The other day, we brought you Albert Brooks introducing his Home Comedians' Kit on The Tonight Show. Here from 1983 is his return visit…

So we have a "birther" Congressman who thinks the House could impeach Barack Obama on the grounds that he wasn't born in the U.S. and is therefore ineligible to be president.

Oh, please, please, please. That would be so funny. It's obvious that most Republicans in the House and Senate were long ago satisfied this was a nutcase charge; that Obama was born just where he says he was born and that all the evidence the birthers have to claim is "an obvious forgery" in order to believe otherwise is legit. What they won't do is say that out loud because they covet the support of the birthers and other loonies. A vote on this in the House would force Republican Congressfolks into a helluva choice…

1. They could say what they believe — that there's nothing to it — and earn the wrath of those who refuse to believe that Their Nation (and they think it's Theirs, not Ours) couldn't possibly have elected that Socialist Commie Nazi Gay Black Man. Whatever else you can say about the birthers, they create grief for all who oppose them, especially Republicans they think should be on their side. And they reliably cast votes that do not go to Democrats.
2. Or they can go with the birthers, which means they have to defend a position that makes very little sense and which they don't even believe. So, uh, how did those birth announcements get into the Hawaii newspapers at precisely the right moment in 1961? Ask a birther that and they'll change the subject or, more likely, argue that the other evidence is so strong it proves the fraud, then they'll say, "He had the power to have that arranged."

The Republican Congress has an approval rating of like 26%. If anything could get it down to single digits, it would be to tie up both houses with this nonsense. Please, guys: Go for it.

NBC has announced that Jay Leno's final Tonight Show will air February 6, 2014 though he and much of his staff will continue to be paid through September. There had previously been rumors that since the show's getting great ratings and they do have to pay all those folks 'til September, they might postpone the switchover for a while. Looks like they aren't going to do that. It might be because they're stubbornly insisting with sticking to the timetable they worked out before they knew how Jay's numbers would go. More likely, they want to put some distance between the date of Jay's last show on NBC and the first night he might do of some competing show elsewhere.

In interviews, NBC Entertainment chief Bob Greenblatt is stressing that the network wants to make some sort of deal to keep Leno in the "NBC family" after he's no longer part of Tonight. I doubt they're thinking, "We'd better keep him under contract in case we need to reinstall him at 11:35." More likely, they just don't want the competition that would cut into Jimmy Fallon's ratings…and maybe make NBC look foolish for letting Jay go.

That they haven't been able to announce a new relationship with Jay already suggests a number of things, starting with the fact that they may not have anything they can offer the guy that he'd want. Jay famously loves the idea of doing a nightly monologue before a big audience. That was the premise behind offering him a 10 PM show and later the half-hour one at 11:35. They aren't going to tender either one of those again…so where would they put him? If Jay had the slightest interest of doing occasional prime-time specials a la Bob Hope, they could have made that deal long ago.

More likely, Jay just wants to see what kind of offers he'll get. We don't know the details of his contract but most likely, he can't negotiate with other networks until X months before the end date of the pact. This is more or less standard in contracts. They want to lock you up for the specified period plus they have a preferential position for further negotiation. Six months is fairly common…but we don't know if Leno has a fairly common deal. At this point, he is doubtlessly getting approaches from other parties saying, "Hey, when you're free, we're real interested." Whether any of them will actually come up with acceptable offers is a lot less certain. When you're a hit in show business, your competition almost always says, "Hey, wish you were on our team. Let's talk when you're available."

Given his ratings, Jay will be in a great position. Given his age, he won't be. I know people in the business who are sure there'll be a feeding frenzy from Fox, various syndicators and other parties to give him a new late night show. I know others who think there's no way he'll get anything like that again. One says, "His career will begin to resemble Howie Mandel's — game shows, panels, etc." I have no idea what he'll be offered…and no idea what he'd accept. All I know is the guy ain't gonna retire…and I'm dying to see where he goes next.

In 1972, Jerry Lewis made most of a movie called The Day the Clown Cried, which may well be the most famous never-completed film of all time. Set in a Nazi concentration camp, its very premise — Jerry as a clown who entertains Jewish children before they're put to death — appalled some, especially because it was Jerry. The premise doesn't seem quite as impossible these days; not since Roberto Benigni's 1997 Life is Beautiful, which was about much the same thing, won critical acclaim and the Oscar as Best Foreign Film.

