Our pal Kliph Nesteroff has just posted an engaging interview with Dick Cavett. It's mostly about Cavett's days as a stand-up comedian and as a writer for The Tonight Show.

Last week on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, John Oliver interviewed Edward Snowden, mainly about the ability of the U.S. government to spy on male citizens' dick pics. The folks at Politifact fact-checked what Snowden said and they gave it a rating of Mostly True.

So: 34 or 35 years after he'd recorded Volume One of Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, Stan Freberg began preparing to record Volume Two. I got to help…a little. Very little. I'll tell you in a moment how little.

One of the things I learned about Stan — and this is by no means a criticism — is that as a creative individual, he made up his mind how something should be and then he achieved it. When he produced advertising, his contracts often said something like, "Mr. Freberg shall be the sole judge of whether something is funny." If you hired Stan, he did what he did and you just had to accept it…or not.

I have worked with other people — some, very talented — who tried to create that kind of "my way or the highway" situation and it can be painful. It's bad enough to watch someone drive off the cliff but it's worse when there were people around who warned them…or still worse, were not allowed to. Somehow, doing it His Way, Stan managed to produce a stunning lifetime body of memorable work.

He was not insistent on His Way when he worked for others on their projects. When he came in to do voices on cartoon shows I voice-directed for example, he was totally cooperative and eager to please. He was also very good and his presence in the studio — and I am not kidding about this — made the other actors better. In the last few days since Stan left us, several of those actors have written to me to say how working with Stan Freberg was among the greatest thrills of their lives…and very, very educational.

However: On a Stan Freberg endeavor, everything had to be to the liking of Stan Freberg. I always thought one of the reasons he preferred radio to television was that he had more control in radio. With his gift for voices and ability to do multiple roles, it was easier to make things sound the way he wanted than to get them to look the way he wanted.

As I said above, I did very little, emphasis on the "very." This is a first-person narrative of my involvement because I was in a unique position to watch a master at work. If it sounds like I'm saying I deserve some credit for the resultant album, look closer. I did nothing that substantially affected the end-product. You couldn't. Stan Freberg making a Stan Freberg record was like Arnold Palmer playing golf. You could drive him to the golf course. You could carry his clubs. But he was the only one who was going to hit the ball.

His producer was his wife Donna, who had been the producer on just about everything he'd done for the past few decades. One of the reasons she was the ideal producer for him was that she made no attempt to interfere with content. I'll tell you in the next part some of the things she told me about what it was like to be Stan's producer but the main one was: "Stan has to make the record Stan wants to make the way he wants to make it."

Which is not to say he was not willing to question his own work, decide something wasn't right and change it…but he was going to be the one changing it. Most of the material for Volume Two of S.F.P.t.U.S.o.A. was written not long after he recorded Volume One. When it came time to at long last record it, Stan went back and rewrote a number of lines that seemed dated. With the hindsight of several decades, he also altered or discarded portions he no longer liked. The passing of time dictated other changes: He had tentatively cast all the roles with the same stock company he used on Volume One but some of those folks were no longer available.

The great Paul Frees had provided the super-authoritative voice of the Narrator. You may remember how he sounded…

Alas, the great Paul Frees was now the late Paul Frees. Stan wanted a sound-alike for consistency and was about 95% convinced no human being alive could properly replicate that voice. He said to me, "I may have to listen to Paul over and over and learn how to imitate that voice myself." In his youth, I'll bet Stan could have done it. He was an incredible mimic. But I told him I had The Guy.

When you go to Disneyland and ride Pirates of the Caribbean or visit The Haunted Mansion, you hear the original, ominous vocal stylings of Mr. Frees recorded way back when. But over the years as those attractions have changed, it was deemed necessary to change a few lines. The new lines were seamlessly inserted and they were done by Mr. Corey Burton.

At the time Stan asked me to help him make Volume Two happen, I was casting voices for a proposed (but ultimately unrealized) new cartoon show. I had already decided on Stan for one of the lead roles and had Corey in mind for another. I had to have them both come in and record audition material so that the Executive Producer could sign off on my selections so I scheduled them back-to-back. One afternoon, I recorded Stan and then asked to him to stick around as Corey arrived.

