"Hi, I'm Jerry Lewis. Bob Dylan has always been a protester not only to the fashion of his times but the trends of the thing."

"And that's super, simply marvelous. So when Parimutuel Records came to me and said, 'Hey, Jerry, whoever you want to record would you just do? Manilow would be good. You want we should give Barry a call? And I said, 'Uh-uh, I want to do Dylan 'cause he makes me feel good a lot and that's why I chose his stuff to be on my album 'Lewis Sings Dylan.' Oh yeah!"

An obscure but great clip of SCTV in 1984 at YouTube.

Amazing how long Martin Short has been around....

And amazing how long people have been kicking Jerry Lewis around. Here he is, in a musical scene, in his prime, in the 1960 movie "The Bellboy":

I ran across that movie on The Criterion Channel the other day, and I've been watching it in bits. I like watching things that can be watched in bits, and "The Bellboy" is great for that. As the opening monologue explains, "There is no story and no plot. That's right, I said, no story and no plot. It is actually a series of silly sequences, or you might say it is a visual diary of a few weeks in the life of a real nut." Perfect for our times. It's almost TikTok. 

Why Jerry Seinfeld doesn't use Twitter to tell jokes.

"I don’t hear the laugh. Why waste my time? It’s a horrible performing interface. I can’t think of a worse one. I always think about people that write books. What a horrible feeling it must be to have poured your soul into a book over a number of years and somebody comes up to you and goes, 'I loved your book,' and they walk away, and you have no idea what worked and what didn’t. That to me is hell. That’s my definition of hell."

From a little interview in the NYT that he's doing to promote the new season of "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" (which I think you can only watch on Netflix now).

BONUS: "Ranking Every Episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" (Vulture). Excerpt:

43. Jerry Lewis... Lewis’s breakfast order just sums up the man he was: “I’m gonna have three fried eggs up, and a large order of very very very stiff bacon.”

Female privilege.

Happy birthday, @KatyPerry! It’s time to bring out the big balloons! pic.twitter.com/w84DMphK3V

— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) October 25, 2017

ADDED: You might think: Katy Perry is not objecting, but what can she do but keep smiling and show herself to be a good sport? She can't improvise, and she can't step on Ellen's effort at comic performance. Ellen is the comedian. She's the comedian with a show, a media outlet to the fans. You can shut that door if you choose, but what's the motivation?

Katy Perry clearly wants her breasts to be noticed and admired — or at least she's decided to use them as devices to further her career. So why would she complain (as long as Ellen doesn't become a target of #MeTooism)?

Ellen is clowning in a style that reminds me of Jerry Lewis, so I went looking for a photo of Jerry Lewis staring at a woman's breasts. I couldn't find one, but I did find this example of Jerry doing the complete opposite of staring at a woman's breasts:

"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?

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.

Apple's new iPhone software suggests a "nerd" emoji when you type "professor."

"Professor" prompts this:



"When she saw the nerd-face emoji, [Pauline J. Reynolds, an associate professor of leadership and counseling,] said she instantly thought of the Jerry Lewis character in the 1963 comedy The Nutty Professor."



Hey, by the way, did you know that Jerry Lewis is now 90 and he's got a new movie?

[H]e still has a resentful grind to his lower jaw, and that monkeyish mouth is as busy, in “Max Rose,” as it was in “The Nutty Professor” (1963), when, in the guise of Buddy Love, the slick-haired Lothario, he brought a whole night club to a halt. But [the director Daniel] Noah takes a fatal decision to trade snap for mush, and the movie only stirs in the final twenty minutes, when Max pays a nocturnal call on Ben Tracey (Dean Stockwell), who cuckolded him long ago. Regrettably, they make their peace, but, for a moment, the sequence smacks of something threatening and fresh: oldster noir. 

That's from the New Yorker review. Here's the trailer:

"Jerry Lewis just turned 90. It isn't trending on Facebook. Or Twitter."

"Because nobody on social media cares about or knows who the hell he is. To people my age, he's known as the guy who monopolized CBS affiliates all Labor Day weekend with his telethons for muscular dystrophy. To my dad's generation, he teamed with Dean Martin to be as big as the Beatles or Elvis.... But what isn't known is his influence in film[m]aking to legends from Spielberg, Tarantino, Eddie Murphy, just to name a few. He influenced me greatly 'look what Jerry Lewis does---he helps these folks out, and its a big person who gives back when they don't have to.' It's a huge reason why I try to get involved and help out as many wonderful non-profits (on a 1/100000th scale) it's important to give back. Its too bad as time goes on, he is slowly being forgotten. Happy 90th birthday, Mr. Lewis!"

