Our friend Frank Ferrante morphs back and forth between Groucho Marx and another mangy lover named Caesar. Caesar is the star of "The Hot Spot," a show that's playing at Teatro ZinZanni in Seattle through June 7. Also in the cast with him is the lovely actress/aerialist Dreya Weber as well as other people who do incredible things. I wasn't able to make it up to see this show but I saw Frank and Dreya once in a Teatro show in San Francisco and had a wonderful evening.

Teatro ZinZanni, for those who don't know, is a long-running theatrical organization that stages shows that feature comedy, music and acrobatics presented in a (gourmet) dinner theater setting. It's like Cirque du Soleil if Cirque du Soleil was smaller, more intimate, funnier and well-catered. Their San Francisco outlet was forced to close in 2011 due to real estate problems but all the legal hurdles have now been hurdled and a grand reopening at a new location should happen in a year or two. We are very pleased to hear this.

Meanwhile: When he's not Caesaring, Frank is often Grouchoing, touring America with his one-man (and a pianist) show in which he stunningly transforms himself into the grouchiest of all Marx Brothers. I have recommended this show to you before. I will recommend it to you again. Do yourself a favor and go see it if/when it comes anywhere near you. Frank has just posted new dates for the balance of this year and much of 2016, including next January when he'll do three shows in two days at the Pasadena Playhouse — an easy commute for us Los Angeles Ferrante fans.

So catch him as Caesar. Catch him as Dr. Hackenbush. Catch him as both if you can. And watch the latest exploits in the decadent life of Caesar….

For how much of your life has America been at war? John McCain would probably answer, "Not enough." But here's a handy-dandy chart that will tell you…

Matt Taibbi on "Why Baltimore Blew Up." And obviously, it's not just Baltimore.

I posted this on June 22, 2003. Reading it now, I see that my mind was on the big room at the Comedy Store, not on the "Original Room," which is/was smaller and more intimate and more likely to be the place where careers were made. You'd already "made it" to some extent once you played the Main Room, which was larger and less viewed as a place for tryouts and workshopping. In the Original Room, I saw the likes of Leno and Letterman and Freddie Prinze and Richard Pryor and — perhaps of greater interest — comedians who didn't go on to become huge stars but could have. Some of them were just as good there as the guys who did but a certain "something" was missing. Either that, or they had personal problems or bad career management. But here are some remembrances from the Main Room…

Someone wrote to ask me about the best night I can recall spending at the Comedy Store.  There were a lot of them, backstage as well as onstage.  One night, Garry Shandling was on, and he wouldn't get off.  Just wouldn't stop.  The audience was loving him but he was way over his time and the next comic up — Arsenio Hall — was backstage fuming.  Arsenio finally turned to me (because, I guess, I was the biggest guy around) and said, "Come on.  Help me get this guy off."  And before I knew it, he and I were on the stage, physically carrying Mr. Shandling off…as Garry continued to clutch the mike and talk about his hair.  Never saw an audience laugh so hard in my life.

Another night that comes to mind was one evening when Sam Kinison was in fine form.  This was when he was still something of a cult figure — the private "discovery" of a select group of Kinison fans.  A guy in the audience made the mistake of heckling Sam, and Sam turned on him.  He began calling the guy names and like a really demented high school kid, describing graphic sexual perversions that (Sam claimed) he'd performed on the guy's mother.  You instantly realized that Kinison had decided he was not going to be satisfied to merely get the heckler to shut up.  He wanted to see if he could drive the fellow out of the room in tears.  On and on he went, making up deviant sex fantasies about the heckler's mother, each lewder than the one before.  After three or four, the heckler had not only stopped heckling but was muttering, "Come on, I'm sorry.  I won't interrupt again." That was not enough.  Kinison kept after him until the guy finally threw down some bills to cover his check and stormed out of the club.  Sam ran down to the table, counted the money and looked at the check, then ran after the fellow screaming, "You didn't tip, you cheap [multiple expletives deleted]!  You're just like your mother!"  Sam was on a wireless mike so we were sitting there in the Comedy Store, listening to him out on Sunset Boulevard yelling at his victim for about three minutes, apparently as the guy got into his car and drove off.  Finally, Sam returned to the stage, calmed down and said, "So…anyone else wanna fuck with me?"  Then he went right back into the story he was telling when the heckler first heckled.  Needless to say, no one interrupted him again.