I think Stan was expecting that the guy I said could do a perfect Paul Frees would be older and scowling and would look like Orson Welles…or at least, Paul. Corey is a short, pleasant-looking younger fellow. When he arrived and I introduced him, Stan gave him a look of withering skepticism, then took me aside and said, "Are you sure he can sound like Paul?" I grinned like a guy with four aces: "Just listen!" (By the way, I am not claiming a lot of credit for this bit of casting. Anyone who knew anything about the current talent pool for voice actors would have known Corey was the go-to guy when you needed Paul Frees. It's just that Stan didn't.)

Corey went into the booth, got on the microphone and began warming up. I was on the other side of the glass, next to the audio engineer, and Stan was next to me. Over the speakers, we heard The Voice saying, "Stan Freberg…modestly presents…the United States of America." It sounded, of course, perfect and I turned to Stan, waiting for him to say, "My God, you were right!"

Instead, he said, "Okay, now I want to hear him." He thought he was listening to a reference recording of Paul Frees.

I said, "That is him." I pushed the button so Corey could hear me and asked him to do some different lines in the same voice. He said, still sounding exactly like Paul Frees, "Sure, Mark…what do you want me to say?"

That was when Stan said, "My God, you were right." In an interview later, he said, "When I realized it was him and not Paul, I got cold chills. I would have bet anything that was Paul." Here is Corey Burton on the final album…

See what I mean?

The three other major performers besides Stan on Volume One were Jesse White, Peter Leeds and Byron Kane. Back in 196whatever, Stan had designated major roles on Volume Two for all three of them but Byron had also died. Lorenzo Music filled his parts, and since I had voice-directed Lorenzo on Garfield cartoons — occasionally guest-starring Stan — everyone, including Lorenzo, assumed I had cast him. Nope. That was all Stan's doing.

Peter Leeds was alive and available. So was Jesse White but I'd worked with Jesse not long before on Garfield. I loved the guy so I will say this as politely as I can: He was not in good health and he was not up to the kind of performance Stan needed from him. Since I'd just been proven right about Corey, Stan trusted me on this. He gave Jesse a small cameo role on Volume Two and selected David Ogden Stiers to play the other parts for which Jesse had been penciled in.

It was very sad the day Jesse recorded. He was failing and it took many takes to get anything even remotely useable. One of our engineers said to Stan, "Guess you're going to have to have someone else redo that part."

Stan said, "No. Jesse was a big reason why Volume One was so successful. I want him to be a part of this one and besides, that may be Jesse's last performance and I'd never forgive myself if I threw away his last performance." It may indeed have been Jesse's last because he passed away not long after Volume Two was released and so did Peter Leeds.

From the original album, Stan also managed to bring back June Foray and there was one other cast member we couldn't find. Shepard Menken played a number of roles and was probably eager to be part of Volume Two. I say that because several years earlier, I'd directed him on an episode of Garfield and Friends and we'd talked about his involvement in S.F.P.t.U.S.o.A., which he said was one of the items on his résumé of which he was the proudest. He told me, "Stan keeps talking about recording Volume Two and I hope he calls me for it."

Unfortunately, when that time came, no one could locate Mr. Menken. After Donna gave up looking, I was assigned to track him down but his agent told me, as he'd told her, "I don't know where he is. Shep's kind of dropped off the face of the earth." Someone at the Screen Actors Guild told me, "If you find him, let us know. We have checks for him that came back to us marked 'No longer at this address.'" He was eventually located but not in time to be on Volume Two. He passed away in 1999.

Stan and Donna however assembled a fine ensemble to support the returning players. In addition to Peter Leeds, Lorenzo Music and David Ogden Stiers, they booked Naomi Lewis, William Woodson, Stan's son Donavan and his daughter Donna Jean. The investors and the folks at Rhino Records wanted some "star names" as cast insurance for a project they knew would be costly so Stan and Donna recruited Tyne Daly, Sherman Hemsley, John Goodman and Harry Shearer. All were folks who'd told Stan how much they loved Volume One. Billy May, who'd arranged and conducted the music for Volume One, went to work on Volume Two.

So with the script, cast and music in place, Stan Freberg finally did something that fans and friends had been urging him to do for thirty-five years. He went into a recording studio to record Volume Two of Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America. In what was very much a "dream come true" moment for me, I got to be there. In the next part, I'll tell you what I observed and how little I did.

As you'll see, my biggest contribution involved distracting Ray Bradbury who dropped by to urge Stan to insert some lines about how Bill Clinton was destroying the real United States of America. As you'll also see, even Stan's close friend Ray Bradbury couldn't persuade Stan to do anything Stan didn't want to do. Next time.

