"But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of the perfect object."

"This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is."

Said Harry Shearer, one of the few people who have actually seen the long-suppressed "The Day the Clown Cried." The movie, directed by Jerry Lewis, starred Jerry Lewis as a comedian who made fun of Hitler and got arrested and forced to entertain children in a Nazi death camp.

Lewis biographer Shawn Levy probably sums it up for many of us when he says the interest in Clown is the “the inconceivable oddness of it. Jerry Lewis is still such a strange and singular bird that I think the very concept is intriguing. And the people who’ve seen the film and spoken about it – Harry Shearer, say – are so vivid in their description that they’ve made it a holy grail. Plus, the fascination with grindhouse, Ed Wood, and movies so bad they’re good (a dubious category) virtually insures there’s a cult for something like this.”

Here's Jerry Lewis saying it will never be seen because it's bad and he's embarrassed by it and he's grateful he had the power to suppress it.



But he didn't destroy it, and in fact he donated it, along with other films, to the Smithsonian, and the instructions are simply that it not be shown until at least 2025. And Lewis once said:

“After I’m gone, who knows what’s going to happen? The only thing that I do feel, that I always get a giggle out of, some smart, young guy is going to come up with an idea, and he’s going to run the fucking thing. I would love that. Because he’s going to see a hell of a movie!”

He's gone now, so maybe we will see it. I've expressed my opinion before (in 2013):

Even if it was in the end, a terrible idea — but wasn't it basically the idea in "Life Is Beautiful"? — can't we see it now, with the understanding that it was a mistake and extract the good and learn from the lesson about what badness is?

It ended with a notoriously cringe-inducing scene of cavorting clown Lewis leading the laughing kids into the gas chamber. Overcome by the grief of what he is being forced to do, he chooses to stay in the gas chamber with them as they are killed.

Let us see it. Of all the Nazi-related things to be ashamed of... maybe this excessive shame about bad art is shameful. Or is it the other way around... and more bad art should be destroyed before anyone can see it?

James Taylor loves his echo chamber.

It's literally an echo chamber. "Echo chamber" is usually figurative. Here are some examples from the NYT archive which I've bunched up, without links:

Americans Attracted to ISIS Find an ‘Echo Chamber’ on Social Media... the bars, restaurants and other haunts of entrepreneurs can be an echo chamber... The Trouble With the Echo Chamber Online... “We’ve seen too many Republicans who live in the echo chamber of the mainstream media bubble,” Mr. Cruz said.... [Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia] confessed—not in so many words—to living in a conservative echo chamber... With his us vs. them invective and his refusal to denounce hate-filled speech from some of his supporters, Mr. Trump is an echo chamber for certain corners of the far right, as evinced by his popularity with white nationalists and the so-called alt-right movement of mostly online activists.... But CNN may be setting up an echo chamber as it covers bloggers who are blogging about what they are watching on CNN....

Also in the NYT, I ran across a piece about an art project by Harry Shearer called "The Silent Echo Chamber" — "video of celebrities and politicians sitting silently in the minutes before appearing live on television."

Video loops run on nine flat-screen monitors that are hung like portraits along three walls. There is a disquieting sense of being at the wrong end of the telescope: the stars you have watched silently for years are silently watching you.... Confronted with silence, whether from a Pinteresque pause or an unreturned “good morning” from that smoldering Irene in sales, we tend to invent an explanation, and it’s no different here. Why, one wonders in the glow of the screens, aren’t these pundits pontificating?

That was back in December 2008. There were 4 examples, including this, of Hillary Clinton.

"11 Things We Learned About Harry Shearer From His 'WTF' Episode."

I found that listicle just now — "8... Shearer got his start as an actor at the age of 7, booking his first audition for The Jack Benny Program... 7. The Beach Boys Helped Him Avoid the Draft... " — as I was looking for a specific quote from that podcast, which I listened to yesterday. I've been listening to episodes from the "WTF" archive ever since President Obama made me notice the existence of the show. Anyway, what I was looking for was a quote of Maron quoting something he'd heard Shearer say long ago, something Shearer didn't remember but that Maron had been quoting for years.

I found this 2011 episode of The Mental Illness Happy Hour (a podcast I've listened to a few times) where Maron is the interviewee. At one point, he says:

I quote this a lot, but Harry Shearer once said that, to me, and I’m paraphrasing, that the reason comedians do what they do is to try to control why people laugh at them.

That got me thinking about the recent fuss over something former Disney CEO Michael Eisner said:

40 years ago today: Nixon resigned.

There are a lot of current stories reminiscing about what was, for most journalists at the the time, a day of jubilation. I'll link to The New Yorker, which brought my attention to this great reenactment of the event by Harry Shearer, showing how it looked and what was said before and after the part we saw on television:



And here's the real thing, including the pre- and the post- show:



"When you watch the actual footage from that evening, recorded by one of the TV cameras in the room, Nixon’s swaggering tone-deafness will make you squirm. Shearer’s reënactment magnifies that effect, both because the use of multiple cameras provides detail and depth, and because presenting the episode as a dramatic scene underlines the strangeness of the President’s behavior."

Harry Shearer likes "making these guys walk around." ("These guys" = Obama and McCain.)

You will know them by their walk. Of course, Bush had the better walk in 2000 and 2004.

ADDED: Want to see some debate walking? Watch the last 30 seconds of this clip from a Bush-Gore debate. Gore does the stupidest debate walking I have ever seen, and Bush's reaction to it never fails to make me laugh out loud.



And check out the clueless look on Gore's face at the end. So pleased with himself. He thinks he's doing so well that he triumphantly re-intones the magic phrase "Dingell-Norwood."