"Trump... is strangely handsome, well proportioned, puts you in mind of a sea captain..."

"... Alan Hale from 'Gilligan’s Island,' say, had Hale been slimmer, richer, more self-confident.... His trademark double-eye squint evokes that group of beanie-hatted street-tough Munchkin kids; you expect him to kick gruffly at an imaginary stone. In person, his autocratic streak is presentationally complicated by a Ralph Kramdenesque vulnerability. He’s a man who has just dropped a can opener into his wife’s freshly baked pie. He’s not about to start grovelling about it, and yet he’s sorry—but, come on, it was an accident. He’s sorry, he’s sorry, O.K., but do you expect him to say it? He’s a good guy. Anyway, he didn’t do it. Once, Jack Benny, whose character was known for frugality and selfishness, got a huge laugh by glancing down at the baseball he was supposed to be first-pitching, pocketing it, and walking off the field. Trump, similarly, knows how well we know him from TV. He is who he is. So sue me, O.K.?"

Writes George Saunders in a New Yorker piece titled "Who are all these Trump supporters?"

"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:

"To Be or Not to Be."

RLC emails to say that the great old Jack Benny/Carole Lombard movie (directed by Ernst Lubitsch) — which we loved in the 1970s — is out in a Criterion Collection edition. He notes the 97% positive rating by the critics collected at Rotten Tomatoes, and I see that the 3% negativity is accounted for entirely by the one review that comes from 1942, when the movie was released. It's Bosley Crowther in the NYT:

Perhaps there are plenty of persons who can overlook the locale, who can still laugh at Nazi generals with pop-eyes and bungle-some wits. Perhaps they can fancy Jack Benny, disguised be-hind goggles and beard, figuratively tweaking the noses of the best Gestapo sleuths.

Carole Lombard is, Crowther tells us, "very beautiful and comically adroit." Twice, in this short review, he informs us that this is her last movie. He writes the strange phrase "the feelings which one might imagine her presence would impose are never sensed." She's beautiful and dead, so he thought he was going to have feelings, but he's forced to see her there with that big old ham, the "radio comedian," Jack Benny:

Too often does he pout or grow indignant or pull a double-take. Of course, the script en-courages the old Benny legend of "ham." Once a German officer comments, laughing loudy, "What he did to Shakespeare we are doing now to Poland." That gives you a couple of ideas about this film.

How dare Jack Benny get the last of the beautiful and adroit Carole Lombard!