The great Broadway songwriters, John Kander and Fred Ebb, sing one of their best tunes…

My pal Ken Levine complained about situation comedies — and this probably applies to other kinds of shows, though it's done most often with sitcoms — being sped up in syndication. He references this article over on Slate that shows you examples and lets you test to see if you can tell the difference.

I agree with everything Ken says…though I have to admit I didn't do so well on Slate's test. I'm also wondering if the speed-ups aren't the lesser of two bad choices, the other being to merely hack a minute or three out of the shows. No, I don't want to watch shows sped-up. I also don't want to watch them incomplete. If I absolutely have to pick between those two options, I think some speed-ups might be preferable to most editing.

Of course, picking from two bad choices always leaves you with a bad choice. There are a few other options which remain largely untried…

One is to run the shows uncut and unsped and just forget about this concept of half-hours. That would mean that after you roll in the requisite number of commercials, a show might start at 9:00 and end at 9:36 and the next one would start at 9:37. The entire schedule would be full of shows that began at 5:22 and 7:53 and rarely on the hour or half-hour. I'm not sure how viewers would take to this. Since I watch almost everything TiVoed, I'd be fine with it assuming the info on start/stop times made available to DVRs was precise. Given how often the times on ordinary broadcast television are off a minute or two, I'm skeptical this could be accomplished.

Another possibility is to let shows run their full, unsped length but to pad things out to round numbers. Years ago, someone announced they were going to do one of those classic sitcom channels and run everything uncut, including the credits. What they were going to do was to pad every 30-minute show to 45 with little interstitial segments. Like, they'd run a Dick Van Dyke Show at 10:00 and then a M*A*S*H at 10:45 and in-between, they'd have little spots where they'd interview people who worked on the shows and/or run clips of particularly golden moments.

They were confident viewers could cope with show starting fifteen and forty-five minutes after the hour. Well, maybe. But that idea never happened, I think because they found it too expensive to produce the filler material. I wonder though if viewers would have waited through those time-wasting segments or if they'd have started changing channels, looking for a real show that was starting now instead of in fifteen minutes.

Cartoon Network and its sister station Boomerang seem to do an amalgam of these two methods…but they, of course, have two advantages. One is that their library includes zillions of short cartoons of all different lengths. A sitcom network doesn't have loads of five-minute and seven-minute situation comedies. Also of course, a lot of their viewership is kids who've been parked in front of the set to watch whatever's on. It does not seem to affect their audience that the start times on so many of their shows are off a few minutes, either early or late.

Lastly, there's one other method which I don't think anyone has really tried: Fewer commercials. Run the shows with the number of ads they were originally intended to have.

This may sound akin to heresy but as streaming services become more plentiful and popular, regular ol' broadcast television is going to have to consider that as a way to compete. I wonder if anyone has tested something. Would viewers today pay more attention (or if they're watching on DVRs, not skip ahead) if commercial breaks were one minute as opposed to three or four? I sure don't watch many of the commercials in the shows I watch on MeTV or Antenna TV or other channels that run old shows.

I wonder what would happen if a station adopted a policy: Commercial breaks would be no longer than one minute during shows and two minutes between programs. It might take a while for viewers to get accustomed to that but once they did, might there be data to suggest that a commercial in a one-minute break on that station was two or three times more valuable than one buried in a three-minute break? I'll reach for my remote to jump through three minutes of ads. I might not bother to avoid one minute.

I dunno. I'm just throwing this out there. Maybe not enough folks watch on DVRs and know how to skip ahead…now. But that will probably change. If I were buying ad time during TV shows to sell my product, I might think it was worth paying a little more for an ad that fewer viewers were fast-forwarding through. Then again, I watch most of my favorite old TV shows via boxed sets of DVDs or Blu-Rays. That's really the answer to this whole problem.

From the New York Times…

Correction: April 9, 2015

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary misstated the year Mr. Freberg last did voice work for cartoons. It was 2014, not 2011.

That's one thing I like about the Times. They're really good about this kind of thing. I don't know any other newspaper — and certainly not any news program on TV — that is so diligent about atoning for that which they get wrong.

When I went to Facebook this morning, I found these two images a few inches from each other on my screen…

I just noticed that Comic-Con International has announced that Sergio Aragonés and I will be Special Guests this year. So I guess we'll be there.

Jonathan Chait on Dick Cheney's increasingly irrational attacks on Barack Obama. And while you're over there, read Chait on Rand Paul's promise to be the next coming on Ronald Reagan.