Writes Andy Garcia.

It's funny, I read that just after writing a post about John Wayne's upcoming non-milestone birthday and, earlier this morning, having a discussion with Meade about another post — about the movie comedy that will depict Ronald Reagan with Alzheimer's disease — that including the use Jerry Lewis as an example. I was defending comedy that reaches into subjects that are not funny at all, not because I like everyone making light of what is serious, but because I recognize the special genius involved in successful transgression. Not that everyone agrees about what has been successful.

Trump outdoes himself with this mocking/not mocking of a disabled reporter.

My take on this story?

Trump — seeming free and wild — somehow hits an absolutely precise line. It's so precise that I want to credit him with knowing exactly what he's doing, even as I am willing to let him off the hook, because that's the line he's hitting — making us think something and preserving deniablity.

He sure got media covering him, here on this holiday weekend when other candidates are lying low. And they're covering him on a story that had almost played out: his assertion that he saw "thousands and thousands" of people cheering in Jersey City on September 11th.

The media is doing his work, keeping that story alive, making repeated references to an article that was in The Washington Post a few days after 9/11 that said "authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river." That article has to be pointed out to set up this new controversy about its author Serge Kovaleski. Kovaleski has a condition, (arthrogryposis) that curls his hand into a distinctively distorted position that Trump may have been imitating as he ridiculed Kovaleski's efforts to get out of taking responsibility for that article he wrote.

“Now, the poor guy — you’ve got to see this guy, ‘Ah, I don’t know what I said! I don’t remember!’"  Trump said as he jerked his arms in front of his body.

The media have picked out the single still that most resembles the reporter's deformity. If you watch the video, you get a much milder impression of what Trump may or may not have been doing. The deniability is there. Maybe Trump was only enacting the weaseling and waffling statements of the reporter and not his physical appearance. If you want to say Trump didn't really mock a disabled person, you certainly can. But if you want to say he did, have at him! If you love Trump, you can defend him, and if you hate him, you've just got to talk about it. What a vortex! All that attention, all that energy.

Quite aside from that, there's the very politically incorrect pleasure of imitating the physical disabilities. Trump is taking some Americans back to the good old days when absolutely beloved pop culture characters made people guffaw with abandon by affecting the movements of persons with physical disabilities. There was, of course, Jerry Lewis.* But he was not the only one. Here's that old "Imagine" guy John Lennon:



That was, in the minds of many still living, a perfectly harmless way to have fun. I suspect Trump knows there's a sizable, long-starved audience out there who would love to be free to laugh at that sort of thing again, and they can feel that Trump is reaching out to them and it's a secret but enticing part of the offer to "Make America Great Again."
___________________

* From "Enfant Terrible!: Jerry Lewis in American Film":

ADDED: How retrograde is this silent America? Think about it: Just last week, "South Park" had its disabled character Jimmy saying "S-s-s-suck my dick, PC Principal":

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.

"An era of seaweed eating can start to seem inevitable—penance for the golden days of corn and cars and cows."

"Paul Greenberg, who has written extensively about the collapse of fish stocks, told Business Insider last year, 'If I could buy kelp futures, I would.' Given the exigencies of feeding the planet, it might be preferable to other available alternatives. 'It’s not worms and it’s not bugs, so that’s positive, right?' he said to me. 'I don’t think anyone is going to stick their finger down their throat and say, "Blech, kelp—I don’t want to eat it."' Cheryl Dahle, the founder of Future of Fish, says, 'We eat things now we never would have imagined eating twenty years ago. We eat dogfish. It’s called dogfish, for crying out loud! If we can develop a market for snakehead fish—an exotic, invasive aquarium species—out of the Chesapeake, we can create a market for kelp.'"

I was reading — listening to the podcast of — this New Yorker article — "A New Leaf/Seaweed could be a miracle food—if we can figure out how to make it taste good" — as I was walking into the kitchen this morning, reencountering my exotic, invasive husband Meade.

ME: "What do you know about kelp?"

MEADE: "Does any Bob Dylan song have the word 'kelp'?"

ME: "Does any Jerry Lewis movie have him named 'Kelp'?"

Meade says he doesn't follow Jerry Lewis, but I don't think you need to follow Jerry Lewis to know this one. "Professor Kelp?" I say, stalling for time, because I don't know the answer to the Bob Dylan question. I say that "kelp" is good if you need a rhyme for "help," and then, doing my search at bobdylan.com, I see I'm right. It's "Sara":

Now the beach is deserted except for some kelp
And a piece of an old ship that lies on the shore
You always responded when I needed your help
You gimme a map and a key to your door

Jerry played Professor Julius Kelp in more movies than just "The Nutty Professor." Here's a compilation:

"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:

Jerry Lewis explains the analysis of gestures.

"There's something very strange about her... It is time that people found out about this house. Oh, weird things go on in here. They have powers! Supernatural powers!"

Said Mrs. Kravitz, the busybody neighbor who was actually right about weird things going on.



The actress, Mary Grace Canfield, whom you may know even better from "Green Acres," has died at the age of 89.

IN THE COMMENTS: Dan said:

I'm afraid you have the wrong Kravitz in your clip. You're showing Alice Pearce, who played Mrs. Gladys Kravitz. Canfield was in only 4 episodes, playing Abner Kravitz's sister Harriet.

Oh! Sorry. You know, I almost figured this out, because I looked at IMDB for "The Disorderly Orderly." I was under the impression that the actress who played Mrs. Kravitz was also Mrs. Fuzzibee in "The Disorderly Orderly," and I didn't see that on Canfield's list. But here's "The Disorderly Orderly" on Pearce's IMDB page. Those 2 women sure did look alike, homely in the same way — a way which made for some great comedy. I'm sorry to see that Pearce died back in 1966, when she was only 48. And I'd just like to say that of all the movies that ever made me laugh, "The Disorderly Orderly" is in my top 5 of most laughing. I can only think of one other movie that made me laugh more. It's a Jerry Lewis movie that came out in 1964, and I was 13 when I saw it.

"It was all bad, and it was bad because I lost the magic... You will never see it. No one will ever see it..."

"... because I am embarrassed at the poor work," said Jerry Lewis about his 1972 movie "The Day the Clown Cried," a drama about a clown forced to entertain children in a Nazi death camp. But there's a bit of video from it on YouTube now. Was it really so completely horrible? 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?

"The End of the Jerry Lewis Telethon—It's About Time."

Says history prof Jon Wiener:

Every year it was the same. Jerry did his telethon shtick, parading little kids in wheelchairs across the Las Vegas stage, making maudlin appeals for cash, alternatively mugging and weeping, and generally claiming to be a friend to the doomed.

The pitch was always for “Jerry’s kids.” But two-thirds of the clients of the Muscular Dystrophy Association were adults, and they didn’t like being referred to as “Jerry’s kids.”

Time passed. The "kids" kept growing up. And Jerry got more and more outmoded.

For me, the worst moment of the telethon came in 1972 when John and Yoko appeared. They played some good music—“Imagine,” and a reggae version of “Give Peace a Chance.” But they were there for a political reason: President Nixon had been trying to deport them for almost a year, and they were desperate to say in the USA. So to prove they were deserving of residency, they stopped hanging out with Jerry Rubin and instead embraced Jerry Lewis. That’s why Lennon told the telethon audience “Jerry is one of our favorite comedians.”

Nixon! Still railing about Nixon over there in The Nation, where this article is published.

Elsewhere, in the same old lefty journal there's another Labor Day piece, "Top Ten Labor Day Songs," and there's John Lennon again, holding down the 2 position with "Working Class Hero." John Lennon, John Lennon, John Lennon. I wonder how he'd feel if he could know how closely American lefties would cuddle him 30 years after his death.

"Working Class Hero" is not one of the labor songs sung by the Solidarity Singers who do their singalongs every weekday at the Wisconsin Capitol. And it's not surprising. The unions that were fought for in the Great Wisconsin Protests of 2011 were public employee unions, especially teachers unions. Picture the teacher-folk singing these lyrics:

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school,
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool,
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years,
Then they expect you to pick a career,
When you can't really function you're so full of fear,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.

There's really nothing in that song stoking enthusiasm for labor unions. There's nothing about working. It's about a disabling fear of work. And it's not the boss who tortures and scares you in those first 20 years. It's the parents and the teachers.

"This year should have been a final tribute to Jerry [Lewis]."

"It should have been a chance for him to say goodbye to everybody, to thank them and to bow out gracefully. It's not right."

Jerry's final finale, from last year's telethon:



"He seemed very happy. I don't know why they'd let him go."

Back in 1950, Sammy Petrillo got a haircut, and then everyone started laughing at him and telling him he looked like Jerry Lewis.