As I hear the story, Jerry's film was underfinanced from the start thanks to producers who didn't have the money they said they had. A week or three before shooting would have been finished, funds ran out. Jerry briefly tried to keep filming using his own money but his legal advisors stopped him. The ownership of the work was in question and he might well have poured a fortune into it, completed the picture and been unable to do anything with it. Filming shut down and for a time he hoped the attorneys could straighten things out so he could take the picture to some other studio and get the balance of the work financed and then have the whole thing distributed. None of that was possible. Joan O'Brien, who'd written the novel on which the movie was based, wanted the whole thing buried. The people who saw completed scenes thought they were dreadful. And the legal situation never did get resolved.

At some point, Jerry realized he had to give up on it. He couldn't get its ownership cleared up and even if he could, no one wanted the film. Too many articles had appeared about what a monstrosity it was. And eventually, he and a few other actors had aged enough that even if he did go back and shoot the additional scenes he felt were necessary, they wouldn't match.

So that was the end of that…but not really. The film attained legendary status in town, and a privileged few saw (and expressed unanimous horror at) a version Jerry had edited together of as much of the finished movie as he could muster. No, I was not among the few. Neither were a couple of my friends who were desperate to see this movie.

I witnessed this desperation first hand with one friend. One day back when we all had our video on VHS tapes, I was printing up fancy labels for some of my homemade recordings. The labels came on a sheet of twelve and I had eleven to print…so I was going to waste one label on the page. On a whim, I used the last one, printed THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED on it and slapped it on an old cassette I was otherwise going to toss. I put the tape on my shelf of movies, spine out for all the world to see. I just wanted to see if anyone would notice.

No one did until a few months later. A friend came by and was waiting in my video room while I got ready so we could leave for a restaurant where we were meeting others. Suddenly, he saw the tape. He yanked it off the shelf, thrust it at me and yelled, "PUT THIS ON! I must see this movie!" I started to tell him he didn't but he interrupted and shouted, "NOW! I must see this movie NOW!!!"

Imagine if you will that some evil villain has tricked you into drinking a fast-acting poison. Imagine you're getting dizzy and your knees are buckling. Imagine that your only hope is an antidote and that the only clue as to where and what that antidote is is on a videotape. Imagine how you'd act in that situation, then triple the intensity and you have an approximation of how my friend acted at that moment. He was five seconds from knocking me to the floor and jamming the tape into my VCR himself.

I finally explained to him that it was a joke. He didn't believe me and I had to run a little of the tape to show him it was not what the label said. I thought he was going to cry.

No, our little Bonus Video Link here is not to the complete extant version of the Jerry Lewis non-masterpiece. But here's a little excerpt from a recent Q-and-A Jerry did where he actually spoke of the picture in humble terms. For a long time, he refused to discuss it at all…

And here's about seven minutes of random footage from the set that has surfaced. You can't judge the film's merits from this but it's all you're likely to ever see of the most famous movie that never quite existed…

Here's an obit of Eydie Gorme that Bob Thomas wrote for the Associated Press. I'm linking to it because it's a good overview of her career…and because I can't believe that Bob Thomas, age 91, is still writing sharp, fact-filled celebrity obits for the Associated Press.

Melissa Lattimore sent me this and I thought it was deserving of a wider readership…

Thank you so much for the the tribute to Stan Lynde (whose name I have apparently been mispronouncing for 50 years, sigh).

In the closet of my back bedroom I have a large wooden album of Sunday Rick O'Shay strips put together by my father, who died 30 years ago next month. Daddy was a huge fan of the strip and especially Lynde's attention to detail (he could tell from the art what gun Hipshot carried, for example) and eagerly looked forward to the strip in the Sunday paper (our local paper did not carry the weekday strips) to the extent that when the News-Messenger tried to drop it, he started a letter campaign to keep it — and succeeded. He was very disappointed when Lynde stopped drawing it! Later on when I moved to the Northwest and subscribed to the Seattle Times, it was carrying Latigo. So my Dad and I set up a trade: I cut out Latigo every day and sent them to him and he cut Prince Valiant out of the Dallas Morning News for me.

I guess I figured Lynde was long dead as well, as he is associated so closely with my father in my mind. Wish I had known he was still alive until this week, so I could have written him and let him know how much pleasure he brought my dad.

A lot of people were disappointed when Mr. Lynde stopped drawing Rick O'Shay. The Los Angeles Times, which was one of his major outlets, dropped it the minute it was no longer by him and printed up a notice that said something like, "Rick O'Shay will no longer appear. Stan Lynde no longer draws it." The way it was worded, it suggested the strip no longer existed…so my city never saw the ones written by Marian Dern and drawn by Alfredo Alcala, and didn't know it was continuing. If Lynde wasn't making enough money off it when he had the L.A. Times, I hate to think what Dern and Alcala must have made off it when they didn't have it. (The story of how they were selected to succeed Lynde is over here, by the way.)