Here's a news item: At least thirty-five years after anyone cared, musician Don McLean has explained what his song "American Pie" was all about.

Let's go back to Comic-Con International in 2012. As usual, I hosted a panel on Cartoon Voices on Saturday morning of the con. We had a great panel including — you'll see a brief shot of him in this video — Chuck McCann. About twenty minutes from the end though, I brought on a Surprise Guest to a thunderous standing ovation. It was Stan Freberg and the audience just loved him. Here's an excerpt from his appearance…

A lot of people got the Iraq War all wrong…but no one got it wronger than Judith Miller, who was then reporting for The New York Times. When folks tell me the Times is a Liberal paper, I say, "At times, sure…but they couldn't have been more in the tank for the Bush Adminstration's war cries if they'd let Dick Cheney ghost-write their front page." Via Judith Miller's reporting, he almost did.

Ms. Miller has a new Wall Street Journal article out defending herself. She can't defend what she wrote as true but there seems to be this new standard being sold, at least in reference to Iraq: We can't fault people in positions of responsibility if they made mistakes — even if those mistakes cost thousands of lives and billions of bucks — if they were just wrong. If they lied, that's different. But if they were just wrong and they believed what they said was so, it's just a big Oops! No one to blame.

It's like if your doctor amputated your right leg and it turned out later that your leg was fine and he was looking at someone else's x-rays. It's an honest error. You can't possibly fault anyone for that.

Anyway, I'm not suggesting you read Ms. Miller's self-vindication but if you do, also read Simon Maloy's rebuttal to it. He has this odd idea that she's still not dealing in the truth.

Stan Freberg's magnum opus as a maker of funny records was probably Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America — the Early Years. It was a musical comedy album that came out in 1961, featuring clever songs and highly fractured interpretations of our nation's founding years. Dr. Demento has said he still can't decide if it's the best comedy album in history or the best history album in comedy. Either way, it was pretty good.

The brilliant Mr. Freberg planned it as a three-volume set: Volume One started with Columbus and took us up to the Revolutionary War. Volume Two would carry things through World War I and then the third release would bring things up to the present day. Stan wrote the songs, co-wrote the sketches and played (in the first one) Christopher Columbus, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and several other historical figures. He was aided in his efforts by superstar arranger/conductor Billy May and by a superb cast including Paul Frees, June Foray, Jesse White, Byron Kane and Peter Leeds. The tunes are wonderful, the jokes are funny and eminently quotable…and there's even a smidgen of real history in there. A great record.

It started with Christopher Columbus setting foot on the shores of America and being unable to cash a check because, after all, it was Columbus Day. It ended with General George Washington winning the Revolutionary War, after spending hours deciding which boat to rent.

That was the first album. It was a huge hit and Stan set to work on the second album. Then "things happened."

In the latter half of the last century, the most prolific producer of Broadway shows was a man named David Merrick. Hello, Dolly! was one of his. So was 42nd Street. So were dozens and dozens of others.

He was also perhaps the most colorful off-stage personality of the Broadway scene. Every Merrick show yielded tales of trickery, feuds, threats, more threats, and lawsuits – most of this deliberately and wickedly orchestrated by Mr. Merrick. He was said to consider any project incomplete unless he sued a few people and made at least a few enemies-for-life. (To learn more about the amazing, controversial career of David Merrick, seek out a book called David Merrick: The Abominable Showman by Howard Kissel.)

Shortly after the first volume of United States of America hit record shops, Merrick heard it and made a deal with Freberg to stage the whole thing – Volume One, plus the material that was to comprise Volumes Two and Three — on Broadway as a musical. The deal was on-again, off-again a few times but then finally it was on, and Freberg moved to New York to begin rehearsals. To his dying day, he wished he'd said no. He wished he'd stayed home and gone ahead with his plans to record Volume Two and then Volume Three. Merrick, however, insisted they be postponed, so as not to infringe on sales of the show's planned cast album.

So instead of making the records, Stan began mounting a Broadway show, and the fights with Merrick were legendary. A few of them are recounted in the Kissel book and more were told in Freberg's autobiography, It Only Hurts When I Laugh.

The best one — the one I have to tell here — is the one where they were rehearsing the Battle of Appomattox. Merrick, after observing a run-through, marched up to Freberg and said, "Take Lincoln out of the Civil War. He doesn't work."

Stan gave out with a loud, understandable Huh? "Don't you think people will notice his absence?" he asked the producer.

