Can't understand the haircut? It's Maude Frickert!

I'm seeing Scott Adams assert "I can't get past the haircut."

He's looking at this:

🔥BREAKING: Media Matters is on the brink of collapse.

After two decades of smearing conservatives, the Soros-funded attack dog is under siege—from lawsuits by @elonmusk, FTC probes, & state AG investigations. Why? Donor fraud, defamation, & LYING to destroy Twitter.

Thread🧵 pic.twitter.com/LfYzbt7Rsb

— Rod D. Martin (@RodDMartin) July 30, 2025

I'm seeing Maude Frickert:

Sorry about the sexism! I just wanted you to see the wig Jonathan Winters wore back in the 1960s.

"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?

"The Academy was simply asking for trouble by giving extra attention to [Cory] Monteith and not Larry Hagman and Jack Klugman."

"Yes, you could argue that it’s not clear where you draw the line. Do you stop after Klugman while eschewing names like Charles Durning, Annette Funicello or Bonnie Franklin? Maybe, maybe not."

What is clear is where you don’t draw the line. You don’t draw it where it leaves out two actors who were major TV stars across the decades. Frankly, though Monteith became a target, I’m not sure you include [Jonathan] Winters in a special Emmy memory before Hagman and Klugman, and I say that as a big fan of Winters and someone who didn’t watch “Dallas.”...

In particular, based on how important Hagman was to CBS, thanks to “Dallas,” his exclusion really is inexplicable. More than one person has wondered whether Winters’ link to Robin Williams, whose new CBS series debuts this week, was the reason that Winters got the nod.

Man, this is just an ugly conversation.

Death and commerce... is it really that ugly?

Goodbye to Jonathan Winters.

"Mr. Winters did much of his best work in nightclubs, but he hated life on the road. In 1959 he suffered a nervous breakdown onstage at the Hungry I in San Francisco and briefly spent time in a mental hospital. Two years later he suffered another collapse, and soon after that he quit nightclubs for good. Between 1960 and 1964 he recorded his most-requested monologues for Verve on a series of albums, notably 'The Wonderful World of Jonathan Winters,' 'Here’s Jonathan' and 'Jonathan Winters: Down to Earth.'"

I remember seeing these albums in my parents record collection — in there with all the Julie London and Ray Coniff Singers — and I don't remember any other comedy albums. I remember trying to grasp the idea of a "nervous breakdown" and the relationship between comedy and inner pain.

Here are  "The Wonderful World of Jonathan Winters,” “Here’s Jonathan” and "Jonathan Winters: Down to Earth."

Jonathan Winters was  — as I understood it, possibly wrongly — the greatest of all comic geniuses, but we only ever got to see a small part of what he might have done, and the greatness and the denial of the whole were part of a single phenomenon, something about his mind. From the first link:

“Mother and dad didn’t understand me; I didn’t understand them,” he told Jim Lehrer on “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” in 1999. “So consequently it was a strange kind of arrangement.” Alone in his room, he would create characters and interview himself.

The family’s fortunes collapsed with the Depression. The Winters National Bank failed, and Jonathan’s parents divorced. His mother took him to Springfield, where she did factory work but eventually became the host of a women’s program on a local radio station. Her son continued talking to himself and developed a repertory of strange sound effects.

He studied art and married an art student when he was 23. They were married for 60 years, until she died. His entry into show business came at the urging of his wife, who pushed him to enter a talent contest, which he won and which led to a morning radio show, on which he created characters and interviewed himself.