After a while, Dern and Alcala were replaced by Mel Keefer and the L.A. Times immediately been running it again, commencing with the first of Keefer's dailies. I'm guessing Mel had a friend or a fan (more likely, the former) at the paper who reinstated it on the strength of Mel's name. A lot of Angelenos were surprised to see Rick back from the dead…but then after a while, Rick and Hipshot went away again. Those who missed them would be very pleased at what Lynde later did with them once he'd acquired full ownership.

From 1983: Albert Brooks teaches Johnny Carson how to do impressions…

And now folks are writing to tell me that the Joe's Pizza in Los Angeles is not connected to the Joe's Pizza in New York at Bleecker and Carmine.

The Joe's Pizza on Bleecker was founded by Joe Pozzuoli in 1975 as you can read on their website…which, I see, announced their first expansion — not to Los Angeles but to a new outlet on East 14th Street in New York.

The Joe's Pizza chain we have in L.A. was founded by Giuseppe (Joe) Vitale, who did operate a place called Joe's Pizza in New York…in Park Slope Brooklyn, not at Bleecker and Carmine. Different Joe.

I was confused because I was sure I remembered the L.A. Times saying the local chain was connected to the Bleecker one. I did some internetting and found this from 3/25/09…

Moving back to L.A. from Brooklyn can leave a (pizza-size) hole in one's heart, but an influx of Big Apple pizza has gained some momentum since Joe Vitale of Joe's Pizza in New York decided to open a Santa Monica outpost (no, despite what seems to have become urban legend, the dough isn't made with water from New York).

The link in that paragraph to Joe's Pizza links to "http://theguide.latimes.com/santa-monica/restaurants/joes-pizza-of-bleecker-street-venue" so as you can see, it was written to point to a piece on the Bleecker Street Joe's. But it no longer points to anything, perhaps because they discovered their error. You can't trust anything you read these days. Thanks to Tony Tower and others who wrote about this.

I don't think the obits are doing a good enough job describing the length and breadth of Eydie Gorme's career. She had been a singing star before she married Steve Lawrence in 1957 and they became a (mostly) inseparable team. Does anyone have a list of how many records they made, individually and collectively? It's a much bigger number than you might imagine. They were fine entertainers, much loved and respected in the business and by the public, and if there were bad stories about either, I never heard them. They just kept working and working and working.

I never met either one but I saw them perform once in Las Vegas. It was a very good show that sent the audience out very happy and it was easy to see why they were always, in those days, performing somewhere. I hope Steve is well enough to carry on. We all hope that, I'm sure.

My favorite Steve/Eydie song was a single they released initially under the names "Parker and Penny." It was an Israeli hit they came across and as I remember the story, they wanted to put it out as a single in the United States but were afraid that their names, associated as they were with entertainment for the older generation, would prevent Top 40 success. So they put it out with the bogus names and the hope was that it would become successful and then when it was revealed who was really behind it, all would have a good laugh and a point would be made about ageism or prejudice or something.

But the record didn't catch on and before long, Steve and Eydie were taking turns, going on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson to "leak" the secret and then perform the number. Eydie would go on as a single guest, talk about it and then go sing it…with Steve suddenly appearing as a surprise to join her in it. A week or two later, Steve would be on as a single guest and he'd let everyone in on the secret that Parker and Penny were Steve and Eydie, then he'd go sing it…and Eydie would suddenly appear as a surprise to sing her half of it. The song never really caught on but I kinda liked it. Click below to give a listen…

Pizza is one of those topics that generates a lot of mail here. Several folks wrote to tell me that the Upper Crust chain in Boston is now defunct. My friend Andy Ihnatko wrote to tell me…

I think as a general rule, your favorite pizza joint in college always stands as your personal "greatest pizza in the country."

Though the pizza I had during a train ride home from New York City last month comes close. Amtrak halted the train to avoid endangering pedestrians at a fireworks display a few miles further down the track. The delay was long enough for me to leave the train, walk to a nearby pizza place, have a pizza cooked to order, and then carry it back consume it on the train.

Airlines wouldn't be so despised if, during a long tarmac delay, passengers had those kinds of solutions available to them.

Lots of others wrote to tell me where to get the best pizza in towns I'm unlikely to visit soon if ever. But my buddy Dave Schwartz, who is one of many Dave Schwartzes I know, told me something useful. Remember I said the best pizza I ever had was at Joe's in New York at Carmine and Bleecker? Well, I was unaware that Joe's has opened no less than four locations in my area. See? I'm going to try one soon and report back. Thanks, Dave.