Maybe the best night — and there are many from which to choose — was one evening when a comedienne friend of mine, Louise DuArt, was the closing act in the big room.  That meant five comics would each do 15 minutes, then Louise would close by doing thirty.  The first comic was Argus Hamilton, who would hang around and serve as m.c. for the others.  Louise called and suggested I come that evening because (she'd heard) certain "surprises" were likely — and she somehow arranged for my date and me to get Mitzi's table in the otherwise sold-out show, Mitzi being Mitzi Shore, owner-operator of the place.  Sure enough, the announced line-up was strong enough on its own — but added to it were impromptu sets by Yakov Smirnoff and Roseanne Barr, both of whom were unadvertised.  I didn't think either was that great but there's still something kind of thrilling about a surprise guest star.

It was the same way after Louise finished her very successful set.  The evening could have ended there, as it was scheduled to, and everyone would have left very happy.  Instead, Argus Hamilton returned to the stage and everyone thought he was going to say, "Thanks for coming."  Instead, he said, "Have you got time to see one more comedian?"  The audience, of course, yelled "Yes!"  Hamilton asked, "If you could see anyone in the world, who would you like to see walk out here?"  One black woman screamed out, louder than anyone else, "Eddie Murphy!"  Argus glared at her: "Do you think I can just snap my fingers and Eddie Murphy will walk out here?"  And sure enough, as he snapped his fingers, You-Know-Who walked out.  The audience went crazy, and Murphy — who was practicing for a concert film or HBO special he was about to do — stayed out there for a full hour, talking to the audience and delivering one of the funniest stand-up routines I've ever seen in my life.  A lot of it was about how he'd just been asked to play Little Richard in a biographical movie.  He got a copy of Little Richard's autobiography, he said, flipped it open and found a description of Little Richard receiving anal sex on his piano.  Eddie went on and on wondering aloud how they'd film such a scene…maybe bring in a stunt butt or something.  Much of his time was spent chatting with the lady who'd hollered his name out to Argus, and who was unabashed about announcing that she was ready and eager to engage in any kind of sex act with Mr.  Murphy — right there on the stage, if necessary.  I think she was even suggesting some of the things Kinison had claimed to have done with that heckler's mother.

Now, I need to explain that this was the early show on a Saturday night.  It was supposed to end around 10:30 and then the Comedy Store staff would do a fast clean-up of the place and begin seating for the 11:00 show.  Because of the addition of Yakov and Roseanne, it was already 10:45 by the time Eddie walked out.  Throughout, you could see personnel fretting and hear the griping of people who were lined up outside on Sunset…but no one was about to cut off Eddie Murphy's mike or carry him off the stage.  Finally, a little before Midnight, he finished — to a tremendous ovation, of course.  Immediately, waiters begin shoving us out the door and as we exited, we all had to walk past the folks who had been waiting more than an hour longer than they'd expected.  They were mad about that, and even madder at reports that we'd gotten to see Eddie Murphy and they wouldn't.  I believe the biggest name on the line-up they'd be viewing was Charlie Fleischer.

Walking past the line, pedestrian traffic jammed-up and a bunch of us found ourselves face-to-face with some angry ticket holders for the 11:00 show.  One woman was yelling at us, "Liars!  You're lying!  You did not see Eddie Murphy! Eddie Murphy was not in there!"  Her theory, I guess, was that we'd all decided to play a trick on the folks outside: "Listen, let's all wait in here an extra hour and we'll make raucous laughing sounds.  Then when you leave, tell everyone in the line outside that Eddie Murphy was doing a set."  Something like that.  Anyway, she was screaming this when suddenly, a black stretch limousine pulled up at the curb. Everyone could see the Artists' Entrance (i.e., back door of the club) swing open and then an entourage of black men in dark glasses marched out and into the limo, with E. Murphy clearly visible in the center.  In ten seconds, the limo, Eddie and the entourage were gone…and the hysterical lady was just standing there with her mouth open and her chin scraping the pavement.

