't but I kinda doubt it. I just think they don't care about formal verification.

If it's not Mr. and Mrs. Reiner, someone's doing their friends and loved ones a disservice by not saying so. It's also shocking and upsetting folks who loved Rob Reiner, his films, his acting roles, etc.

Here's Charles Grodin with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. Mr. Grodin is easing into his hostile character who does his best not to answer any question Mr. Carson asks…

I have a whole bunch of e-mails asking me why, in the commercial we were discussing for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, someone decided to only have Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, Milton Berle, Phil Silvers, Jonathan Winters and (in absentia) Sid Caesar. Why not Edie Adams? Why not Terry-Thomas or Dick Shawn? Why not the major star of the movie, Spencer Tracy? Or someone else?

I have no verifiable insight into that decision but it's a pretty safe bet that there was a joint decision between Stanley Kramer, Stan Freberg and the promotional folks at United Artists not to crowd a very short commercial with too many people and to pick comedians who were instantly recognizable to the target audience.

Seven people were plenty. The commercial was only sixty seconds and I'll bet Freberg had trouble getting it down to that length.

Including Spencer Tracy, even assuming he'd do it or was available, might have not helped sell the idea that the film was full of comedians and that it was a comedy. Dick Shawn wasn't that well known then and Terry-Thomas was largely unknown to American audiences. If you included Edie Adams then why not Dorothy Provine? (There may have been equal billing clauses in their contracts.)

I constantly get questions about why this star or that star wasn't in the film. There were only around fifty roles in the film, some of whom had one or two or zero lines. There were hundreds of people around then who qualified as comedians or at least comic actors. Some weren't available or weren't available when they might have been needed. Some wanted too much money. But the main reason a certain comedian wasn't in the film was that there wasn't room for them. It's really that simple.

We now commence this year's countdowns of Christmas and Hannukah videos, an annual feature here at newsfromme.com. This year, we'll be posting two Christmas videos each day up to and including December 25. One will be new to this site. The other will be one we've featured before and someone — more likely, several someones — asked to see it again. We'll also post eight days of Hanukkah videos — a mix of the new (to us here) and the old. I like doing this because it's a lot easier and cheaper than stringing lights all over my house and then taking them down next June…

Our "oldie" today is from an old episode of The Tonight Show back when it was hosted by the often-divorced Johnny Carson. Here, he is joined by his announcer Ed McMahon and his bandleader, Doc Severin — two more men who were paying a lot of alimony…

New to this blog this year is Jason Owen and his combo turning a song that really isn't into a Christmas song into a Christmas song…

And here from Sesame Street is a quick lesson about Hanukkah. No, I don't know who did the voices but the narrator lady sure sounds like Nora Dunn…

P.S., added later: Several of you have written to tell me it's not Nora Dunn, it's Andrea Martin. Okay, I can buy that.

Here's a bit that made me laugh out loud from David Letterman's show — the one he did from the Ed Sullivan Theater on CBS. The premise of the bit was to see how many guys in Spider-Man suits they could get into a Jamba Juice shop on the ground floor of an office building across the street from their theater.

And one of the things that made this extra-funny to me was that I'd been in that Jamba Juice and I knew the office building was where DC Comics and MAD magazine had their offices. Furthermore, it was located about a block-and-a-half from where Steve Ditko had his office. I'd lost touch with Mr. Ditko by this time but several folks who'd met him told me that he was quite bitter about how successful his co-creation Spider-Man had become and he refused to talk about it, at least with them.

So imagine (as I did) that Ditko is on his way home from his office or otherwise walking past the Jamba Juice and he decides to stop in and get a Caribbean Passion Smoothie. And while he's waiting for his order, all these Spider-Men start wandering in…

Ed Kilgore has an article up entitled "Trump Is Angry at Americans for Not Appreciating His Greatness." And the madder he gets, the more he says and does things that make people lose even more respect for him.

Today is the last Christmas Video of "My Simple Christmas Wish" I'm posting this year or, more likely, forever — and believe me, I could post 'em forever.  Its composer David Friedman wrote what just might be the most performed song in a cabaret context ever.  If you don't believe me, go to YouTube and do a search for "Simple Christmas Wish" and another for "Rich, Famous and Powerful," and you'll see most of the videos that folks — mostly with some connection to Broadway or musical theater — have made.

I used to go to a lot of such shows back when (a) I was often going to New York and (b) there were a number of places in and around Los Angeles for such performances.  In L.A., venues where one good singer and a piano player could entertain an audience of 25-200 people don't last long but when I went to them, you could almost lay even money that someone would get up and sing "My Simple Christmas Wish."