My mention of good and bad pizza brought the inevitable flood of messages from civic partisans, including the usual insistences from some that all pizza stinks unless it's thick crust and you're in Chicago. Meanwhile, Shmuel Ross writes…

I entirely agree that you can find lousy pizza in New York, and that it's very easy to do so. Sturgeon's Law applies; in a city where there's a pizza shop on practically every corner, most of them are going to be meh. Sure, we have Sbarro, though only the tourists and the hurried go there. Yes, there are dollar slice joints everywhere; the slices are salty and completely lacking in subtlety, but they're cheap and filling. (When a friend from Minnesota came and tweeted that she'd had her first "New York slice!" with a photo showing her at a dollar slice joint, I died a little inside. And then I took her to a coal-oven place that makes its own mozzarella, and she was enlightened.)

What's ridiculous about Tripadvisor's rankings is that while they were "based on the highest average rating by city for all restaurants that serve pizza," the analysis is exclusively focused on the outliers. Is it true that "some of America's best pizza is being tossed on the West Coast"? An average spanning the best and the worst each place has to offer can't tell you that, but that's the evidence they're using to make that assertion. It's kinda like ranking the top 10 cities for beef based on rankings that include fast food joints, and then claiming that ranking tells you where to find the best steakhouses.

I haven't been to San Diego or LA, but I have spent a few years in Boston. They cite the original Regina Pizzeria — which, to my shame, I never actually got to — and Santarpio's. I will cheerfully grant that Santarpio's is a must-visit for the pizza tourist, a trip back in time. I would also cite The Upper Crust and Pizza Pie-er as places worth checking out. (Pizza Pie-er's original location is in Providence, and I mean to visit it someday.) But, again, we're speaking of the good ones here, based on a survey that Tripadvisor itself admits is based on a much broader average. Boston doesn't have as many crappy pizza joints, because Boston doesn't have as many pizza joints, period. Boston doesn't have a culture in which people will grab a cheap slice while rushing across town.

On the other hand, if we were jettisoning the overall average and looking at the good places, then I am comfortable asserting that you will find more really good pizzerias in New York City than in any other U.S. city. I refer you to Jon Stewart's most excellent rant, which on the one hand notes the existence of "convenience pizza" in NYC, while listing a half-dozen places with the good stuff, and he could have added at least a dozen more without trying too hard…

All of that having been said… I doubt I'll ever get out to West Hollywood, but if I do, I'd like to visit Vito's. I'd really like to visit Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix, which is said to be the single best pizzeria in the nation. And more attainably, I have got to contrive a reason to go to New Haven, so I can try the pizza there.

You, umm, might get the impression that I like pizza. :-)

Thank you for adding that because I never would have known.

I have zero problem with people saying that New York has more great pizzerias than any other city. It's probably so. I'm not about to go on a fact-finding mission but I suspect the city also has more bad pizzerias than any other city.

There's a big difference between "You can find great pizza in New York" and "New York pizza is better than any other pizza in the world." If someone wants to claim the latter, they can't just decide that places like Ray's and Sbarro don't count when they measure New York's finest against every single pizza sold in some other town. My own observation is that it isn't just tourists and "the hurried" that eat at those places…unless of course you want to take the position that in New York, darn near every native can be counted among "the hurried."

I think I told this story before here once but several years ago, Sergio Aragonés and I were walking back from Marvel's old offices on Park Avenue South to our hotel in Times Square. It was lunchtime and we decided to stop for some pizza. I asked Sergio if he knew of a good place. He said, more from reflex than any actual belief I suspect — "Every place in New York that serves pizza has great pizza." We went to the first shop we passed and each ordered two slices and a large Coke. We each wound up taking but two bites. Like Sergio, I took the second because I couldn't belief how lousy the first bite was. Then the slices we'd bought went into the trash and we carried our drinks out and walked to another pizzeria in the same block and bought two somewhat-more-edible slices apiece.

The bad places, I suspect, can thrive because of this silly rep that all New York Pizza is grand, and because most people really don't taste that much difference between the best and worst. The "hurried" people who go to Sbarro can't be in so much of a hurry that they don't walk four doors down to what we connoisseurs would call a better place. Sbarro, especially because they've heard of it, is just fine by them.

For what it's worth, the best pizza I've had in New York or anywhere was at Joe's at Carmine and Bleecker. But Vito's out here compares favorably and so do a lot of other places outside the tri-state area. Grimaldi's, which is one of those N.Y. places that makes most "best pizza" lists, is now expanding to other cities in which they claim to be precisely cloning the cuisine of their location 'neath the Brooklyn Bridge. I'm curious as to how many who've sampled the pie there and elsewhere think they've managed it.

