I should have told you about this earlier. Turner Classic Movies is running a "free, flexible online exploration of Slapstick comedy" class in connection with films they're running tonight and intermittently through the month. They have silent movies on this evening and tomorrow night. (The best film tomorrow night is Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr.) Info on the course and the full schedule can be accessed here.

I'm a bit puzzled as to what definition of the word "slapstick" applies to the films selected — they mostly just seem to be broad comedies — but hey, I'm all for running broad comedies. On Wednesday the 21st, they have It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World followed by The Great Race, which I'm going to think of as a brief, unintended Marvin Kaplan Film Festival. More on Mad World in the next posting here…

I have no desire to watch this weekend's Comedy Central Roast of Rob Lowe. I don't particularly care about Rob Lowe one way or the other and apart from occasional moments with Jeff Ross and/or Gilbert Gottfried, find those roasts hard to take at all. A lot of them feel like a cavalcade of people who don't know the roastee but they need a job and/or exposure enough to show up, read nasty remarks someone else wrote about the "honoree" and force smiles and fake laughter at whatever shots are taken at them. The Friars, back when they started this tradition, used to say "We only roast those we love." Now it's more like, "Hey, gimme the check and let me outta this place!"

David Sims has more to say about it, especially about the odd inclusion of Ann Coulter as a roaster. Ms. Coulter makes a fine living saying vile things about certain people to the delight of an audience that wants to hear vile things said about those people. But then, that's kind of what "roasts" are becoming, isn't it?

Matt Taibbi on the Trump campaign. Here's my favorite line in it…

Apart perhaps from his most hardcore fans (and the occasional Wall Street Journal columnist), nobody seriously believes Trump has been trying to reach out to African-American voters. If he had, he might have spoken to some actual black people, and taken a position on an issue black audiences care about.

And speaking of the Republican nominee's ability to even speak to black voters, let alone win them over, read Jonathan Chait on the late Phyllis Schlafly. I cannot imagine the kind of person who would go to their graves proud that they did all they could to block equal rights for women and minorities.

That's a photo of my best friend (male division), Sergio Aragonés. Posting his picture on my blog is way cheaper than buying him a birthday present.

People keep asking us, "How did you two meet?" Between around 1966 and 1969, there was a thing called the Los Angeles Comic Book Club that met every Saturday afternoon at Palms Recreation Center, which was (and still is) located not far from where the San Diego Freeway crosses the Santa Monica Freeway. A whole bunch of teenagers would gather there each week to buy comics, sell comics, trade comics but most of all to talk about and argue about comics. I was not the founder but I was its president.

In the group's history, we had one guest speaker. It was Sergio. One of our members saw in a magazine article that Sergio lived in L.A. (in Beverly Hills, actually) and found him listed in the phone book. The member called him up and invited Sergio to come to one of our meetings…and he did. That was the first time we met, though we didn't talk much that day. Later, I ran into Sergio at a number of local events relating to comic books and we got to know each other.

I believe this was in 1968 so year after next, it'll be fifty years I've know this man. We will have been collaborating on comic books for about forty of those and in all that time, we've had exactly one argument that lasted more than thirty seconds. That one lasted about three minutes. That's pretty good.

We get along fine because of mutual respect. I get along with him because I know he is a brilliant humorist and cartoonist and a very smart, very nice man.

And he gets along with me because I know things that could get him arrested, deported and used to drum up support for that stupid wall Donald Trump wants to build. He probably could get Mexico to pay for that wall if he promised to keep Sergio on this side of it.

Happy Sergio Day, my friend. Please take the twenty minutes to draw the next issue of Groo before you go out celebrating.

So many to pick from. I think I'll go with Peter Beinart's article about how Trump, though he gets praised for speaking his mind, really doesn't do that. He tells audiences what he thinks they want to hear and when he addresses different audiences, he says different things…sometimes, very different things.

Back in this posting, I got to musing about what old TV show I would most like to see released on DVD.

So I guess my choice would be The Defenders, no relation to the current program of that name. Aired on CBS from 1961-1965, it was a courtroom drama starring E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed as a father-son lawyer team that handled important, polemic cases. Unlike the concurrent Perry Mason (which also aired on CBS), the accused was not always proven innocent and the stories were not whodunnits. Often, they had to do with the morality of our laws and the legality of our morals. A few years ago, someone sent me a VHS tape of four episodes and I thought they held up quite well…and every one of them gave me a lot to think about. Every bit of controversy in them was still controversial, though often not in the same way as in the sixties. So that's my vote: The Defenders. Will someone get on that, please?

More than half a decade later, someone finally has. The good folks at Shout Factory have issued Season One of The Defenders — 32 episodes plus an episode of Studio One that was kind of like (but not exactly) a pilot for the series. There are also interviews with folks who worked on the show and it's all on eight DVDs for — at this moment — $33.28. That's like a buck an episode for what I think is the best courtroom drama ever made for television.

I should probably also mention that the cast lists for some of these are stunning: Jack Klugman, Ossie Davis, Richard Thomas, Frank Gorshin, Robert Duvall, Robert Loggia, Julie Newmar, Martin Sheen and many others, plus someone in their casting department really, really liked hiring William Shatner. And has there ever been a better actor on a TV series than E.G. Marshall?

I haven't watched them all yet but the video and audio range from excellent to passable. A few of these look like all they could find was old 16mm prints…but there's something about the show that makes it feel more credible and real that way. They're in black-and-white, of course.

You can purchase a copy here. We highly recommend this and really, really want to see the three other seasons get released.

My cousin David recently wrote a very fine book about Woody Allen. Here, he writes about what it was like to write that really fine book about Woody Allen.