Those were the golden nights of the Comedy Store.  They don't make 'em like that anymore.

A "web only" exclusive from John Oliver since he took a week off. The last time he took a week off, he went to Russia to interview Edward Snowden so who knows what he'll have next Sunday night…

You're not supposed to wish folks a Happy Memorial Day since Memorial Day is a time of mourning and remembrance. Then again, judging from my e-mailbox this morning, it's also a time of really great bargains if I rush to my nearby Target store, order new underwear from Hanes or pounce on any of several dozen Memorial Day Sales. And you don't even have to have lost a loved one in the military to take advantage of them.

As a kid, I was a little fuzzy on what you're supposed to do on Memorial Day except remember, and how it differs from Veterans Day in November. Wikipedia — which as we all know is never wrong about anything — tells us "Memorial Day is not to be confused with Veterans Day; Memorial Day is a day of remembering the men and women who died while serving, while Veterans Day celebrates the service of all U.S. military veterans."

So we mourn the dead on one and celebrate them all on the other. Seems to me there's a gap in there. On which one do we acknowledge the sacrifice of those who didn't die while serving but did suffer lasting injuries and disabilities, including the emotional kind? There are an awful lot of them and we don't seem to do right by those folks. And while they should be remembered, that's not enough. They should also be helped and not just with a twenty-four hour sale at Lowe's.

Remembering these folks is, literally, the least we can do. There is no gesture or action that demands less of us than to remember.

Here's a reprise from 9/7/04. Amazingly, the links in it are still good. Since then, I've read a lot more FBI reports that have leaked out onto the net and they all seem to be like Dean Martin's, full of info that wouldn't even satisfy the accuracy stands of TMZ or Sean Hannity. Makes you wonder how the bureau has ever caught anyone…

I was just browsing over at one of my favorite sites, The Smoking Gun. The folks there manage to dig up a wide array of suppressed or otherwise unavailable documents which they gleefully make available to all. One of the many categories, and perhaps the most amazing, presents a stash of old FBI dossiers. Your government actually spent (and probably still spends) your tax dollars to compile "files" on prominent people…and judging from the ones that are available, these files contain a mix of readily-available info — the kind of thing you can find in the person's professional bio — mixed with gossip, much of it blind-sourced and often inaccurate.

In 1972, a report on Dean Martin was requested by Alexander P. Butterfield, the Deputy Assistant to the President. We will forever be grateful to Mr. Butterfield for it was he who revealed the existence of the taping system installed by his boss, Richard M. Nixon. Butterfield was probably following orders, maybe even Nixon's, when he ordered this paperwork…and you can read what he received here. As you'll see, it consists of some common knowledge plus some unsourced gossip, including some scanty evidence that Mr. Martin was gay. While I obviously can't swear this is not true, I did know Craig — one of several children Dino fathered — and Craig used to tell pretty authentic-sounding stories of his old man bedding a steady stream of famous ladies. None of that info is in the report but I was especially amused at this paragraph…

So here's the question: Should we be more outraged that our government assembled this kind of info on citizens? Or that they relied on such vague and probably inaccurate sources? And how about that sloppy redacting job, blacking out what appears after Dean Martin's name in the above? The censored section is followed by "were," which tips us that there's another name under there. That means that the word after Dean Martin's name is "and" then we presumably have a first name, a space, then a last name. Since this document was typed in a non-proportional spaced font, it's easy to look at the line above and figure out that the name that was blacked-out has ten letters.

Okay, it's 1955 and some source mentions a name with ten letters in the same breath as Dean Martin. Gee, I wonder who that could be.