From his obituary:

[A]fter several appearances on television variety shows, Mr. Petrillo moved to Los Angeles, where he teamed up with Duke Mitchell, a singer who sang in the smooth-baritone style of Frankie Laine, Vaughn Monroe — and Dean Martin. They put together a nightclub act based primarily on their impersonations of the comedy team Martin and Lewis.

Based on that, the movie producer Jack Broder cast them in a low-budget comedy, “Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla,” opposite Mr. Lugosi. In the movie they played nightclub performers, stranded on a tropical island, who act very much like Martin and Lewis....

... Mr. Lewis’s eldest son, Gary, said: "When Sammy and the other guy played in that gorilla movie, I remember my dad and Dean saying, 'We got to sue these guys — this is no good.'"

See for yourself:



Bonus: Gary Lewis plays drums and sings.

Live-blogging the Oscars.

Hang out and watch with me.

7:28: I'm loving Tim Gunn gushing over the lady actors.

7:28: Hugh Jackman, he can sing and run around desperately on the stage, and oh! that gorgeous white foam in the corners of his mouth.

7:43: Best Supporting Actress ... a stripper need never take off her dignity with her clothes... blah blah... bullshit. Ugh! this is boring. So so stilted. But yay! Penélope Cruz, won. I love her.

7:52: "They're making the announcing of the nominees into a religious ceremony," IMs Chris (my son). Yes. Indeed. Good lord, it's deadly. This may go down as the most embarrassingly bad Oscars show of all time.

7:58: "Milk" wins original screenplay, and we get some mawkish bilge about the gays.

9:02: Sorry, my interest flagged...

9:09: Heath Ledger wins Best Supporting Actor and everyone acts all sanctimonious and morosely glum. Seriously, folks: Don't encourage suicidal behavior. The man had some talent. He performed a role. And he threw it all away. How about rewarding the living? I'm taking a break. Carry on without me. I find tonight's Oscars insipid and sickly. I'd rather live than sit through this embalming.

9:45: I went off and lived the real life for over an hour. Came back to the TiVo and found Jerry Lewis maundering about himself.

10:11: The Parade of the Dead. Marching to the tune of Queen Latifah singing "I'll Be Seeing You." She doesn't have the pipes for this song. It's painful. But take heart. The dead can't hear her. The agonizing death of this song has me rethinking my beliefs about euthanasia. Finally, we get to Paul Newman. We hear the only spoken word in the death sequence. The big difference between people, Paul says, is between those who have had "pleasure in love" and those who haven't. True enough. So turn off the fucking television and love somebody.

10:18: Danny Boyle wins Best Director. Appropriate. I agree. He hops up and down. He says it's in "the spirit of Tigger."

10:30: Best Actress. It's torture listening to presenting actresses' leaden praise of the actresses who longingly ache for the little gold man. The presenters are hogging camera time by talking slow slow slow. Thank God the Oscar goes to Kate Winslet because we're all tired as hell of hearing about how Kate Winslet has not won the Oscar yet. She gives a cheeseball speech about how as a little girl she pretended to do her Oscar acceptance speech with a shampoo bottle.

10:40: Now, the religious ritual for the Best Actor. Oh! It's so slow and dumb. This is the worst Oscar show ever. I have some things to do, but I'm hanging on to the end (after fast-forwarding through the whole rotten (I presume) center. Come on, give Mickey or Sean the damned man. And it's Sean! I approve!

10:44: "You commie, homo-loving sons of guns," says Sean. I'm going to pack it in now. I'm going to assume "Slumdog Millionaire" gets the Best Picture, and if it doesn't, I'll find out in the morning. So carry on without me, my friends.

So everyone hated Rosie O'Donnell's attempt at bringing back the old-fashioned variety show.

I can tell from all the links about it on Drudge. Is it that people just don't like Rosie anymore, that no one wants variety shows anymore, or is it just the combination of Rosie and variety that's poison? Writing the headline to this post, I typo'd "old-fashioned variety sow," which seemed like a clue from my not-very-nice subconscious.

Only 5 million tuned in at all, so the problem can't have been the actual content of the show:

Segments included Kathy Griffin impersonating Nancy Grace, Alec Baldwin hitting Conan O'Brian with a pie, O'Donnell singing "City Lights" with Liza Minnelli and Jane Krakowski doing a product-placement-themed striptease for White Castle burgers and Crest Whitestrips.

Critics were not kind. The NY Times described it as "hokey comedy with an enemies list." TV Guide called it a "ghastly ego trip." And the LA Times asked, "Rosie, what on earth were you thinking?"

