And yet, as I was watching, something felt out of kilter. It wasn’t the occasional comic misfire that was bothering me. Nor was it the sense that the end of “Curb” signalled the end of something more than the show itself; the immigrant and children-of-immigrant Yiddishkeit version of Jewish humor has been on the wane for a long time.... No, what was off was the timing, the misery of the moment. It was hard to think about the finale of “Curb”... amid the cruelty and carnage of the past six months. The comedy of manners plays with the mores of civilization; it can lose its charm when civilization succumbs to barbarity. In life, as in comedy, timing is essential.
Did Larry David ever intend charm? Did Larry David ever purport to fit with the times? He went looking for where he did not fit and leaned into his own repugnance. But it is always possible to demand an end to comedy because it is unseemly in a world where people are suffering and dying. Here, Remnick is making a special complaint, based on Jewishness ("Yiddishkeit"): A Jew should not do Jewish humor at a time when Jews are conspicuously killing people. (Remnick himself is Jewish.)
Nielsen estimated that 76.3 million viewers tuned in to the last episode of Seinfeld, making it the fourth most watched television finale since 1960. That’s an astronomically high number by any era’s standard, especially today’s. In a world where the NFL and almost nothing else consistently pulls in huge audiences, there are barely any truly widely watched scripted shows left....
The monoculture’s last gasp may have been in 2019, when 19.3 million people watched the Game of Thrones finale. Four years later, the Succession finale–the TV event of the year—drew only 2.9 million.
The last episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" becomes available for streaming — it doesn't "air"! — tomorrow. People are predicting that it will parallel the final "Seinfeld" episode. Presumably, there will be a trial. We've been headed toward that all season. And we've been told that since Larry did the act — he gave water to a lady who was waiting in line to vote (in Georgia) — the outcome will hinge on the jury's view of Larry's character. So how can it not be a review of all the bad things Larry's done, tracking the "Seinfeld" finale? But who really cares, a quarter century later, whether the "Seinfeld" finale was actually good? Maybe somehow the finale "Curb Your Enthusiasm" episode will go meta and become an examination of Larry's longterm belief that he ended "Seinfeld" exactly the right way.
Matthew 25:35: "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in...."
ADDED: This reminds me of Season 6, Episode 1 of "Curb Your Enthusiasm": "You know what some people are doing that I personally think is a really great idea? They're bringing in displaced families. You know, I've been doing a little research and we could actually have a family here tomorrow.... Imagine how they would feel, to come here, and live in our house...."
"She cut her teeth in the Groundlings, a Los Angeles-based improv troupe; 'Curb' is outlined but unscripted.
In some ways, answering questions from a stranger is just another form of: 'Yes, and.' With improv, 'it’s challenging because you don’t know what’s coming next. You don’t know what the audience is going to shout out,' she said. '"Where are these two people?" "They’re scooping poop in the lion’s den at the zoo!" Lights go down. Lights go up. You have to commit 100 percent... or it’s not funny or interesting.' But here’s a scenario... You are beloved by fans and peers, and have managed to steer clear of controversy your entire career, but fall in love with a man who touches it off regularly with his often outlandish claims — a man who was kicked off Instagram along with his anti-vaccine nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, for spreading misinformation during the pandemic.... Who just this week suggested 'S.S.R.I.s and benzos and other drugs' might be responsible for America’s school-shooting problem...."
Is it really that different from what any other political spouse must do? Seems to me, she's better prepared than most and less likely to try to use drugs as the solution.
After spending some time in the advertising industry, he began his television career as a writer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and in 1969 won his first prime time Emmy. He went on to write for the Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour and the Canadian sketch comedy show, Bizarre. But his second Emmy came in 1977, as a producer for Van Dyke and Company....
Einstein played a slew of oddball characters on many of the variety shows he wrote for and produced, but it was Super Dave Osborne, an accident-prone stuntman who was a send-up of Evil [sic] Knievel, that made the writer-turned-actor a star. And it eventually led to his own TV show from 1987 to 1991 on Showtime called simply Super Dave. He revived the character for Spike TV (now called Paramount Network) in 2009 for Super Dave's SpikeTacular.
In more recent years, he developed a new fan base appearing as Marty Funkhouser, Larry David's self-proclaimed best friend on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Larry Middleman, a surrogate for the family patriarch on Arrested Development.
There are so many great clips of Einstein. I'll just highlight the role that first made me love him — Officer Judy on The Smothers Brothers:
It's not a reality show, but something like "Curb Your Enthusiasm," based on the lead character's real life, but scripted and acted. I know: Where's the line? Reality shows are scripted, blah blah blah. But Tyson offered "Curb Your Enthusiasm" as the model his show either used or wants to be thought of as using.
Here's another model:
Anyway, Tyson's marijuana farm is "a 40-acre plot of land about 60 miles southwest of Death Valley National Park." And:
Besides growing premium pot, Tyson Ranch will feature a cultivation school to teach growers the latest technology, an edible factory, a hydro-feed and supply store, plus cabins and “glamping” campgrounds for stoner tourists....
Tyson is a big proponent of weed’s health benefits and said 85 percent of pro athletes use some form of cannabis to relieve pain, inflammation and anxiety. “I smoke it all day, every day,” Tyson said.
What would you pay to glamp and smoke weed within the aura of Mike Tyson? Or — better question — would you sit and watch a TV show about the people who'd pay a lot of money to glamp and smoke weed in the actual presence of Mike Tyson?
Which reminds me... that new Lena Dunham-produced TV show "Camping" (about some glampers) is unwatchable, and I like Jennifer Garner (and I'm fine with her name). It looks promising in the trailer:
"The weird thing about life: You can feel fine but also know that you're a ticking time bomb."
It’s premiered to some fairly harsh reviews, all of which entirely miss the point. Camping, in its original incarnation [a British TV show], was a vicious satire about a middle-aged harridan who micromanages a trip at a campground run by a deranged mama’s boy.... The jokes are blindingly cruel.... The miniature society of the camping trip totally breaks down. Repulsive sex ensues, along with diabolical mishaps, nudity, violence, and drug benders. The show isn’t so much dark as completely, disorientingly devoid of light.
Dunham and [her Girls co-producer Jenni] Konner have now remade the show for an American audience that is notoriously thinner-skinned than its British counterpart.... The central change is that Dunham and Konner have imbued each character with a sympathetic twist. Kathryn still micromanages—forcing everybody to go bird-watching, for example—but now she’s a woman stricken by grief over her hysterectomy, her emotional dysfunction sublimated into worries over her body (echoing Dunham’s own medical woes). The brainless and nasty alcoholic of the British Camping has become a sweet, struggling guy who is just trying to find his way. Miguel the shagger is now a smart doctor finding a new light in his life, instead of a pathetic young Englishman who got hair plugs and speaks with a slight American accent....
Understanding that doesn't make me more able to watch the American version. It just makes me sad about how dull America has become in The Era of That's Not Funny.
As I said back in 2005, that's my all-time favorite scene on "Curb Your Enthusiasm":
Any scene with Shelley Berman ascends to a new level of greatness. My all-time favorite scene on the show was the old one where Berman kept beating around the bush, not wanting to reveal to Larry that his (Larry's) mother had died. "She didn't want to bother you. You were busy."
Mr. Berman, one of the first comedians to have as much success on records as in person or on television, was in the vanguard of a movement that transformed the comedy monologue from a rapid-fire string of gags to something more subtle, more thoughtful and more personal....
The obituary groups Berman with Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce.
In 1959, Time magazine referred to this new breed as “sick” comics, and the term (which Mr. Berman hated) caught on. But they had little in common with one another besides a determination to remake stand-up comedy in their own image. Mr. Sahl was a wry political commentator; Mr. Bruce was a profane social satirist; Mr. Berman was a beleaguered observer of life’s frustrations and embarrassments.
