Details are sketchy about David Letterman's announced retirement in 2015 so I thought I'd get an early jump on the speculation to come. Can't wait to see how CNN will tie this in with the missing Malaysian plane.

Why is Dave quitting? Well, first of all, is he quitting? His ratings versus Fallon and Kimmel have not been great. He's generally been finishing second in total viewers, third in the 18-49 bracket. It's not hard to imagine him losing both contests soon but it is hard to imagine anything reversing the trend. America has long since decided how much they feel like watching Dave at night and the new, younger viewers are not drawn to him. So that's a decent reason to retire but it's also a fine reason for CBS to suggest that strongly. My guess would be it's both. And someone probably feels that Dave's only real chance of getting his numbers up at all is a year of "farewell" shows, trotting out the best guests and reprising the best bits.

Then again, it's important to remember that the reasons for a decision like this may not all be visible to us. Maybe it's just Dave's mood or Dave's family or Dave's health. When someone leaves a great job, it's kind of a cliché for them to say they weren't fired; that they resigned on their own accord to "spend more time with the family." That usually means they were fired…but not always.

Who's going to replace him? Beats me. If I were CBS, I'd send a Dodge Viper filled with cash to Stephen Colbert's door to see if he's ready to abandon his Comedy Central show and the character he plays on it. But I don't think it'll be Colbert. I think they're going to want someone fresher…and it wouldn't surprise me if it was someone more skilled at Social Media and YouTube than delivering a great monologue.

I don't think it'll be Craig Ferguson. Some reports say Ferguson has (or had) a succession deal in place while some say otherwise. If he had a deal guaranteeing him the time slot, I assume CBS will exercise some sort of escape clause. Ferguson didn't do well against Fallon at 12:35. Why would he be competitive at 11:35?

(I'm still a big fan of Mr. Ferguson, by the way, even though I rarely watch his show. I think he's one of the brightest, quickest humans on television and when he's really interested in a guest, a better interviewer than any of his competitors unless you count Jon Stewart. But lately, Ferguson has been trending in the same direction via which Conan O'Brien lost me: Too much mugging and dancing and making the show about how much he can make the studio audience love him. I've given up O'Brien because he seems way more interested in topping his guests and talking about himself than he is in helping them to score. Craig is drifting the same way.)

(One more aside before I get back to Dave: For April Fools Day, Ferguson and Drew Carey traded jobs. Carey hosted The Late, Late Show and Ferguson hosted The Price is Right. Neither did that well but Carey did better with his assignment than Ferguson did with his. I don't think Craig knew how to split the difference between getting laughs and running a game. You can't be too silly on a game show since you don't want to interfere with anyone's ability to win that new car and given that restriction, I don't think Craig knew what tone to take. I still think the guy's brilliant but it didn't work. It was interesting though to see him go the other direction, being too subdued instead of not enough. End of aside.)

One thing I suspect about Letterman's replacement: CBS already knows who it'll be and probably has paper signed. They may not want to announce it right away. It'll make Dave's departure seem less like he was elbowed aside if they don't announce the new person too quickly. But the selection has probably already been made.

What intrigues me more than that person's identity is So what is Dave going to do?

A person who was close to Carson told me that when Johnny retired, he honestly wasn't sure what, if anything, he'd do in the public eye. He thought some options would present themselves…and some did though he didn't like any of them. Letterman worships Carson but I can't see him disappearing the way Johnny did. I also can't see him going out and doing stand-up like Leno or guesting on other shows or…anything. He's a very funny, popular man and it would be such a waste if he didn't do something. I'm wondering what it will be…and it wouldn't surprise me if he's wondering, right along with the rest of us.

More as this story develops.

