In the past here, we've complained that the Mark Twain Award — the one given out by Kennedy Center for contributing to American comedy — has sometimes gone to people with rather short track records, thereby ignoring deserving folks with longer ones. Whatever the worthiness is of Will Ferrell, Ellen DeGeneres and Tina Fey, it oughta continue for another decade or three…and if it doesn't, then maybe they weren't as deserving as they seemed when they were selected before Sid Caesar, Stan Freberg, Shelley Berman, Don Rickles, Mort Sahl, Robert Klein, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, David Letterman, Tim Conway, Dan Aykroyd, Jerry Lewis, Jon Stewart, Dick Van Dyke and a whole buncha producers and authors.

The last time I made up such a list here, Carol Burnett's name was on it but now they've announced that she'll be the recipient of the next one, which will be presented in October. Good choice. Let's hope it's not a "token older person" and that next year's will go to someone who'll have a hit sitcom or movie between now and then.

Just wanted to remind you about our pet charity here at newsfromme.com.  If you feel the need/desire to donate to help the unfortunate folks in Oklahoma, there are many fine charities that will do good things for your money.  But I doubt any of them will do more good with it than Operation USA, which spends none of it on fancy offices or outsized executive salaries and such.  They spend darn near all of it on people who need clothing, food, a place to live, first aid, etc. — and they're good at getting there fast with it.

Years ago, I was being pelted with worthy causes asking for donations and I decided to just pick one and send all my "giving" money there. A friend of mine was (and still is) on the Board of Operation USA but that's not why I picked it. I picked it because I asked around and found out they were real good at what they do. And that's what those people in Oklahoma need right now: Money and people who are very good at what they do.

The Muppets of Sesame Street tell you how to watch a movie…

My pal Adam Rodman is a top writer of motion-type pictures and other things. Today, he called me with a dilemma. He said that he'd been trying to remember the name of a science-fiction story he'd read long ago and it was driving him nuts that he couldn't. I was his second call. His first was to Harlan Ellison and Harlan didn't recall the story from anywhere. I didn't either but I told Adam how brilliant the readership of my blog was. I told him to e-mail me a summary and I'd post it and one of you out there would write in with the correct answer. Here it is. Don't let me down.

I read it back when I was in college or shortly thereafter. The premise is that a guy (journalist) sees this crazy man doing battle with the electric door at the market. The man jumps over the electric eye "defeating" it, only to have the door then close on him. It turns out that the guy was a mathematical prodigy who had been doing battle with machines since he was a child. Eventually, computers grew to powerful and he could not keep up. He drove himself to insanity in the process. We know this because he takes the journalist back to his house where a giant computer has been mutilated. The crazy man prepares to do battle. "Go ahead," he tells the journalist, "Ask it a question." The journalist asks how mush is 2+2 and the badly damaged machine cannot respond. It begins to overheat and a fire erupts. The crazy man won't leave the house until the journalist poses the question to him so that he can defeat the machine. "How much is 2+2?" the journalist asks. The man cannot compute the answer; he, too, is too badly damaged. The goes up in flames with the computer and the crazy man inside.

That's how I remember the story. I probably got a few details wrong, but if anyone recognizes it, I would love to know the title and author.

If you know what the story is that Adam's recalling, please drop me a note. Thanks.

Fred Kaplan on a disturbing trend — government prosecution of reporters who are involved in the leaking of classified information. I didn't like it when other administations did it. I don't like when this administration does it. I won't like when the next one does it. It's one of those things that's legal but shouldn't be. (Prosecuting the reporters, I mean…)

Stephen Colbert delivers the 2013 Valedictory Address at the University of Virginia. Back in 2011, I was very impressed with this speech he gave at his alma mater, Northwestern University. If you didn't watch it then, watch it now, especially the last five or so minutes in which he gave some darn good advice. I am a bit less impressed with this year's speech which feels more like it was written by someone else and he's just reading it…but some of it is quite funny. Here's this year's…

The new hysteria seems to be the assumption that if you're a conservative or you voted for Mitt Romney and your income taxes were audited, that's the Obama administration harrassing or intimidating you or something. As Nate Silver points out, that's a ridiculous assumption. Which doesn't mean some people won't believe it.

