Hey, let's watch an episode of the 1960 TV show, Championship Bridge! This was a syndicated TV series on which hosts Alex Dreier and Charles Goren did play-by-play as four great bridge players played the game.

Why the hell are we watching this? Because one of the players in this episode is Chico Marx, making what some claim was his last TV appearance ever. He passed away on October 11, 1961.

Throughout, the hosts refer to him as "Cheeko." Those who knew him — like, say, his brother Groucho — always pronounced it "Chicko," noting that the nickname came about because he liked to chase chicks (i.e., cute women). I dunno why Chico didn't tell the hosts how to pronounce his name but maybe by then, so many people had gotten it wrong that he'd given up.

You probably won't want to watch the whole thing but you might want to watch a little of it, especially if unlike me, you know how bridge is played. There's actually a website that diagrams this particular game so you can study it and decide what you'd have done. In case you don't make it to the end, Chico and his partner lose badly and Chico, saying one of the few funny things he says during the program, insists, "It was a close match until the first hand."

One more view of the Woody Allen situation. Roger Friedman thinks there is a calculated campaign and…well, read it for yourself.

This whole thing is a shame but I'm not sure what kind of shame it is. If Allen really did molest the girl then it's a shame he's getting away with it and she was as hurt as she said in her article. If he didn't molest the girl, then it's a shame she's experienced all that hurt, "remembering" something that didn't happen and it's a shame Allen can never fully clear his name.

At some point, maybe soon, I'll probably stop reading these articles because there seems to be no resolution possible. But it felt important to link to this one.

• Friends mock me for caring so little about football that this year, I decided to wager on the Super Bowl. Just bet a hundred on the Rams.

We interrupt our work to bring you this…

Since I linked to a defense of Woody Allen a few days ago, I feel I should link to this. It's an open letter from Dylan Farrow, who says that she was sexually molested by Allen when she was seven years old. There's also this from Nicholas Kristof, a columnist and friend of Farrow's who helping publicize her side of the dispute.

I have no opinion on what happened in the attic long ago and believe most people expressing one should admit that they don't know, either. I do think too much is being made of the Golden Globes honoring Allen but that's because I think the Golden Globes are kind of a joke. I could round up ten friends, we could pick out a cool name for a trophy, decide on Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor and other categories…and then, if we were as good at P.R. and promotion as the unknown folks at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, our award could be taken just as seriously. I also disagree with Kristof when he says…

The standard to send someone to prison is guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but shouldn't the standard to honor someone be that they are unimpeachably, well, honorable? Yet the Golden Globes sided with Allen, in effect accusing Dylan either of lying or of not mattering. That's the message that celebrities in film, music and sports too often send to abuse victims.

I doubt the Golden Globes' "siding" went any farther than just saying Allen has produced an impressive body of work…and maybe that they thought it would garner attention and credibility for their lightweight award to give him one. Dylan probably didn't enter into the decision, nor did anyone's personal life.

In 2003, the Motion Picture Academy gave Roman Polanski a Best Directing Oscar for The Pianist. Now, Polanski's guilt in a child molestation case is admitted and inarguable but the Academy wasn't siding against his victim or approving or forgiving his actions in that matter. They were just saying they thought he had done the best directing job of that year. It's possible to have that opinion and also believe that the man who did that best directing is a sex criminal.

Is Woody Allen? I don't know and barring a Perry Mason Moment from Dylan or Woody — someone blurting out a confession — I don't think we'll ever know. But I do know he's made some great movies so I can at least say that with some certainty.

I have much to write today of a deadline nature so there will be little if any posting here today. I'll make it up to you tomorrow or Monday with a very long Tale of My Childhood.

Turner Classic Movies is running A Thousand Clowns tomorrow morning. That's one of those movies you should see if you've never seen it. Later in the day, they also have a few more like that: The Caine Mutiny, The Defiant Ones, 12 Angry Men and The Lost Weekend.

Someone pointed out to me a mistake I made on the commentary track for the new Criterion release of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I said that the police calls, which were played in first-run theaters during intermission, were included on the Laserdisc release. Not true. The Criterion DVD/Blu-ray set is the first time they've been available on home video.

I hear the set is selling very well and I see it's getting raves from all the online professional reviewers. There are, of course, some complainers on Amazon, most of whom don't seem to get the fact that when you do a restored version of a movie, putting back footage that was lost and had to be found, the audio and video may not be perfect even after extensive correction and processing. I especially like the guy who complained that the package that holds the discs doesn't contain a Table of Contents. He might try looking at the flap that says "Disc Contents." I'm sure that if Criterion ever issues a Russ Meyer set, the same guy will complain on Amazon that the movies don't have any women with large breasts.