Here's what happens when you board a flight and the cast of the Disney musical of The Lion King just happens to be aboard…

Jonathan Chait on the good news for Obamacare. I suspect the program still faces possibly-lethal court challenges and a whole lot of tweaking…but the predictions that it could never work, that it would never meet sign-up projections are starting to look a lot like Dick Morris's assurance of that Romney landslide. Actually, they remind me of a producer I once worked for who told me that a certain project was definitely going to be picked up for production. I asked her how she could be so sure and she said, "Because I need it to be." It wasn't…but if it had been, it would not have been because of that.

Michael Hiltzik debunks the claims that the White House is fibbing about the enrollment success of Obamacare. People are going to believe what they want to believe — I still get messages from a guy who insists it's been "inarguably proven" that Obama's birth certificate is bogus — but I think the tide has turned on the Affordable Care Act. Not that some people won't give up without a fight…

Today (Wednesday), Stu Shostak has another of all his always-lively discussions on the state of the TV industry with his resident TV critics, Steve Beverly and Wesley Hyatt.  As Stu's website says, "First, we'll pay tribute to game show hosts Jim Lange and Geoff Edwards.  Then we'll discuss DirecTV dropping The Weather Channel (and nobody except TWC seems to care), the Comcast-Time Warner merger and what it means for we poor consumers, the latest on the Aereo streaming TV lawsuit (and what that means for we consumers), the surprise ratings bonanza Jimmy Fallon is experiencing (and how long it will last), and GSN doing it again with another lame series pickup…" And on and on from there…

Stu's Show can be heard live (almost) every Wednesday at the Stu's Show website and you can listen for free there. Webcasts start at 4 PM Pacific Time, 7 PM Eastern and other times in other climes. They run a minimum of two hours and sometimes go to three or beyond.  Shortly after a show ends, it's available for downloading from the Archives on that site. Downloads are a paltry 99 cents each and you can get four for the price of three.  Great shows at a great price.

This is to remind my friends in the Southern California area that Frank Ferrante will be doing An Afternoon With Groucho at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts on Sunday, April 13 at 3 PM. Go here to get tix because they may not be available for long…and it will probably be a quite a while before the next time Frank does his show in our neck o' the woods.

For those of you new to this blog: Frank is this incredible actor I met who gets on a stage and miraculously transforms himself into the one, the only Groucho Marx. He sings. He dances. He tell stories. He heckles the audience. I'm not a big fan of "impersonator" shows but this is a lot more than an impersonation. I've seem him about a dozen times so I may skip this chance…but you shouldn't.

• My lawyers just completed a report that completely exonerates me with regard to Scrappy Doo.

Our friend Shelly Goldstein wrote a piece on Fred Phelps that summarizes what a lot of people feel about the man.

A friend of mine who is personally opposed to same-sex wedlock (but accepting of its inevitability) sent me a message recently that said he was happy to see the guy die. My friend wrote, "Every time someone thinks that opponents of Gay Marriage are emotionally disturbed homophobes, we have Fred Phelps to thank for that." Well, him and some others.

Here at long last is the second excerpt from Allan Sherman's 1965 TV special…but before we get to it, we need to discuss and maybe view another clip.

One of the guests on the special was Lorne Greene, who was then a pretty big star. Bonanza was just about the most popular TV series in the country and Mr. Greene had a hit record — a western-themed ballad called "Ringo." On the special, Greene performed the song in western garb. The tune was slightly abridged from the record but it was done with the same seriousness and style. Then he exited and Allan Sherman walked out in western garb and performed his parody version on the same set.

This excerpt from the special begins with Sherman's parody and omits the Lorne Greene performance he's spoofing. So here, in case you're unfamiliar with it, is Lorne Greene and "Ringo," as heard on the record…

Then imagine Greene exiting the screen, Sherman walking in wearing much the same outfit and assuming the same opening pose and — well, go ahead and click…

As you've just seen, the special continued after the "Ringo" number with a few other items. Mr. Sherman sang a serious song called "His Own Little Island," which was written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans for the 1961 Broadway musical, Let It Ride. The show was not successful — it closed after 68 performances — but like many non-hit musicals, there was one song that outlived the show, and a number of artists recorded it. Sherman's version had lyrics that differed slightly (but not to be funny) from some of the others but it's kind of a nice recording. You can listen to it right here…