Happy Labor Day!

A whole bunch of Broadway actors name their favorite show tunes.

I am a late add to the guest roster for the Long Beach Comic Con, which takes place September 17th and 18th — Saturday and Sunday — at the Long Beach Convention Center in the splendid city of Long Beach, California. I will be around Saturday afternoon only and I think I'm on one panel and I will not (repeat: not) be sitting behind a table in the exhibit hall that has my name on it.

I don't do a lot of cons these days and when I do, I insist that they not give me a table with my name on it. This is because if they give you a table with your name on it, you have to sit behind it most of the time…and since I never sell things at cons and don't like sitting behind a table for very long, I don't want to feel obligated to do that.

But I'll be roaming about that day and maybe even poaching briefly at other folks' tables. If you're there and you see me, say howdy unless you're that rude guy who cornered me in San Diego and tried to convince me that the United States will be utterly destroyed if we don't elect Donald Trump. (Another good reason to not sit behind a table: It makes it easier to get away from people like that.)

Happy Day of Birth to my friend of many years, Scott Shaw!  That's Scott above, discussing his voluminous cartooning career on a panel at this year's Comic-Con.  How long have I known this man?  We met in Jack Kirby's studio back when Jack was drawing New Gods.  You do the math.

At the time, Scott was a fledgling cartoonist, drawing for his school newspaper and other places where fledgling cartoonists find an appreciative, if non-paying audience.  A skip and a jump later, he was drawing quite professionally for Hanna-Barbera and for DC Comics and for Marvel and many other places with did pay and were glad to have him.  We like so many of the same things that we've always gotten along fine, even during the brief time that he lived with me.  (It was kind of like The Odd Couple but with two Oscars and no Felix.)

Not much too add except to wish him a wonderful day.  And heck, I like Scott enough that I'll wish him a good one tomorrow, as well.  And Tuesday.  And, oh hell, give him the rest of the week, too.  Nothing but the best for my friends.

Stephen Colbert is ready to do his show — but his graphics department isn't…

Someone named Sally writes…

Why are there so many producers on a TV show or movie? Sometimes, there are seven or eight or more.

Well, the first thing you need to know about the title "producer" is that it, in its various permutations, is just about the only title of any importance that can be bestowed on anyone. The Writers Guild has strict rules on what someone must contribute in order to get a "Written by" credit. The Directors Guild controls director credits. But if your company is doing a TV show, you can make your three-year-old son a producer on it.

So sometimes people get it for ceremonial reasons…like they were involved in the deal that sold the show. Or they're a biggie in the production company. Since it doesn't cost anything, the title is sometimes given out in negotiations. You ask for $25,000 to write a TV show. They counter by offering you $18,500 and a producer credit.

You can not only negotiate that, you can negotiate to be Executive Producer, Producer, Co-Producer, Supervising Producer, Creative Producer, Associate Producer, etc. There are no fixed definitions of any of those but obviously, some suggest that they're higher ranked than others.

Also, there's this: When I was doing the original Garfield and Friends show, my credit was originally "Written by," which was all I wanted. I didn't even want to be credited as Voice Director. Then one year, we were nominated for an Emmy for Best Animated Series and one of our Executive Producers, Lee Mendelsohn, realized something. According to the Emmy rules then, a Best Show Emmy went only to the producer(s) of an animated series. Lee felt it would be a shame if the show won and I didn't get a statuette so beginning with the following season, he added my name on as Co-Producer.

Nothing else changed. Just that. We never won, by the way. Those Emmy rules have since been changed and I believe now, someone who writes a certain percentage of the episodes qualifies for an Emmy if the cartoon show wins Best Series. But there are other situations where folks fight for producer credits because the way the rules are configured, if the show gets an Emmy, they don't. Unless they have a producer credit.

Lately, a lot of folks who in earlier days might have been credited as Story Editors or Script Consultants now ask for and get producer credits. Some stars want them. A manager who once wanted to represent me as a writer told me that if I signed with him, he would get 15% of everything I was paid but he would also demand an Executive Producer credit on any show or movie I wrote. If they wouldn't give it to him, we wouldn't take the deal. I did not sign with this person.

Long ago on a TV show, you could easily pinpoint which of the names in the credits was the person who had the main creative say. It was the man or woman designated as producer. Now, everyone's a producer so they refer to the person with the main creative say as the "showrunner," a title which I don't think ever appears on-screen.

What I'm getting at is that you shouldn't take producer credits too seriously. One might mean something or it might not. I did a show once with two Executive Producers. One had day-to-day involvement making important decisions…though not as much as the guy credited as Supervising Producer. The other Executive Producer was the agent who made the initial deal with the network to do the show. I wrote on that show for three years, never met that Executive Producer and almost never heard his name mentioned. He may not even have watched the program.

David Cook sent me this question…

Mark, I appreciate everything you post and yesterday's on Chase Craig was really interesting.

I have a question about a certain kind of editor/publisher: Ever have the kind of editor or publisher who'll contact you, sound very interested and excited and invite you to send something (and these usually pay okay), then when they receive it they yell, "This is a piece of trash! Garbage! I hate your style! But I've got a deadline so I'm going to use it anyway"?

And then they do indeed publish it. But it doesn't seem like they really did any editing or anything professional other than receive it, pay and publish — and vent some insulting stuff.

What is going on with that kind of editor/publisher?

I don't think I've ever encountered anyone like that so I'll just take an educated guess and suggest that what's going on with that person is that he or she is an asshole. Thank you for your question, David.

Penn Jillette with a Donald Trump card trick…