In fact, once it was more than one person.  At a showcase one night — this is some time ago but still vivid in my memory — the second performer of the evening sang it.  Then later, the sixth performer — who I guess had arrived too late to hear the second performer — sang it and didn't seem to understand the odd response of the audience and one member yelling out, "You too?"

But that almost wasn't the end of it. A lady who closed the show got up and said, "Well, I was going to sing 'My Simple Christmas Wish' but…" and everyone laughed and she sang something else. But I don't think she was kidding.

Anyway: Tomorrow on this blog, we start our regular countdown of Twelve Days of Christmas Videos as well as Eight Days of Hanukkah Videos. Nice of them to start the same day this year, isn't it? And now, for the last time ever on this blog (probably), here's "My Simple Christmas Wish." This time, it's interpreted and rendered helpless by Perez Hilton, who seemed determined to give us the gayest version ever…

So what's the deal with that Venezuelan oil tanker that U.S. forces recently seized? As usual, Fred Kaplan comes along to explain.

I dunno how long it will be online but as I post this, there's a Monty Python highlight reel running continuously on YouTube. If it's still active, you might enjoy watching it for a while…

If you've followed this here blog for any length of time, you know what Dick Van Dyke has meant to me. Loved him on TV. Loved him in movies, I saw him on stage a number of times and loved him on stage. And I've never encountered or heard anyone who said, "That guy? Can't stand him!" How many other performers can you say that about?

Much of my life has been about interacting or sometimes working with people whose work I loved when I was a kid, whether it was on TV or in comic books or…well, anywhere. A few (very few) brought to mind the not-always-valid advice of "Never meet your heroes." I can count the number of those who disappointed me on two hands and still have a finger or two left to flip them off. I would have a much sourer outlook on life if Dick Van Dyke had been one of those disappointers.

Today, the world celebrates not so much that he made it to a hundred but that it reminds us how much he's meant to so many of us. Just The Dick Van Dyke Show alone made him important to my generation. I don't want to make this about me but I probably will. My life changed a lot for the better on Tuesday, February 2, 1965 when my parents and I went to see an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show filmed. I wrote about that here and other places on this blog. I was exactly a month shy of thirteen years old that day and I already wanted to spend the rest of my life as a professional writer of something. After that date, I really wanted that something to include writing something like The Dick Van Dyke Show or at least The Alan Brady Show.

The first time I encountered Dick himself was years later in an elevator at NBC after I'd kinda achieved that goal — in no small part thanks to him. Of course, I had to tell him what I owed to him and that series. And of course, he couldn't have been nicer even though he was telling me how many hundreds of other writers had told him that. Later, when I got to know him better, he was still just as nice, still the Dick Van Dyke I wanted him to be.

I'm going to repeat a story I told here last year when he turned 99 and a photo that goes with it…

In 2013, there was a small dinner party noting the ninety-somethingth birthday of his co-star on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Rose Marie. A waiter at the restaurant took the above photo and the lady at the lower left is Arlene Silver, otherwise known as Mrs. Dick Van Dyke. If you're celebrating Dick becoming a centenarian, throw some thanks Arlene's way because she's highly responsible for getting him there. She takes wonderful care of that man, loving him exactly the way he deserves and needs to be loved and the feeling is obviously mutual.

You recognize the guy next to her and then next to him is Rose Marie. The two folks at the end of the table are Jeanine Kasun and Stu Shostak (another married couple, good friends of the Van Dykes) and then you have me and at lower right is Laraine Newman, who was my "plus-1" for the evening. I'm going to cut-and-paste from last year's post what happened at the end of the dinner…

Dick and I went out to give our parking tickets to the valet to get his car and Laraine's (she drove us) and as we were waiting, two women who were also waiting for a car were suddenly staring at Dick with one of those "Oh, he's someone famous" look. It took a moment for them to recognize who he was and, I think, also to accept the concept that he really and truly was who they thought he was. One said, "Oh, if you're who I think you are, I've always loved you." The other one agreed and Dick gave them both that great smile of his and said, "Well then, I hope I am who you're thinking of because I could use all the love I can get."

Their car arrived and as she tipped the valet, the first one told Dick, "I think you've already got more than anyone else." The other lady said, "Everyone adores you…everyone" and I just stood there thinking, "They're both right." Then as they drove off, clearly delighted with that little exchange, I asked Dick, "How often do you get that?" He replied, "I get it a lot and I'm always very grateful. Hell, I'm grateful when people recognize me and don't tell me how much they didn't like my accent in Mary Poppins."

That accent gets mentioned way more than it deserves and I think I know why. Because if you want to think of something negative to say about Dick Van Dyke, it's just about your only option.

This is Danna Davis. This is the next-to-last one of these I'm posting and tomorrow, I'll tell you a little bit about this song…