As some of you may be aware, my father worked for the Internal Revenue Service, retiring during the Nixon administration. His last years there, he routinely received orders that seemed to originate with someone in Washington to ignore tax cheating by wealthy, connected Republicans and to go extra-hard on folks who donated to Democratic causes. A lot of this came out and was one of the less-talked-about scandals of the Nixon presidency. It prompted the erection of what we now call a "firewall" between the White House and the I.R.S. and I'm not sure there's been a credible report since of that wall being breached. But as my father used to say, every single person who gets audited wants to believe he or she has been unfairly singled out. So I suppose a lot of folks who oppose Obama will forever believe they were called in because of that and not because they're claiming poodles as dependents and money paid to hookers as a business expense.

Ruben Bolling, the talented cartoonist behind Tom the Dancing Bug, writes to suggest that Marc Maron's recent podcast interview of Mel Brooks was in the ballpark of what I was talking about. I haven't had time to hear it yet but will. In the meanwhile, if you'd like to give a listen, the audio player I've embedded below should make that possible. Thanks, Ruben!

Just a reminder that PBS is debuting an episode of American Masters all about Mel Brooks tomorrow in most cities. I hear it's real good.

I'm not sure why but the TV Academy, which does these great oral histories of folks in the television business, has never done one with Brooks. They did around three hours with Sid Caesar. They did even longer with Carl Reiner and Larry Gelbart. But no Mel. I've seen fifty Mel Brooks interviews but they're all of the "talk show" variety where the idea is for him to get to funny stories. I can't recall one that was just about his career and filmmaking and the people he worked with and his lesser-known endeavors.

Back around the time he was working on High Anxiety, I spent two weeks working at Twentieth-Century Fox helping punch up a comedy screenplay that was ultimately discarded and then completely rewritten by someone else. During those weeks, I was part of a writing room that didn't get a lot done because we were conscripted twice to go down the hall to Mel's office where he spread out over his couch and floor. Each time, he was giving an interview to some print journalist and each time, he wanted an audience in the room. Even when it was for print, he needed a laugh track. When he's interviewed and he doesn't have an audience there, he talks as if he did.

I assume he's been asked, probably many times, to a long and serious Q-and-A. I assume he's refused just as many times. I've always wanted to hear or read a long, not-for-entertanment interview of the man. If he's done one, I've missed it. But I'll be watching American Masters anyway because he's a funny Jew.

Today, your Stooge Sunday brings you the sequel to last week's Stooge Sunday. This is I'll Never Heil Again, where once more we compare Moe Howard to Hitler. This was released July 11, 1941, a year and a half after You Nazty Spy. Some people seem to think the two films were shot at the same time but that's not so. The Stooges did that kind of thing later on when budgets got tight but this was earlier in their run when that kind of thing wasn't necessary.  Besides, when they did the first one, it was a gamble. No one knew how the public would react to it.  Worse, no one knew if Hitler would even be in power or if the war might not have turned too ugly to joke about by the time the film was released. They couldn't have imagined it would still be relevant eighteen months later. Sadly, it was…

Larry Tye (Hi, Larry!) writes an interesting essay about the origins and enduring popularity of Superman. I might take issue with one thing he says in it…

If [Superman] thrived in the hands of a couple of Jewish kids from the ghetto, he should flourish backed by the muscle of Time Warner, one of the world's biggest media cartels, which would be mad to let its billion-dollar franchise languish.

No matter what the Supreme Court says, corporations are not people and they certainly are not creators. A couple of Jewish kids from the ghetto or some writer who acts as their successor can have a clever, incisive vision for what constitutes a good story. A corporation can, at best, employ a human being to provide that…and the property will only be as good or valuable (in a non-monetary sense as well as a monetary one) as the sensitivity and creativity of that person.

The problem that occurs far too often with corporate-owned characters is not that the company designates the wrong person to be in charge but that they designate no one. No one who wishes to endure and rise up in that company wants to lose whatever control he or she can manage to have over an important company asset so they do not cede this power. Bloody battles are fought within the halls of Time Warner over who controls Superman, who controls Batman, who controls Bugs Bunny, etc.

I had this friend named Greg Burson who was one of the people (the best, I thought) who did the voice of Bugs after Mel Blanc died. Every time a different division there needed the voice of Bugs for a cartoon or a commercial or a toy or something, Greg had to go in and audition. Why did he have to keep auditioning when there were plenty of examples of him doing Bugs for major Time Warner projects? For that matter, why wasn't one person the new voice of Bugs? Why were there about eight who all were called in to audition?