Perched on a stool — unlike most stand-up comedians, he did his entire act sitting down — Mr. Berman focused on the little things. He talked about passionate kisses that miss the mark so that ‘‘you wind up with the tip of her nose in the corner of your mouth.” Or what to do when the person you are talking to accidentally spits in your face — do you wipe the spit off or make believe it didn’t happen?...
Like his fellow Chicago comedian Bob Newhart, Mr. Berman specialized in telephone monologues, in which the humor came from his reactions to the unheard voice on the other end of the line. (Mr. Berman often claimed that Mr. Newhart stole that idea from him. Mr. Newhart maintained that the idea did not originate with either of them, noting that comedians had been doing telephone monologues since at least the 1920s.)
In one classic routine, Mr. Berman, nursing a brutal hangover, listened with increasing horror as the host of the party he had attended the night before reminded him of the damage he had done: “How did I break a window? … Oh, I see. … Were you very fond of that cat?”
Here he is on "The Judy Garland Show" in a scene that seems to be an elaborately staged musical with 9 singing office workers but suddenly shifts. Listen for the audience reaction at 1:25 as the idea becomes a classic one-man telephone routine (which goes on insanely long):
1. He's making us do this. He's brilliant at causing the media to revolve around him, and this is a big one. He tossed off a funny word as if he just suddenly thought of it, off-handedly, and now all of us, new and old media, are going to talk about it all day. I woke up this morning, saw the story, and regarded it as my serious duty and amusing pastime to go on about all aspects of the statement that Hillary "got schlonged" by Obama.
2. Is "schlong" a verb? The linguists are activated. Give Trump's schlong some lingual action. Now, Trump knows something about taking a noun and making it into a verb — "verbing" it. People love to take Trump's name — names are nouns — and use them as verbs — as in the Hillary campaign catchphrase "Love trumps hate." She wants to be "love" and to call him "hate"? Does she think love, love is the answer with Putin? Speaking of verbing names, Putin works as a verb — put in — who hasn't thought that sounds like a good schlonging?
3. Trump is making us look at his penis — his use of the word for penis — so he's kind of the flasher here. But it's Obama's penis in the image: Obama schlonged Hillary. Are you tempted to call that racist? Good luck, you fool. You'll have to explain why. Go ahead. Go down that path, you idiot. Trump wants you to fall into that rathole.
4. You know who else's penis we had to talk about — a big fat politician made us talk about that time? Has there ever been a more talked about penis than the penis of the man Hillary Clinton is still married to? Speaking of Hillary getting schlonged. We've had a mental image of it so long that this worked as an Onion headline:
5. The left meme pushed by Think Progress is: "Trump's Astonishingly Sexist Attack On Hillary." But now you've got to explain why it's sexist. As the WaPo piece linked at #2 showed us, Trump used "schlong" as a verb once before and it was to refer to something a woman did to a woman: "I watched a popular Republican woman [Jane Corwin] not only lose but get schlonged by a Democrat [Kathy Hochul] nobody ever heard of for the congressional seat...." As Trump uses the word, if Hillary had trounced Obama, he would have said "Hillary schlonged Obama," just as many of us will say: She fucked him. Women can schlong men, whether they have a schlong or not, and if a woman wants to be President, she'd better have the capacity to (figuratively) schlong men. Trump is surely in the position to explain his use of the word that way. And if you keep up with the "astonishingly sexist" bullshit, he's going to schlong you.
6. A Meadhouse dialogue ensues:
MEADE: "Maybe Hillary has a huge vagina."
ME: "She can store several heads of state in there."
MEADE finds that very funny.
ME: "I don't know if I should put that on the blog."
MEADE: "HA HA HA! OH NO NO NO! When it's men's genitals we're talking about, it's okay, but when it's women..."
ME: "I'm just afraid people don't know the whole 'huge vagina' meme. They haven't seen the 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'..."
MEADE: "You have to protect people from the idea of a woman's genitalia being huge, holding heads of state. 'Oh, what are we doing in here?' 'We're in President Hillary's vagina. She envaginated us.'"
ME: "Wait. What heads are you picturing? Who's in that dialogue?"
MEADE: "Putin. Angela Merkel. And I'm picturing the head of the new Trudeau, because he's so dreamy."
7. Meade wants me to show you this:
Meadhouse dialogue:
ME: "I like 'absolutely everyone can come inside' and taking care of you 'if you're ever frightened.'"
MEADE: "A safe space."
8. As Trump antagonists struggle to portray "schlonged" as sexist, they cause us to think more and more about the question of whether a woman is tough and strong and dominant enough to be President. Yes, most of us think that in theory a woman can be President, but like nearly all men, any given woman is unlikely to have what it takes. We know there's one thing she doesn't have, and that's not literally needed. But all the ideation about what it figuratively means is stirred up as we talk about the subject, which is what Trump is making us do, all by saying one little word and standing back and letting us do all the churning through of meaning. He never needed to say Hillary couldn't be President, but he made other people say things, things that they think will hurt Trump, and what they are saying is affecting the minds of millions of people, massaging our doubts, our resistance, shaping opinions that we don't want to have to talk about, that we know we shouldn't say out loud. Trump's one out-loud word did it all. That one word schlonged us.
9. And isn't it very funny that — in the same speech — Trump posed as the prudish man who thought it wasn't proper to mention that Hillary went to the bathroom:"Where did Hillary go? They had to start the debate without her. Phase two. Why? I know where she went. It’s disgusting. I don’t want to talk about it. It’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting. We want to be very, very straight up." He won't even say "go to the bathroom." That's the kind of straight-up man he is. Straight up. What erectitude! Rectitude. Oh, you disgusting people. Get you head out of the toilet.
10. A list can't end at 9, and I do have one more thing to say. It's a nostalgic look back to simpler times, back before Hillary got schlonged by Obama, when Hillary had full hopes of winning. It was June 2007, and the Hillary campaign had just put out a slick ad. My response, a list of 5 items, had a point, point #4 about Hillary's deployment of phallic symbols:
Bill says "No onion rings?" and Hillary responds "I'm looking out for ya." Now, the script says onion rings, because that's what the Sopranos were eating in that final scene, but I doubt if any blogger will disagree with my assertion that, coming from Bill Clinton, the "O" of an onion ring is a vagina symbol. Hillary says no to that, driving the symbolism home. She's "looking out" all right, vigilant over her husband, denying him the sustenance he craves. What does she have for him? Carrot sticks! The one closest to the camera has a rather disgusting greasy sheen to it. Here, Bill, in retaliation for all of your excessive "O" consumption, you may have a large bowl of phallic symbols! When we hear him say "No onion rings?," the camera is on her, and Bill is off-screen, but at the bottom of the screen we see the carrot/phallus he's holding toward her. Oh, yes, I know that Hillary supplying carrots is supposed to remind that Hillary will provide us with health care, that she's "looking out for" us, but come on, they're carrots! Everyone knows carrots are phallic symbols. But they're cut up into little carrot sticks, you say? Just listen to yourself! I'm not going to point out everything.
Robert Steele, 81, male ...Attacked by an alligator while walking his dog on a trail between two wetland areas near the J.N. "Ding" Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel, Florida. Steele bled to death after his leg was bitten off below the knee.
How strange it must have been for families who lost loved ones on 9/11 to causes of death other than the terrorist attacks. From a contemporaneous news article:
Ellen Steele, 81, thought her husband was drowning in the canal when she heard his screams. She pulled him as far up the canal's bank as she could before calling 911. "We live among alligators. We protect them. They have never attacked us before," she said.
America is immersed in its disbelief: We didn't expect the terrorists to attack. And Ellen Steele has her vastly smaller but not entirely dissimilar shock: They have never attacked us before.
Wildlife officials spotted the alligator less than an hour later and shot it in the head. "We saw it surface on the other bank with the leg in his mouth," said [Sanibel Police Cmdr. Bill] Tomlinson.
We spotted bin Laden 10 years later and shot him in the head.
I was considering making some humor out of al Qaeda/al Ligator, but I'll just give you this little clip of the time "Curb Your Enthusiasm" made humor out of the predicament of losing a loved one on 9/11 but not to the terrorist attacks:
Sorry about the tag — the Crow-David entity — but I don't like to add too many new tags, and Sheryl Crow already has a tag on this blog, created back in the day when she was operating as a single entity with Laurie David. Ever notice how Larry David called his wife on "Curb Your Enthusiasm" Cheryl, not Laurie?
Just as Sheryl and Lance are no longer an... entity. Larry and Laurie are now divorced. Here's something funny from Laurie's Wikipedia page:
In an interview with The Guardian in November 2006, David acknowledged that owning two homes on opposite sides of the country and flying in a private jet several times per year is at odds with her message to others. In the interview she notes "Yes, I take a private plane on holiday a couple of times a year, and I feel horribly guilty about it. I probably shouldn't do it. But the truth is, I'm not perfect. This is not about perfection. I don't expect anybody else to be perfect either. That's what hurts the environmental movement – holding people to a standard they cannot meet. That just pushes people away."
Larry's wife on [TV] is a meek woman who spends her days gossiping with friends and worrying about her wardrobe. Laurie, by contrast, is often said to be stubborn, confident and driven - thoroughly focused on the fight. Larry himself says of her, "She's a gal with a mission."
Hines also had struck up friendships with two of Mary’s best friends, Kerry Kennedy and Glenn Close, according to her tweets.
The “Curb Your Enthusiasm” blonde even tweeted about talking football with Mary and Bobby Jr.’s 11-year-old son, Aiden....
Throughout Hines’ Twitter tear, Mary was isolated in her Bedford mansion, drowning in sorrow, alcohol and debt....
“She faced losing her kids, and his relationship with Cheryl Hines was humiliating. At an event last month, he walked the red carpet with Cheryl as a couple and took the kids,” a source told The Post last week, referring to the Riverkeeper Annual Fisherman’s Ball in late April.
"'Oh, I get Leon all day long,' Mr. Smoove said. Passersby on the street often call out his character's lewd catchphrases."
Ha ha. Which lewd catchphrase do you think they're calling out to him? You won't find out reading this Wall Street Journal profile of JB Smoove (AKA Jerry Brooks), which has stuff like this...
He started studying comedy in earnest in high school. "I loved Peter Sellers," he recalled. "I thought he was the perfect mix of physical comedy with out-of-the-box humor. I loved his tone, I loved his physicality, I loved everything about what he was doing as a comedic actor."
... but you might hear some of those catchphrases here:
"... wasn’t just that Larry [David] has to read detailed anatomical instructions through the door (I love the barely sublimated panic in her voice: 'Inner tube?!'), or that he seems at least as baffled by the whole process as Keira did. Nor was it the look of paralyzing terror that washes over Keira’s face as she discovers she's become a woman (at the time, Larry's describing the ingredients in Samoas, and for a second I thought maybe she had some kind of coconut phobia). No, what really made this secene brillant was that Keira decides to tell Larry, her dad's old, bald friend, that she's gotten her period for the first time. God forbid this should ever happen to anyone in real life, but if it did, I'm certain that 99.9% of earthbound females would just quietly slip away to the bathroom and figure out a temporary solution to their worries. But, lest we forget, Larry is not the only oddball who occupies his universe. As petty, outrageous and selfish as Larry so often is, he’s usually acting in response to someone who’s 'off' in some fundamental way. In this case, that someone is a 13-year-old girl willing to discuss her intimate bodily functions with an aging male stranger."
“Doing it with Larry and on his show just seemed like the only possible way it would be fun….We would never do the type of thing that these shows usually do. That wouldn’t be our style. But something like this — that was sillier and a little more offbeat — felt like it might be right for us.”
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