Livingston and Evans, of course, had a pretty good joint career despite the failure of Let It Ride. Among their many hits were "Buttons and Bows," "Silver Bells," "Mona Lisa," "Que Sera Sera" and the song you can hear in the player below. It was sung by Mr. Livingston himself…

Sherman's recording of "His Own Little Island" has an interesting story. The man was not happy being a fabulously-successful recording artist with his parody albums. Almost immediately upon going overnight from unemployed TV producer to wealthy superstar, Sherman began pushing Warner Brothers Records to let him do an album of serious songs. They fought him all the way for obvious reasons but it was hard to say no to their biggest star. Grudgingly, they agreed to release a single (not an album) of a serious song Sherman had written years earlier as a love letter to his wife — the one he divorced not long after.

It was called "Oddball" and since records have two sides, he sang "His Own Little Island" as the "B" side, the side a lot of buyers never bother to play. In the era of CDs, it has become a lost phenomenon but it was not unusual back then for someone to record a single and to sweat and work and to have all sorts of great expectations for the "A" side…and then have the "B" side, which was chosen and recorded almost as an afterthought, become the hit. The Livingston-Evans hit "Mona Lisa" was the throwaway "B" side of a Nat King Cole record that no one remembers.

Anyway, neither side of Sherman's single got much attention but almost 100% of what notice it did get was for "His Own Little Island," and he took to singing it often in concerts and night club appearances. It became kind of a personal theme for him and since the song's origins were so obscure, a lot of people thought he wrote it.

One other thing about the special before I let you go…

As I mentioned the other day, I audio-recorded this special when it appeared and played that tape over and over. A few years ago when I finally got a DVD of it, I was eager to check out the writing credits, which I hadn't noted back in '65. It turned out to have been written by Sherman, David Vern, Sam Bobrick, Bill Idelson and Roger Price…all names well-known to me.

Starting at the end and working backward, Roger Price was the inventor of Droodles, a funny gag panel which I wrote about back here. He was also (a) an occasional collaborator with Harvey Kurtzman and a contributor to MAD, (b) the editor-publisher of Grump, a good but unsuccessful and generally-forgotten humor magazine that tried to be MAD for an older audience; (c) a frequent TV panel member and the host of a short-lived TV series based on Droodles, (d) the co-creator of the game, Mad-Libs and (e) a co-founder/owner of Price-Stern-Sloan, a major publisher of silly books. A very funny, prolific man.

Sam Bobrick was — and still is; he's still with us — a very prolific author and co-author of TV shows and plays (including the oft-performed Norman, Is That You?). Bill Idelson was a former radio actor who became a successful TV producer and writer, best known for playing Herman Glimshire — or however you spell it — on The Dick Van Dyke Show.)

And then there's David Vern, a man I don't know a whole lot about but he seems to have had a fascinating career. He was an old pulp writer with hundreds of credits under a dozen names in science-fiction and mystery magazines. He worked a lot in television, including a number of game shows. Just before Allan Sherman hit it big with his record, My Son, the Folk Singer, he was producing a game show for CBS called Your Surprise Package. David Vern was one of the writers for it and he seems to have worked on other TV shows, occasionally changing his name. He wrote for Sam Levenson, Red Buttons, George Gobel and many other TV comedy stars of the fifties.

His birth name was David Levine but his main professional name was David Vern Reed and when he wasn't writing TV or pulp magazines, he was writing comic books, mainly for DC and sometimes for the editor there who had once been his agent, Julius Schwartz. His first comic book credits seem to be for Batman around 1949 and he wrote quite a few of them and also many Superman stories, scripts for the mystery and war books and others. He was away from Batman for a long time but in the mid-seventies, did a long string of stories under the name "David V. Reed." He was a pretty good writer, I thought…someone we need to keep in mind someday for the Bill Finger Award. He died in 1989.

I never met the man but I was a fan of his comic book writing. So you can imagine my surprise when I discovered he was one of the writers on this TV special I remembered so fondly. Maybe one of these days, someone will post the rest of it.

• It's April Fool's Day. Believe nothing you read on the internet today. Or tomorrow. Or the rest of the week. Or ever.

There's so much more to say about Eddie Lawrence. Brad Ferguson wrote, "The New York Times obit is good, but it neglected to mention that Eddie Lawrence hosted the Three Stooges show on WPIX Channel 11 in New York for about a year in 1963-64. That's how I found him."

My pal Mark Rothman wrote a tribute to Eddie that says much the same thing I said. I offer it as independent corroboration. Mark reminds me of another of Eddie's great roles — as a burlesque comic in one of my favorite movies, The Night They Raided Minsky's.

And here's a little sample of Eddie at work. This is a special Old Philosopher record he made for disc jockeys. Enjoy…

• CNN has reporters in a flight simulator emulating the search for Flight 370. Makes sense since CNN is kind of a news simulator.

There's pretty much everything you need to know about the way Fox News has been covering Obamacare.  Someone went to the guy who designs their charts and said, "Okay, make sure six million looks like it's about a third of seven million."  Or more likely, they didn't have to tell him.  He works there.  He knows.  More "fair and balanced" coverage from the people who told us Mitt Romney would win in a landslide.

That loud rock music you heard in the distance Saturday evening, wherever you were, came from the birthday party for our pal, Bill Steinkellner. His superb spouse Cheri arranged a good, old-fashioned sock hop at what looked like a high school gymnasium. (It was actually a Senior Center. I was amused that on the wall of the men's room, there were ads for medication to help males who are having trouble urinating. Talk about your Target Audience.) Anyway, we had a great time and no, we didn't dance. We stayed mostly outside with the non-dancers and talked with the likes of Ken Levine, Leonard and Alice Maltin, Lynne Stewart, George Wendt, Dan Castellaneta, Michael Bell and others. Great party, great people, great hot dogs.

---

Then last night, I had to go out to the Aero Theater in Santa Monica since I hadn't seen It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in over two weeks. The charming Karen Sharpe Kramer and Kat Kramer introduced what may be Stanley Kramer's greatest film, which the Aero was showing in tribute to the late Sid Caesar. Sid's daughter Karen also spoke, and then they ran the film which the audience thoroughly devoured and enjoyed. I was impressed because there were a lot of Mad World virgins in the house — people seeing the film for the first time. (Kat called for a show of hands in her intro. Even if she hadn't, you would have known because of all the whispering: "That's Charles Lane…" "That's Edward Everett Horton…") Naturally, I noticed things we didn't include in the commentary track on the DVD/Blu-ray set. Wish we could go back and do a commentary track for the commentary track.

---

Today is supposed to be the last day the Souplantation restaurants have their Classic Creamy Tomato Soup. Guess where I'm dining.

---

The second part of the Allan Sherman video was preempted for Breaking News about another great funnyman of the records, Eddie Lawrence. It will appear here later today. And in a day or two, I'll be posting the final chapter in the story of my grandmother's funeral. [SPOILER ALERT: We bury her.] Back to work. And soup…

One of my favorite comedians, Eddie Lawrence, died last Tuesday at the age of 95. If you're over the age of 50 and don't know who he was, skip down and watch the video. Yeah, he's that guy. He did other things on records besides his routine, "The Old Philosopher," but that was the classic. I own them all and they all make me laugh.

Eddie was kind of a Renaissance Man. He was an actor, both on-camera and for animation. He appeared in musicals and plays and also wrote them. He also painted, having inherited the studio of his dear friend, Zero Mostel. This obit in the New York Times will tell you a little of what he did.