A ten-letter name — probably the same one — is blacked-out on the first page where it says Dean and someone else made a pornographic record in May of 1956. Hmm…who was Dean Martin working with in May of 1956 who had ten letters in his name? That's too early for Joey Bishop. Can you think of anyone who might have been in a recording studio with Dean in May of 1956? (Hint: Dean and his partner played their last professional engagement at the Copacabana in New York on July 24, 1956.)

And back on the second page of the report, it looks like a ten-letter name has also been redacted in the sentence about names being found in a book of alleged clients for a homosexual prostitution ring. I'm guessing it's the same ten-letter name each time and that they did make the dirty record but that the gay stuff is an outright lie which someone in your Federal Bureau of Investigation took seriously. The guy who compiled this was inept and so was whoever was assigned to cross-out the name of Martin's cohort to conceal his identity. One hopes they do a better job of protecting the identity of mob informants.

It is worth noting that this report is dated August of 1972. The infamous FBI boss, J. Edgar Hoover — who gathered smut on people— died in May of that year. Still, the information in the document is from the FBI files so it was almost certainly collected on Hoover's watch…even though, as it notes, there was no formal investigation of Martin. I really, really hope that the many intelligence failures we've experienced lately in this country weren't because the bureau was busy gathering this kind of poop on Harry Connick, Jr.

I never met Anne Meara. I just always liked Anne Meara. She was bright and funny and good in everything she ever did. That's all I wanted to say.

The Broadway show The Wiz is soon to have a Broadway revival and a live television production. (Hey, did you know it was once almost a DC Comic? When the movie version was about to come out, they hired me to adapt it and I had to trudge up to Universal Studios and see a rough cut of the movie and then write an adaptation and they hired Dan Spiegle to draw it and when he was around page 26 or so, someone told them the film was going to be a bomb and they called Dan and told him to stop drawing because they weren't going to publish the comic. And they didn't. Dan, by the way, drew a dynamite Nipsey Russell.)

Anyway, it's always been an interesting bit of theater history how close that show — which won the Tony for Best Musical the year it debuted — came to closing in about three days. Playbill has just posted a 1975 article all about this for those of you who want to know the story.

Here's what I believe is David Letterman's first post-finale interview. There may be a brief ad but it's worth sitting through to get to the interviewer's first question which Dave obviously enjoys…

Here's a new interview with Art Garfunkel. In it, he says "I don't want to say any anti Paul Simon things," and he said this before and after he said a number of anti Paul Simon things. I don't know how many reunions those two guys have had — twenty or thirty — but it may be a while before the next one.

Here's a post from June 23, 2003. If I was writing it today, I would make more of the success that the Archie company has had over the years with their digest line. I'm told it kept that company alive for a long time and the fact that it no longer works as well as it once did is why they're floundering about, trying stunts to refurbish a very old, outta-date property. I would also include a remark I once heard from Jack Kirby. Jack liked things big. He liked big comics and big panels and big scenes and big concepts. When DC started their "super-size" lines of comics with a larger-than-usual page size, he was thrilled with the concept…and disappointed that they started by filling them with reprints of old comics, thereby not taking advantage of that bigger canvas.

Anyway, one time Jack looked at a Gold Key Digest and he said, speaking just of the page size, "That's a terrible thing to do to comics." He wasn't wrong but I still find something fun about those books.

Back in the sixties, Western Publishing Company (Gold Key Comics) began to have increasing problems getting their comics distributed. All the publishers were having this problem but it was most acute for Western. DC and Charlton owned their own distribution companies so they were able to push a little harder and at least they were paying their distribution fees to themselves. Marvel was distributed by DC until they jumped to a company owned by the same conglomerate that owned Marvel. The other companies, like Archie and Harvey, were hurt…but they (like DC and Marvel) were largely using their comic book publishing as a loss leader for the merchandising of the properties depicted in their comics. DC didn't consider it fatal when sales on the Batman comic went down since they were making money off Batman t-shirts and games and spatulas and such.