Okay, back to work on this, another good day to not be Chris Christie…

37 years of Best Visual Effects winners at the Oscars…

It's another good day to not be Chris Christie. David Wildstein, the former Port Authority of New York and New Jersey executive who directed the George Washington Bridge lane closures, says Christie knew about the closures while they were happening and that there's proof. If there is, you wonder why Christie thought it wouldn't come out.

In other news, a Republican candidate for Congress in Montana is saying Hillary Clinton is the anti-Christ. I'm confused. I thought most Republicans were convinced Barack Obama is the anti-Christ. Are things so bad in the world that there are now two of them? And remember the good old days when to become the anti-Christ, you had to enslave the entire world and make fire come down from Heaven to Earth in the sight of all? These days, you can apparently earn the title by helping poor people get health insurance.

• Let me know if you find any of my tweets offensive and I'll fire the employee responsible for them.

Dave Berg — not the late MAD Magazine cartoonist — worked with Jay Leno on The Tonight Show for 18 years and has a "backstage" book coming out shortly. In this article, he makes the case for Jay's accomplishments not being sufficiently appreciated. I'm a big fan of Jay's but I think this piece may be overstating a few things.

And I am curious about these statistics…

Leno will have done 4,610 episodes when his show, which has aired 22 years, wraps. That's 79 more episodes than Johnny did in 30 years.

First off, I'd love to know the source of the exact number of shows Johnny did. Years ago, I remember a lot of TV historians wondering how many he'd done and there was a belief that while it could be estimated, there were no records that would yield a precise answer. Then one day, the number 4,531 suddenly was out there. Who calculated that and how?

Secondly, does anyone know how many times Jay hosted The Tonight Show as a guest host? Add that number to the 4,610 and it's even more impressive.

Thirdly, isn't it worth noting that all of Jay's shows have been an hour in length and that a lot of Johnny's were 90 or even 105 minutes? If you figured who'd done the most hours of The Tonight Show during their tenures, Johnny would surely be ahead. Then again, if you added in the hours of Leno guest-hosting for him…well, I think Johnny would still be ahead but it would be closer. Not that it matters a lot.

I don't mean to trivialize Jay's accomplishment. Assembling and delivering 4,610 topical monologues is all by itself an incredible feat and you just know he could have hung in there for another thousand or two. I just think Johnny was Johnny and Jay was Jay and there are so many differences between the situations in which the two men worked that a comparison is kinda pointless.

Speaking of old comedians: Jerry Lewis will be 88 on March 16. On March 15, he's doing two shows at the La Mirada Theater for the Performing Arts here in Southern California. Tickets are still available here.

I'm not going for two reasons. One is that I have tickets to see Lewis Black that evening in Beverly Hills…and while I could conceivably catch Jerry's matinee in La Mirada and make it to Mr. Black's show in time, I fear the whiplash between the two Lewises' approaches to comedy, experienced on the same day, could be lethal.

Also, I've seen Jerry live about a half-dozen times and he doesn't make me laugh anymore. He just makes me uncomfortable. I respect the accomplishments and there's something admirable about him still performing at his age. It's great that people who love him and his work will be able to go and applaud him and forever say, "I saw Jerry in person." All well and good. But it's like being around Mickey Rooney. He rambles and he gets his own history all wrong and he lashes out at the darnedest people for the darnedest reasons and sometimes, it's like watching an exposed raw nerve, waiting for someone to touch it and…

Well, I've stopped finding it interesting or amusing. If you love the guy and you're anywhere near La Mirada, by all means go. That's a great theater, by the way, even if the traffic between there and L.A. can sometimes get a bit gnarly. I guess that's a third reason I don't want to try and make a double feature that day. And if you go, let me know if he wedges a drinking glass into his mouth and/or does the typewriter bit. Who would have thought that routine would outlive the typewriter?

Did you ever hear of burlesque? It was a great style of comedy…very broad and a wee bit naughty. Alas, burlesque died out and so did all the great comics who worked for Minsky's Burlesque and other purveyors of the Art Form.

Well, not quite. There's still Irv Benson.

Benson was one of the best and after burlesque became extinct, he went to Las Vegas and began doing…burlesque. He and the (eventual) last remaining straight man from burley-q, Dexter Maitland, often appeared in revues there and in Reno. I saw them many times in the eighties and got to eat with them a few times and hear anecdotes. Oh, those anecdotes.