I first discovered him the way I discovered one of my other heroes in the world of comedy records — on the old Soupy Sales show. Soupy would have his puppets, Pookie and Hippie, mime to records. Sometimes, it was Freberg. Sometimes, it was Lawrence. I loved the work of both men and after I got to know and work with Stan, I set my sights on Eddie. Here's a story I told once before on this blog…

It was a 1994 recording session for the cartoon series, Garfield and Friends. Ordinarily, the series was recorded wholly in Los Angeles with L.A.-based actors but the producer, Lee Mendelson, indulged me an extravagance. He let me go to New York and record a couple of episodes with talent from back there. I was there with the east coast actors while the rest of the cast was in a studio in Hollywood, the entire session connected via digital phone lines. For the day, I hired three actors I'd always wanted to work with — Arnold [Stang], Imogene Coca and Eddie "The Old Philosopher" Lawrence — and we booked a Manhattan recording studio. The studio was recommended by our L.A. recording supervisor and by coincidence, it turned out to be one where Arnold and Eddie had, decades before, recorded many Paramount cartoons.

While I was recording with Arnold, Eddie Lawrence arrived. You may not know Eddie's name but he's a wonderful character actor and comedian who did a series of much-quoted records as "The Old Philosopher." His catch-phrase was, "Hey, is that's what bothering you, Bunky?" Anyway, he and Arnold were longtime pals, and when Arnold and I were done with his cartoon and he exited the booth, he and Eddie embraced.

Then Arnold looked him in the eye and sounding as serious as Arnold Stang could possibly sound, he pointed to me and said, "Eddie, don't give this young man any trouble. He's a fine director and you just do everything he says."

Eddie promised he would. That wasn't good enough for Arnold. He added, "If you give him any crap, I'll come back here and kick your ass." Then he handed me his pager number and said, "Remember…if he gets out of line, call me and I'll come back and kick his ass." This wasn't necessary but there was one moment when Eddie was giving me a little problem and I had to threaten, "I'll call Arnold." He immediately apologized and agreed to do it the way I wanted. The power of an Arnold Stang threat.

Actually, Eddie was a dream. A few weeks earlier, I called his agent in New York and said I wanted to hire him to do one or two Garfield cartoons. Here was the deal. I told the agent, "What I really would like to do is write for the Old Philosopher. I know Eddie has always written all his own material so I don't want to offend him. If he doesn't want anyone else writing for that character, I absolutely understand. I'll just write a different kind of Garfield cartoon and have him play a role, just so I can meet him and say I worked with him. If, however, he is willing to trust me, I'll do two cartoons with the Old Philosopher character and we'll pay him twice as much."

The agent said, "I don't know…Eddie is really protective of that character."

I said, "Tell him I know his work backwards and forwards. Tell him I will send him the material in advance…which is something I've never done for anyone else in six years of this show. Tell him I will overwrite the monologues. I'll write them 50% longer and he can cut the jokes he doesn't like or reword them or whatever he wants."

She said she'd check with him. The next day, she called me back and said, "Eddie says he'll do the two episodes with the Philosopher…but I'll warn you. He's going to be really fussy about the material." We verbally "shook" on the deal and a week later, I sent the scripts to her to pass on to Eddie.

I was packing for the New York trip when the phone rang. On the other end was the unquestionable voice of Eddie Lawrence and he said, "Mark, you have been listening to my records." I would love to be able to tell you that he did everything I wrote just as I wrote it but in fact, we spent about a half hour then and another half hour after I got to New York fiddling with the jokes. Which was fine with me. I wrote two Old Philosopher routines for Eddie Lawrence and I am a happy man because of it.

I am not, however, happy that when he invited me to go to lunch with him and see Zero Mostel's studio, I had to decline because I had a plane to catch, nor am I happy that on subsequent visits to Manhattan, I never got around to rescheduling that lunch and tour. But we spoke a few times on the phone later. Some of the stories he told me are in the great interview he did with my pal, Kliph Nesteroff. Here's Eddie at work…