"I don't have a bunch of shit about what happened, so if you came to hear that, I had like a whole show I wrote before this weekend."

"And I'm still kind of processing what happened, so at some point I'll talk about that shit. And it'll be serious and it'll be funny, but right now I'm going to tell some jokes."

Said Chris Rock last night, as he took the stage for his show at Boston's Wilbur Theater, CNN reports.

He said absolutely nothing more than the bare minimum. It was just on with the show. That's what he did on the Oscars stage too: On with the show.

"On with the show" is an old show business slogan. It's old-timey, so maybe you don't remember it. If you try to Google it, you'll get a first page full of Mottley Crue links. I know there's a way to exclude a term from the search, but I've forgotten how to do it and I've got the distracting prior question whether I need to use those fake umlauts. I see it's a Rolling Stones title too.

Ah, but there is another version of the slogan that gets me to a nice TV Tropes article: "The Show Must Go On":

[I]n live entertainment, the show must go on at all costs... This forces the characters into crazy improvisations, costume changes, awkward stealth to avoid further disrupting the show and any number of disparate things to keep the show going. It must also be remembered that for live entertainers, not only is it about making sure people get their money's worth or ensuring a production continues, performing is something they've dedicated their lives to. It's not something they do, it's who they are, and it's a point of professional pride that no matter what, the show must go on....

Ethel said it best (words by Irving Berlin): 

 

And here's the crazy, over-the-top finale, with Marilyn: 

"I'd like to think that sometime, maybe 10 or 20 years from now... there'd be something I could laugh at... anything."

Said Spencer Tracy, as the thoroughly disgraced Captain T. G. Culpepper, encased in a body cast, at the end of "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World," which I watched — all 2 hours and 39 minutes of it — as the 1963 entry in my imaginary movie project. This is a movie I saw in the theater when it came out. I was 12, and I didn't know much about gigantic epic comedy chase movies. In fact, I still don't. It's been more than 50 years since then, and I've found any number of things to laugh at along my way, but I can't say I laughed much rewatching this sprawling, raucous monster. I wasn't in a theater full of people who'd assembled to enjoy the hell out of themselves, as I was back in 1963. I'm sure I laughed a lot back then, but I only half-laughed twice in the present-day rewatch.

Tracy, musing about ever laughing again, in fact gets to laugh almost immediately. Buddy Hackett (also in a full body cast) peels a banana, throws the peel on the floor, and Ethel Merman, who's been yelling at everyone throughout the film, comes strutting in, yelling at everyone, and she slips on the banana peel and falls hard on her ass. Do we really want to see a woman get hurt? Yes, in this case, we've been conditioned to wish harm on her, because she's been the loud-mouth mother-in-law visiting aural pain on all the men (except her beloved son Dick Shawn) for the entirety of the movie.

I get it. And yet, I do not get it. And I did not get it the first time around. Yes, I understand the old comic convention of The Mother-in-Law — specifically the mother-in-law to a man. She's got her daughter's devotion and she's going after the daughter's husband, crushing his masculine pride at every turn. You don't ask why these people are like this. They just are. They're characters. They're assigned these positions. Do not pause to reflect or all is lost. That is, nothing is funny. It's just loud. And — oh! — Ethel Merman is loud. Did you know her original last name is Zimmerman — just like Bob Dylan? She lopped off the "Zim." Why not lop off the "man" — it would be more castrating-y — and be Zimmer?