Actually, I think the distinction needs to be made between "traditional" pizza and the more elegant variations. We have a couple of places in L.A. like Mozza that have received raves for their pizza. A lot of folks think Mozza has the best pizza in the country…but it's not the thin-sliced kind with cheese, tomato sauce and one or two toppings. It's like pizza with "long cooked broccoli, caciocavallo and chiles," to cite just one variation from their menu. I actually prefer (and judge) pizza plain but an awful lot of the acclaimed places anywhere are acclaimed because they don't serve the basic kind.

Stan Lynde, creator of the newspaper strips Rick O'Shay and Latigo died August 6 in a hospital in Helena, Montana. The cause was cancer and he was 82. This video will introduce you to him…

Lynde created Rick O'Shay in 1958. It was a wonderful comic that underwent several changes of style over its run, ranging from broad humor to what might be considered serious philosophy, at least by comic strip standards. It also changed eras. The little town of Conniption, presided over by Deputy Sheriff O'Shay, was originally depicted in the present day. In 1969, Lynde suddenly announced that henceforth, the strip would be set in the year 1869…and from then on, it was, though many readers may not have noticed.

Readers who were aware of that change and the ones in tone probably assumed the transitions were simply a matter of the artist evolving…and that was probably some of it. It was a good strip no matter when it was set or how broad Lynde got with it. But he also spent most of the strip's run groping for a way to make it sell better. Rick O'Shay was an unusual feature in that it appeared in very few newspapers…but the ones it was in were the big papers that paid the most, like the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. It wasn't in very many small newspapers.

Usually, a comic strip has the opposite problem. Cartoonists who are in a lot of small papers dream of getting into the big ones. The big ones that carried Rick O'Shay paid enough to make it worth his time to do…but he needed the extra income from a bunch of smaller clients and — as he told me the one time we met and spoke — they were maddeningly uninterested in his strip. The switch to 1869 was in part an attempt to grab them and it did not succeed in that regard.

Lynde worked very hard on Rick O'Shay, sometimes putting in (he said) 80-hour weeks. As he got older, this became more difficult to do and he increasingly employed assistants…though it never showed in the strip. That time I met him, someone asked him why he'd quit his own creation in 1977. His answer went something like this: "I couldn't do those long weeks anymore so I brought in others to help me…but I was so fussy about how the strip read and looked that I was still putting in impossible hours on it. One day, I realized that my assistants were making more per hour off my strip than I was. That was when I realized I had to go do something else." Rick O'Shay was continued for a while by the team of Marian Dern and Alfredo Alcala, then later by Mel Keefer but it was discontinued in 1981.

Lynde did indeed do something else. He wrote novels (graphic and otherwise) and short stories and did drawings. In 1979, another syndicate offered him a potentially more lucrative arrangement to create a new western strip and he came up with Latigo, much of which was expertly drawn by Russ Heath. It was a good feature but it was no Rick O'Shay and it failed to find an audience, ending in 1983. Lynde returned to his novels and other projects, many of them issued by his own publishing imprint, Cottonwood Press. Soon after, he acquired full ownership from his old syndicate of Rick O'Shay and he republished the classic strips himself and did some new stories in graphic novel format that were quite splendid. I recommend any of them. He was a very talented man and the world of comic art is much poorer for this loss.

Tom Spurgeon has more details on his life. Buzz Dixon has a nice appreciation.

Because there are some things you just have to watch again from time to time…

Woody Allen tells us some things he's learned.

Matthew Yglesias is outraged that Tripadvisor thinks the two cities in America with the best pizza are San Diego and Las Vegas. I think too much is made of this idea that the best pizza (or to hear some tell it, the only edible pizza) is in New York with the occasional outlier in Jersey. I've had lousy pizza in New York and when people proclaim it has the finest, they're not factoring those places into the comparison. They're measuring all other places against their favorite place in or around Manhattan.

Well, yeah. My favorite place for pizza is Vito's over in West Hollywood. It's a lot better than the Ray's chain all over New York and it compares favorably to the best back there. For that matter, the last time I was in New York, half the pizza places I passed seemed to be Sbarros and their pizza isn't better than anyone's anywhere. I'll respect anyone's raves for the wonderfulness of the pizza at one or more specific restaurants…but a blanket statement that covers all the pizza in some cities? Nope.

Then again, I also don't buy Tripadvisor's pick. I'll believe that when I go to New York and see places advertising "San Diego style pizza!"