"I always thought of my career that you could reflect on it through the decades by who comes up to you and says what. If it’s a 40-year-old woman, she’s gonna talk about Father of the Bride."

"If it’s a 40-year-old guy, he’s gonna talk about Three Amigos. If it’s a 55-year-old guy, he might talk about Ed Grimley. But definitely, if it was a 29-year-old stoner, he would mention Clifford. Because he’d seen it 18 times in a row high in his dorm room. I use the word 'stoner,' and it probably is not fair. I don’t think that you had to be stoned in your dorm to like Clifford, but I do think it’s like what Conan O’Brien once said about       — that it was on from 12:30 until 2, and he and his brothers thought they were the only people in the world that had discovered it and that it was for them. And I think when a film is obscure enough, you feel it’s now yours. Your parents don’t know this film, but you do. So it’s your film. And then you get into the pace of it and the oddness of it. Especially if you’re high. And it becomes more like it’s talking to you."

Said Martin Short, in a truly amazing, very long dialogue in New York Magazine, "'Look at Me Like a Human Boy! An oral history of Clifford, the 1994 cult comedy about a deranged little boy played by Martin Short." 

Maybe you can't read it, because maybe you need a subscription to New York Magazine, and you don't have one, but I have one, and I'm telling you this one piece is worth the price of an annual subscription. 

Here's one scene from the movie, with Short and Charles Grodin:

Perfection.

RIP Charles Grodin, an absolute genius pic.twitter.com/11YBdTYrdD

— Steve Agee (@steveagee) May 18, 2021

And I like my son John's Facebook post:

Sad to see that Charles Grodin has died at 86. Back in the ‘90s I loved watching him on his TV show and as a guest on other shows, and I also like him in The Heartbreak Kid (1972), with Cybill Shepherd.

I’m not surprised to see Rainn Wilson’s effusive tribute to Grodin, whose grimly deadpan approach to humor seems like a precursor to the cringe-inducing awkwardness of The Office.

Wilson wrote: "R.I.P. Charles Grodin, one of the all-time comedy greats. His legendary wit and dark wryness inspired me beyond all measure. Just watch this… SO FAR ahead of his time...." And links to this:

The great Jerry Lewis has died!

NYT obit.

A mercurial personality who could flip from naked neediness to towering rage, Mr. Lewis seemed to contain multitudes, and he explored all of them. His ultimate object of contemplation was his own contradictory self, and he turned his obsession with fragmentation, discontinuity and the limits of language into a spectacle that enchanted children, disturbed adults and fascinated postmodernist critics.

ADDED: I like this 1995 interview (with Charles Grodin, whose show I, unlike most people, loved):



And here's the car chase scene from "The Disorderly Orderly," which I saw when I was 13:



That scene revealed a whole new dimension of hilarity to me. I'd had no idea how funny something could be — just waves and waves of funnier and funnier. With possibly one exception, it's the most I ever laughed at a movie.

AND: Here's the Marc Maron interview with Jerry Lewis.

5 videos I watched, none of which seem capable of supporting a free-standing blog post.

1. On Facebook, somebody got me watching this parody video of Hillary Clinton singing "I Will Survive." Amusing enough that I looked up the YouTube page of Maximum Suffrage. Lots of stuff there, as yet unwatched by me.

2. I didn't know "Convos with my..." got a second child (like the first, amusingly played by an adult). I watched "Asking Nicely."

3. Charles Grodin, in 1995, as a talk show host, riffs for 6 minutes surrealistically introducing Jerry Lewis. (I started watching Jerry Lewis interview videos on YouTube a while back, for reasons I don't remember, and YouTube keeps suggesting more Jerry Lewis videos, and this is never going to end, because I keep watching them, and I'm not going to stop, because they are all so weird, including some where Lewis is the host, like here, interviewing Cassius Clay.)

4. The Grateful Dead in a live performance of "It Takes a Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train To Cry." I got there as a result of a conversation that was mostly about "Ballad of Thin Man," prompted by reading this old 1965 interview in which Nora Ephron tried to get him to identify Mr. Jones and Dylan said: "He's actually a person. Like I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel. He proceeded to put his eyes in his pocket. I asked this guy who he was and he said, 'That's Mr. Jones.' Then I asked this cat, 'Doesn't he do anything but put his eyes in his pocket?' And he told me, 'He puts his nose on the ground.' It's all there, it's a true story." Meade seemed to believe that Mr. Jones was Leonard Bernstein, but "That Party at Lenny’s" that Tom Wolfe described in "Radical Chic" took place in 1966. The word "camel" does appear in that greatest-of-all-time article, in this sentence: "Forty years ago firms flogging things like Hardman pianos, Ponds cold cream, Simmons metal beds and Camel cigarettes found that matrons in the clans Harriman, Longworth, Belmont, Fish, Lowell, Iselin and Carnegie were only too glad to switch to their products and be photographed with them in their homes, mainly for the sheer social glory of the publicity."

5. "Yeah, I'd like to see a video of a young person singing 'Eve of Destruction,'" I said after commenting in yesterday's post about the death of P.F. Sloan, who wrote the lyrics. The hit single was by Barry McGuire, who was 30ish, and I watched the video of a TV performance I remembered from 1965. I wrote: "Watching it again, I'm struck by the inappropriateness of McGuire's age. The lyrics are ridiculous coming from an adult. They're a perfect expression of teenage confusion about the world. Coming from an adult, it's mental or stupid." I found this, by Bishop Allen. It becomes noticeably "Eve of Destruction" at 3:44, but only the chorus is used, in the changed form: "And I tell you over and over and over again, my friend/That I'm down with you, even on the eve of destruction." I'd like to see a video of a teenager singing the original lyrics earnestly and sincerely.

"The 32 Greatest Talk-Show Hosts Ever, Ranked."

At Vulture.

#1 is Howard Stern ("For over 30 years, Howard Stern’s calling and gift has been getting his guests, many wildly famous, to talk freely about all the things they’d rather not talk about. Of course there’s sex — so much sex — but there’s also drugs and money, which, for most celebrities, are far more taboo, and marriage and work anxiety and family and vanity. "). #4 is Marc Maron ("No one gets more out of his guests than Maron, whose now-familiar emotional touchstones — family background as class determinant, art as the pursuit of truth, self-acceptance and forgiveness — give every interview a sweetness and depth without equal.").

I note those because I love them. They don't have any weird choices from more than 20 years ago. I mean, remember when Charles Grodin had a talk show. I loved that! Here he is with Jerry Lewis: