Recent Comments

1. about 20 hours ago on Kliban

   “Say the secret woid and the duck will come down and give you a goose.”

2. 3 days ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   What just about everyone seems to be overlooking here is that Carson never pretended to be a journalist. He was a comedian, and the only reason something from the news would be alluded to in his monologue is if it lent itself to a joke. No judgments on important figures, no taking sides, at most he’d make some general comment about Mayor Yorty being out of town again, or something LBJ did or said at his ranch.

   Come 1975, SNL incorporated Weekend Update which at first was just “funny stuff we can say about world events” (where’s the politics in “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead”?) And at the time reviewers mentioned that every comedy show had a “news segment” (that’s the one thing that survived all six seasons of Laugh-In).

   Post-Carson, it quickly turned into “news and editorial comment disguised as comedy” instead of “using elements of the news as a peg to hang punchlines on”. SNL itself led the charge and by the time Norm MacDonald was in the anchor seat it was all over (Dennis Miller, as MAGA as he is now, was still more comic than commentator in those days).

3. 4 days ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   For awhile, we were encouraged to watch or listen to Al Jazeera for unbiased reporting.

4. 4 days ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   Back in the ‘70s, I got all my news from Johnny Carson’s monologue. I figured if anything wasn’t important enough for Johnny’s writers to come up with jokes about it, it wasn’t something I needed to know about.

   We need someone like that now.

5. 4 days ago on Kliban

   Debbie and Pam. Or, as Kipling would have referred to them, “the white man’s burden”.

6. 4 days ago on F Minus

   My grandparents had four of those feeders around the perimeter of their porch. Brought in so much traffic my grandfather had trouble keeping them filled, and the birds would nag at him to get him to hurry up.

7. 9 days ago on Drabble

   My doctor wants me to watch my weight. I’m in luck. Most of it’s right out there in front of me where I can keep an eye on it.

8. 10 days ago on Non Sequitur

   There are other commandments besides the Big Ten, such as prohibitions on marrying your own grandmother. My favorite may be Deuteronomy 19:14, which in KJV reads “Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour’s landmark, which they of old time have set in thine inheritance, which thou shalt inherit in the land that the LORD thy God giveth thee to possess it.”

   Or in modern terms: “Don’t pull up survey stakes”.

9. 11 days ago on Non Sequitur

   Thou shalt not pay any attention to anyone who uses words like “thou” and “shalt” in this day and age.

10. 11 days ago on Super-Fun-Pak Comix

    Fresh air? Have you seen the air around here lately?