That NYT review -- from Alessandra Stanley -- came after the show aired. So it seems the concept was off-putting enough to people, but if hadn't been, they'd have found the execution deadly. Per Stanley:

In between skits, celebrity cameos and hokey novelty acts, the legendarily thin-skinned Ms. O'Donnell found time to take potshots at some of her favorite targets, including Donald Trump, Nancy Grace and Bill O'Reilly....

Ms. O'Donnell's self-referential swats at detractors were light, but they clashed with the context, lending a hard, contemporary edge to what was intended to be a corny, heartfelt homage to variety shows of yesteryear, like "The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour" and "The Carol Burnett Show."...

It's not easy to be the brilliant Ms. Burnett, and you should never, never underestimate what constitutes the greatness that is Cher.

From the L.A. Times:

For weeks now NBC has seduced and tantalized with the promise of a cross between Carol Burnett and “Sonny and Cher.” And this is what we get? Rosie in a glitter top having Baldwin speak into her cleavage and making jokes about her weight? Someone get a hold of Tim Conaway, stat.

Tim Conaway? I guess the L.A. Times doesn't really spend much time reminiscing about the old Carol Burnett show.

Joe Gandelman blogs:

If you’re a student of show biz history, there are books that detail the careers of Burnett, Sullivan, and Martin that chronicle the thought and care that went into the preparation of their shows and what they were trying to do on them....

But what you don’t read as much about are the many variety shows that hideously flopped over the past 50 years and the performers who either hit a dead end and didn’t do as well on weekly TV series as they did in other venues: Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr. Jerry Lewis and a host of other. Every attempt at a variety show didn’t click: a huge number of shows noisily bombed....

So the variety show format isn’t dead. It could still be revived– with the right performer who isn’t controversial, with careful thought, and with packaging and production values more akin to a Vegas or cruise style variety show than a celebrity vanity production with a bunch of celebrities instead of high-powered talent of its era.

Any ideas as to who could fit that role? Celebrities are so awful these days. Who wants to see how they behave presenting other celebrities?

We'd rather watch another season of "American Idol," with third-rate music and annoying youngsters who only want to become the celebrities who have become too loathsome to watch. At least we get to see "American Idol" contestants judged and insulted for thinking they are much good. Maybe the old variety format could live again with a panel of judges or some sort of on-screen vote tally as we phone in and tell them they're nowhere near as good as they think they are.

The post-election transformation of the front tables at Borders.

For a long time, I used to stop by Borders nearly every day and look around, usually get some coffee, and often buy books and magazines. Then I stopped going. I just didn't feel like being there. I speculated I'd lost interest in going there because it was it was a drag seeing all the front tables loaded with Bush-bashing books. They hardly seemed like books at all, more like thick rectangles around which a crude political cartoon had been wrapped.

Back when I enjoyed going to Borders, the front tables were full of a variety of books, making it fun to see what was new, what cover would draw my eyes in and cause me to pick up a book and read a few paragraphs. Yesterday, I finally went back, and the front tables had returned to their old form. I noticed a forlorn display in the back with lots anti-Bush materials. Who would buy a DVD of "Going Upriver" now? I stared at the display for a while, and then a woman started standing next to me, staring at it too, and I had the eerie feeling that she felt that she was sharing a moment of silent grief with me. It seemed something like going to a funeral where you're standing by the casket thinking unfunereal thoughts -- how long do I have to stay? where can I get some lunch? he really was a bit of a bastard, wasn't he? -- and then a close family member steps up beside you to commune with the deceased. You really don't much want to stand there anymore, do you? I walked away.

In any event, today I returned to Borders, stayed for coffee, and even bought a couple things. The old habit of haunting the bookstore springs back to life.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds noticed something similar at his Borders. Re that photograph: I saw "The Disorderly Orderly" when it came it out (the year Goldwater lost his bid for the presidency), and thought it was, by far, the funniest thing I'd ever seen. If you're a fan of the old TV show "Bewitched," you should see "The Disorderly Orderly," because there's a hilarious character in it named Miss Fuzzibee who is played by Alice Pearce, that impossibly homely actress who played Mrs. Kravitz in "Bewitched."

And while I'm updating, let me link back to this post of mine, from back in March:

I was browsing at the front display table at Borders last night, when an old woman, for some reason, started talking to me about how bad it is that there are so many books attacking Bush. I told her not to worry, that no one who didn't already oppose Bush would read a book like that, so it didn't matter. Maybe I specialize in reassuring old ladies, because I also went so far as to assure her that Bush was going to win and he was going to win by a lot.

I'm relieved to see that I did not falsely reassure the old woman.