Irv also appeared on television a lot, mostly with Johnny Carson and Milton Berle. Carson loved him and would have him on often and play straight man to him. Berle used Irv on many shows, often as an irascible character named Sidney Spritzer. The snide Mr. Spritzer would sit in a box and heckle Berle on stage. We have a clip here of them in one of their many encounters. Watch and you'll see how good Irv was at delivering a line…and how bad Uncle Miltie was at reading cue cards without looking like he was reading cue cards.

And why am I featuring this clip today? Well, today Irv Benson is one hundred years old. He's retired now and still married to his wife, Lillian after 77 years. That's amazing, especially when you consider how much of Irv's material was about how horrible his unnamed wife was.

Here's the main event: Berle vs. Spritzer. My money's on Spritzer…

And I should mention that there's an award-winning documentary about Irv called The Last First Comic. I ordered one and have received my copy but have been too busy to watch it yet. But hey, if it's full of clips of Irv, how could it not be wonderful? Here's the website to order one and here's a preview of it…

How to know when you're really in trouble: When you're being defended by Rob Ford.

Chris Cillizza says — and I agree with him — that current polls for who might be our next president should not be regarded as anything more than snapshots of a given moment. Note the line…

If polling done at this point in the 2008 race was right, we would have had a general election fight between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani. And, we didn't.

And no one disagrees the current polls are largely meaningless. They just don't act like they think they're largely meaningless.

Today, Rudy Giuliani said, "I like Chris [Christie] very much and he's being unfairly treated, and he's a good friend." He also said of the decision to close the George Washington Bridge to create an unnecessary traffic jam and the question of whether Christie was involved, "It's fifty-fifty, it leaves you with no possible way of knowing did she discuss it with him or didn't she discuss it with him."

In other words, there's a 50-50 chance that "my good friend" who's "being unfairly treated" did it and is lying when he says he didn't.

If that's what Christie's good friends are saying about him…

I continue to be mightily impressed by the segment last Monday night on The Daily Show. I'm talking about the one with Nathan Lane, Tim Gunn, a bunch of street people and the cast of the Broadway show Jersey Boys urging Fox News's Sean Hannity to stay in New York and not move away. If you didn't see it, you can watch it here…

Even if you don't find its politics amusing, I hope you're impressed by the fact that they did it at all. Hannity made his statement on a radio show on Monday, January 20. If you were a writer on The Daily Show and you walked in on Tuesday morning, described the segment and said, "Let's shoot that and have in on the air next Monday," a rational Production Manager would have told you you were out of your ever-lovin' mind. Not humanly possible.

The scenes on the street with Lane, Gunn and various New Yorkers were not difficult…probably a very long one-day shoot for a good camera crew and producer. But the mind boggles at the problems involved in getting that musical number written, produced and shot. It would be beastly expensive to pay all those singers and on-stage musicians so you'd have to work out some special accommodations with Actors Equity, the Musicians' Union and SAG-Aftra. That's after you got the producers of the musical to agree and all the performers to say yes.

The end credits listed the song as by Matthew Loren Cohen and D.J. Javerbaum. Mr. Cohen is an L.A.-based specialist in improvisational music and David Javerbaum is a former head writer of The Daily Show. He's lately been writing for Broadway and has done a lot of special musical material for folks like Neil Patrick Harris and Stephen Colbert. They wrote the song and then I believe some band somewhere had to pre-record a music track because they probably couldn't use the musicians for Jersey Boys except as on-camera performers miming to the track.

So then when did they shoot the number? The cast of Jersey Boys does eight shows a week and to further complicate matters, Jersey Boys was undergoing a major cast change at the time. Dominic Scaglione Jr., who's been playing Frankie Valli, played his final performance on January 26 and his replacement, Joseph Leo Bwarie, returned to the role on the 28th. I'm not sure which gent, if either, is in the video but there were probably rehearsals going on at the same time. So the cast had to learn, rehearse and shoot the Daily Show song while that was occurring. That's after someone choreographed and staged the thing.

It looks to me like they had three cameras there, at least one of which was on a crane of some sort. Perhaps they got lucky and Jersey Boys was shooting something else that week but if The Daily Show had to bring in all that equipment and a crew, that could get expensive. Maybe someone involved in the process was so outraged at Hannity's position that they donated a lot of time and money.

I really thought it was quite funny and clever. The only thing wrong with it, of course, is that Sean Hannity probably loved it. He's made millions stoking the anger and paranoia of a certain segment of the population. It sure won't hurt him with that segment that he's such a potent voice for their side that the Evil Left is singing insults to him.