Because the guy in charge of each Bugs project wanted to be in charge of Bugs. He wanted control of Bugs and you can't be in control if you're just going along with what was decided by the guy in the office down the hall who also wanted control of Bugs. Greg swore to me that one time, he lost a Bugs job and the guy told him, "You were the best but I'm trying to convince them that I know Bugs better than this other executive…and he's the one who chose you in the first place." It's like that with Superman, too. Everybody in the firm thinks they know what's best for Superman and that there is great career advancement to be had in asserting that.

The classic, universally-understood concept of Superman will endure forever. Whether the current Superman comic books or movies or TV shows or videogames deliver that depends on whether they're written by and/or managed by someone who understands that concept. On a movie or TV show, it's more or less understood that there has to be one person — or at best, an in-sync team — who is the ultimate arbiter of what's right and wrong for the project; someone who has both the contractual and moral authority to say, "No, our hero wouldn't do that."

It's bad enough when that one person is wrong. It's even worse when that one person is fifteen different people. They can be deadlier than Kryptonite — the green kind, not the others.

Cole Porter's oft-revived musical Anything Goes debuted on Broadway in 1934. Twenty years later, they did a one-hour adaptation of it on TV's Colgate Comedy Hour with Ethel Merman, Bert Lahr and Frank Sinatra. To get it down to that length, they had to throw away half the book, two-thirds of the songs and most of the sense. The show was really kind of a shambles but the performances more than made up for it.

It also featured a performance by Lou Krugman. Lou was one of my favorite actors to spot in supporting roles. From about 1950 until around 1980, he was on every single episode of every single TV show done in either Los Angeles or New York, including live shows done simultaneously on opposite coasts. Okay, that's a slight exaggeration…but I'm still amazed at how often I spot him in old TV programs. I would guess his Internet Movie Database list of credits is no more than 10% complete. I'll write more about him some day here.

Getting back to Anything Goes: If you had to turn a 2.5 hour musical into an hour live TV special (an hour, that is, minus commercials), the last thing you'd do is add songs to it, right? Right. But Merman and Lahr both insisted they wouldn't do the special unless the song "Friendship" was added to the show. "Friendship" is a ditty that Porter wrote for another show, the rarely-revived DuBarry Was a Lady. So they stuck it in and it more or less became a part of Anything Goes. Most revivals since then include it.

And you'd figure the last thing you had to worry about was having the show run short, right? Well, it did. It was reportedly right on time throughout rehearsals and then when they did it live to all of America, they ended with about five minutes to fill. Frank, Ethel and Bert had to nervously ad-lib and sing encores. The video of the whole show, which I've embedded below, has some commercials missing so it runs 52 minutes…

Oh — and if you just want to see Ethel and Bert do "Friendship," which runs about two minutes, here's just that. It's the best part so they were right to demand it…

I kinda/sorta agree but not really with Michael Kinsley: Opposing Gay Marriage in and of itself doesn't make you a bigot or a homophobe. That said, there are opponents out there of Gay Marriage who have said some pretty bigoted, homophobic things. I think there are also folks out there who are on that side of the issue for simple political or career reasons. In some parts of the country, it's still possible to demagogue that issue to get people to donate to your cause or vote your way or listen to your talk show, etc.

This is in addition to all the folks who oppose Gay Marriage just because it's a "win" for The Other Side. We've long since reached the point in this country where Republicans don't need any more reason to oppose something other than that Obama and/or Democrats want it. Last year at WonderCon, I found myself in a brief, pointless debate with a fellow writer over Global Warming. He thought it was an enormous hoax and his "evidence" wasn't science or temperatures or climate history. It was that Al Gore believes in it and to this guy, Al Gore is such a reprehensible human being that if he said it was Saturday, that alone would be undeniable proof it wasn't Saturday. There are Democrats who are the same way about issues that the Republican party supports or things Dick Cheney says.

Kinsley doesn't think Ben Carson should have been disinvited from speaking at Johns Hopkins Medical School. I don't think those kinds of things matter much but the First Amendment does not enshrine a right to express your opinion anywhere you want. It means the government can't shut you up. One could even argue that the deciders at John Hopkins have their own, equal First Amendment right to express their disapproval of Dr. Carson's position the way they did.

But I do agree with Kinsley that people these days are way too quick to play The Outrage Card. And I agree that proponents of Gay Marriage ought to be more gracious in victory than some are. And I agree that clinging to the old definition of "marriage" doesn't make one a monster. And I agree that we'll see the day when admitting to have once opposed Same-Sex Wedlock will be like admitting to a long-ago membership in The Klan…and when we get to that point, let's all be gracious about that. We all change our minds about things that we once felt strongly about. Or at least, we should.