Althouse: Remember when comedy on TV looked like this?

January 28, 2011

Remember when comedy on TV looked like this?

Charlie Callas. Dead at 83.

9 comments:

Unknown said...: Damn. He was funny. I really liked that guy.

Did a great Cary Grant.

PS Same problem as the other day, Madame. On the page with the comment board, the right video.

On the page with all the posts, the Amazon portal.

Time to yell at Blogger again.; 1/28/11, 5:07 PM
ricpic said...: There useta be guys like this standing around on every other streetcorner in Brooklyn. What happened?; 1/28/11, 5:18 PM
MadisonMan said...: Wasn't he on Hart to Hart?

RIP.; 1/28/11, 5:37 PM
Christopher in MA said...: I do remember. And, of course, the reason we look at this with a sigh of "why isn't anybody else this funny these days?" is because nearly all of current "humor" is sanitized, prepackaged and guaranteed not to offend.

Unless you're white. Or Christian. Or Sarah Palin. Then, like the cocksucking black fool who drooled "Sarah's good masturbation material," you're allowed - hell, REQUIRED - to offend them. "Speaking truth to power," you know. They're prime targets for satire. A Richard Pryor or Sam Kinison would be blacklisted today, if not actively hauled up on hate crime charges.

And it's not just comedy. Take a sweet movie like "White Christmas." Can you imagine such a movie being made today? No - if the two male leads didn't have some sort of repressed homoerotic attraction to each other, then General Waverly would have a mawkish speech about how WWII was an unjust war that we (or the Jews) had forced on poor Hitler. And, of course, the snappish housekeeper would be replaced by a sassy, earth-mother Queen Latifah who would show the uptight white song-and-dance team how to put on a show.

And it would all be leavened with a sickly crust of irony. Thank you, "Seinfeld." That fucking show did more to kill off actual humor in America than a dozen shrieking Andrea Dworkins.

RIP, Charlie, you racist, teabagging reichwing monster, you.; 1/28/11, 9:01 PM
MadisonMan said...: I confused him with Lionel Sander in Hart to Hart.

However, Callas was in Switch, which also starred Robt Wagner who played Jonathan Hart.; 1/28/11, 10:44 PM
Irene said...: He tickedd off Johnny Carson in 1982, and *bwah*, I can't find a clip of that.; 1/28/11, 10:46 PM
Martin L. Shoemaker said...: MadisonMan,

IMDB lists him on one episode of Hart to Hart. But yes, he was a regular on Switch.

I remember almost nothing about that show, but I remember never missing an episode.; 1/28/11, 10:54 PM
Palladian said...: Charlie Callas was never funny.; 1/29/11, 12:56 AM
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http://whois.domaintasks.com/cnn.com; 6/28/11, 12:24 AM