Western, however, did not control their own distribution, nor did they make any money off the merchandising of most of the characters in their comics. They had the Disney properties, Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker, etc. — all properties owned by others. The few comics Western did own did not yield any real licensing money.

So they began hustling to find a way to sell comics in other venues — bookstores, toy stores, anywhere. They explored other forms of distribution and to this end began experimenting with different sizes and shapes of comics. Long before anyone at DC or Marvel was ready to break from the conventional funny book format, Western tried oversize comics, paperback comics, comics bundled in plastic bags and a few other ideas. Some received limited test marketings or never made it that far. Others came out and were widely ignored. The one thing that did well for a time was the digest comic — a little paperback about 6 and 3/4" tall with (usually) a little under 200 pages. Today, the Archie people have done quite well with their digests and the rumor is that other companies are gearing up to try them — especially for "funny" comics, whose less-detailed pages suffer less when reduced in size.

I don't believe this format will ever catch on big. Archie's success with it has largely been a matter of skillful (and expensive) marketing. They've managed to get excellent display in airports and at supermarket checkout counters. It often costs a lot of money to get your wares into those locations…which can accept very limited amounts of product. I also think there's a fundamental problem with the format in that its very size makes comics look cheap and unimportant.

One thing that some publishers seem to have missed is a lesson that Western learned when they were the only publisher doing them. When the digests were successful, they were only successful in stores that were completely isolated from regular-size comics. If a store had both sizes, no one bought the digests. If a store didn't carry regular-size comics but the one across the street did, no one bought the digests. I forget the actual sales numbers I was shown but it was something like this: When no regular-sized comics could be purchased nearby, a store that carried the digests might expect a 75% sale, which was very good. If the same store had regular comics, the digests would sell 10%. Therefore, Western was in the odd position of trying very hard not to distribute one of their products to some outlets. This they did until the digests died out in the early-seventies — about the time DC and Marvel were both enjoying some success with larger-than-normal comics. Western's distribution was crashing anyway by then but I've often wondered if the appearance of the tabloid "super-size" comics made the digests just look so puny that they helped finish them off.

If you were horrified by that Fiddler on the Roof medley performed by The Temptations, you probably won't want to watch much the same thing performed by the Osmond Brothers…

Matt Kuhns writes…

Out of curiosity I have to ask, why are you so convinced that the GOP won't nominate Jeb Bush, now? I just don't see how blustering in ways that seem (to you, and to me) imbecilic and embarrassing will be worrisome to Republican primary-goers. My own observations are that they seem, rather, to demand it.

Well, I'm not convinced they won't nominate him. They have to nominate someone. He just no longer seems like the likely guy to me. Of course, right now, no one does.

I just think that, first of all, Jeb Bush has lately looked like a really bad campaigner — a guy who gives an answer on Monday, hedges it on Tuesday and reverses it on Wednesday. I don't think any party likes a nominee who does that and it's worse with a faction of the Republican party that seems to thinks it's a sign of leadership to state a firm position and never, ever budge even a millimeter off it. (Democrats sometimes seem to have the opposite problem. On those rare occasions when one of them takes a firm position, he or she loses few points within the party for backing away from it.)

The other problem Bush has is that the current Republican Party is running far from the position that George W. Bush was a good president and that he made all the right calls in Iraq. Even "he was misled by bad intelligence" is a pretty feeble excuse…one that the people offering it to defend Bush would not accept with regard to any foreign policy miscall made by Obama or anyone named Clinton. It's going to be pretty awkward if not impossible for Jeb Bush to distance himself from all that, especially when the Democrats have video of Bush saying he turns to his brother for advice on dealing with other nations.

Speaking of all this: It's fine when the press asks candidates what they would have done about Iraq but I'd like to hear a few of them also asked what they would do (present and future-tense) about Iran. I dunno…I'm thinking in some vague, remote way that might be relevant to the job of being the 45th President of the United States.