"Oh," Merrick replied. "You'll miss him, I'll miss him, a few history buffs will miss him, but the average person won't notice." He also suggested moving Barbara Fretchie from the Civil War to the Revolutionary War, because they needed a strong female character in that section.

Most of their exchanges, alas, weren't this funny, at least to Stan. He finally decided that Merrick was trying to destroy his spirit, and he yanked the project. Broadway lost what might have been a wonderful show but, worse, Volume Two of Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America was indefinitely shelved. By the time the legal battles abated, Stan had lost the momentum of the project.

I loved that first record. I played it over and over and over, and I wasn't the only one. Soon after, a group called the Beatles became the hottest thing in the history of show business. When Paul McCartney was once asked what kind of music he liked to listen to, he mentioned a couple of songs from Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America. I'd call that a pretty good compliment — wouldn't you?

I'm not sure exactly when I discovered it — around '63, I guess. Maybe a bit earlier. I bought a copy at a record store on Westwood Boulevard in West L.A., just north of Pico. If you know the area: It was located right where they built Junior's Delicatessen which is now Lenny's Delicatessen, which is where Ken Levine and I just had lunch which is not the least bit relevant to this article.

Every time I went into a record store thereafter, I would zip over to the Comedy section and peek in front of the index divider for Stan Freberg, on which his name would inevitably be misspelled. I would fervently pray that Volume Two would be there but it never was. A few times, I asked the clerk in the store on Westwood if he had any idea when it would be in and I was always told, "No, and we've had a lot of people asking."

Little did I know that (a) it would take thirty-five years and (b) I would get to be there for its creation. For that matter, there's a (c) and a (d): I didn't imagine that I'd get to know Stan and work with him…and that we'd even lunch at Junior's Delicatessen — on the very same hunk of real estate where I bought the first volume of Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America.

Throughout those thirty-five years, Stan was asked over and over, "Say, is Volume Two ever coming out?" It came to be the Eternal Question of his existence.

The first time I met him, I figured that he was probably sick of people asking him about it, so I held off and didn't ask immediately. I think I held off for about four minutes. The answer, of course, was that he had moved on to other work, he was no longer making comedy albums and neither was Capitol, and his company of actors had scattered and, in a few sad cases, passed away.

And there was another reason which I didn't mention the first time I wrote about all this. Stan was expensive. He put a high price tag on his creations, demanded total control and always went first class. His musical arranger/conductor did not come cheap and what he had Billy May arrange and conduct was a full orchestra. Full orchestras never come cheap. Neither did the cast Stan wanted to use. He also demanded (or maybe just needed) a large cast and plenty of studio time to do multiple takes and then to spend days editing and mixing, editing and mixing.

During those 3.5 decades, he was often approached by record companies about bringing forth Volume Two. They were all enthusiastic about it. That was, until they saw the budget. Record companies simply did not spend that kind of money on a comedy record…especially a comedy record with commercial prospects that faded as Volume One became more and more a distant memory. Finally though, some outside investors came in, not so much because they expected to make a fortune off the album but as they simply felt it should be done.

So one day, Stan called and asked if I could meet him for lunch — at Junior's, which was frighteningly appropriate. He had a tuna sandwich and I had corned beef and he asked me if I'd help him out with Volume Two. I said…well, what do you think I said?

I'll tell you what happened next in our next installment of Freberg Stories. I'm not sure yet how long it'll be before it appears but it should be less than thirty-five years.

Comic Book Resources reports on the panel we did last Friday at WonderCon: Sergio Aragonés, Stan Sakai and myself discussing Groo the Wanderer and other current and upcoming projects. Their reporter misheard a few things…like I don't have a wife and I'm sure Sergio didn't say I did. But most of the info is correct.

Leonard Maltin remembers Stan Freberg. I was present for the "impromptu musicale" he describes and I recall the delight of the audience…and the look of disbelief/joy on Leonard's face that he was playing piano to accompany Stan Freberg.

The New York Times has a nice piece by Douglas Martin, which I came across because of this Tweet…

One quibble: It says Stan's career doing voices for animated cartoons ended in 2011. Just for the sake of accurate history (and to not truncate Stan's amazing longevity in this profession), Freberg was a semi-regular on The Garfield Show for the last few years and did his last recording for us in June of 2014.

He appeared in a number of episodes done for the show's fourth season and his last session was to record an hour-long special we produced after the completion of Season 4. The fourth season and that special have aired all over the world but not yet in this country. I am told Cartoon Network here is planning to run them this October.