"I don’t understand why the [Snopes] verdict is 'mostly false,' when most of this article is giving reasons why it would’ve made sense..."

"... for Lucille Ball to say 'don't gaslight me' in 1953. The word is based on the 1944 movie 'Gaslight.' The article cites a 1948 article that quotes a woman’s lawsuit as alleging that her husband gave her 'the Gaslight treatment.' That phrase was used on Lucille Ball’s TV show in the ‘60s, and in 1956 she did a parody of 'Gaslight' in a whole episode of her earlier show. She was a comedian who knew how to improv — don’t you think she would’ve been creative enough to turn a noun into a verb? People do that all the time, e.g. I probably started saying 'I’ll Facebook this' soon after I first got a Facebook account."

Writes my son John, at Facebook, commenting on a Snopes post about its article "Did People Refer to Gaslighting During the Era of ‘I Love Lucy’? A stray piece of dialogue from the 2021 biopic 'Being the Ricardos' set off a fascinating online debate about a cultural anachronism." 

Snopes acknowledges that people back then knew the concept of "the Gaslight treatment" from the movie, but it blithely assumes that somehow, in the 1950s, we didn't fluidly and comically repurpose a noun into a verb:

"I was raised on Proverbs and pushups... I subscribe to Judeo-Christian beliefs... I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ."

"I think if you think about my political ideology, where it really stems from, you know, my ethics and my morals and what I think is right and wrong, you look to ancient Jerusalem, you got ancient Judeo-Christian values. So right and wrong... I also cling to a lot of traditional values and a lot of traditional ideas, because they’ve worked in the past."

"I think that we have bred a generation of soft men and that generation has created a lot of problems in our society and our culture... designed to reclaim and restore masculinity in a society that is ever more dismissive of what it means to be a man."

Those are quotes from Madison Cawthorn, from 2020 and 2021, presented by Politico in an effort to shame him over 2 photographs that show him in what looks like a party setting and wearing women's lingerie, in "Exclusive: Madison Cawthorn photos reveal him wearing women’s lingerie in public setting/The embattled congressman has outraged Republican colleagues with accusations of orgies and drug use." 

Cawthorn is running for reelection and has a lot of rivals. After Politico published this exposé, Cawthorn responded the photos are from some game show on a cruise ship: "I guess the left thinks goofy vacation photos during a game on a cruise (taken waaay before I ran for Congress) is going to somehow hurt me? They’re running out of things to throw at me... Share your most embarrassing vacay pics in the replies."

Cawthorn asks to be treated the same as any other politician with an embarrassing old photograph. But if he's made the masculinity of men a core political value, a photo of him in women's clothes is a different problem for him than it would be for a politician who eagerly embraces an ideology of gender fluidity. 

But I would say that within the tradition of distinct gender roles, there has long been playful cross-dressing. It's perceived as comical precisely because you believe in the immutability of the 2 sexes. That's what's going on in the great movie comedy "Some Like It Hot" — with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis trying to pass as female in the presence of Marilyn Monroe. Old-time television with Milton Berle and Flip Wilson in drag isn't  hilarious because they were displaying any inner femininity but because people saw them as obvious men wearing women's clothes.

Are you ready to accept Nicole Kidman as Lucy? Javier Bardem as Desi?

 

I was very skeptical about this project. Both actors seem way too old, and they both have to do accents to fit the characters. Kidman comes from Australia, and Bardem comes from Spain. Desi came from Cuba, and Lucy grew up in Jamestown, New York. 

But that trailer overcame my resistance and — this is beyond my rational analysis — gave me chills. Did Aaron Sorkin do that? I haven't seen much of Sorkin's work. Of all his movies, I've only seen "Moneyball" and "The Trial of the Chicago 7" (and a little bit of "The Social Network"). As for his TV, I haven't seen any of it! Am I the only one who's never watched a single episode of "The West Wing"?

Bonus fact from Lucy's Wikipedia page: "Ball recalled little from the day her father died, except a bird getting trapped in the house, which caused her lifelong ornithophobia." She was 3. Her father was 27.

From that ornithophobia link, we're told Ingmar Bergman also had a fear of birds, and so do David Beckman and Scarlette Johansson. Eminem has a fear of a specific bird: Owls. We're not told the word for the fear of owls. (Strigiformophobia?) But we are told the word for the fear of chickens — alektorophobia — and the fear of ducks — anatidaephobia.

Sweet? Funny? Sad? Scary?

My birthday present to myself! pic.twitter.com/pGBuOoZ9Lp

— Sen. Lisa Murkowski (@lisamurkowski) May 23, 2019

I checked her age. She's only 62. So... I guess it's not as scary as it looked. It made me think of something the comedian Bob Goldthwait said about the TV show "Life with Lucy," which came out in 1986: "I'm getting really worried about Lucy." It was funny laughing at Lucy's physical comedy in the 1950s and 60s, but in 1986, she was 75, and she was trying to show that she still had what it takes, but we could see she was old, and we were moved not so much to laugh as to feel protective and hope she wouldn't  get hurt.



But Lisa Murkowski is 62. She can still put on a show that she's a kid at heart and up for physical hijinks... can't she? But maybe she hasn't heard that a lot of people find those motorized street scooters annoying, and a lot of people are getting hurt, including the young and youngish.

"thing 1 fears'HAPPENED'😱" to Cher!

Ok,Last nite in 1st 2 songs, thing 1 fears”HAPPENED”😱.My Huge Headpiece Started Falling off🤯Felt it slipping BUT…The Show Must Go 🙄.THEN In my in-ears came Choppers voice”CHER RETURN 2DRESSING RM. EVERY1 WAS PANICKED.I 🤣. I LOOKED SO RIDICULOUS.😭IT WAS LIKE
I❤️LUCY

— Cher (@cher) April 27, 2019

Here's the Lucy image she must mean:



That's from "Lucy Gets Into Pictures" (Season 4, Episode 18 of "I Love Lucy," where "Lucy gets a bit part in a movie, but has a problem with the costume").

Bill Flanagan interviews Bob Dylan. Read the whole thing — it's nice and long...

... here. Bob is pushing his new album, "Triplicate," which is 3 discs of him singing standards like "That Old Feeling" (my favorite song when I was about 4 and had no old feelings) and "Sentimental Journey" (the song my parents considered their song for reasons I only came to understand, suddenly, 4 years ago).

Bob gives an explanation for why he put the 30 songs on 3 CDs when they would have fit on 2 CDs:  

Is there something about the 10 song, 32 minute length that appeals to you?

Sure, it’s the number of completion. It’s a lucky number, and it’s symbolic of light. As far as the 32 minutes, that’s about the limit to the number of minutes on a long playing record where the sound is most powerful, 15 minutes to a side. My records were always overloaded on both sides. Too many minutes to be recorded or mastered properly. My songs were too long and didn’t fit the audio format of an LP. The sound was thin and you would have to turn your record player up to nine or ten to hear it well. So these CDs to me represent the LPs that I should have been making.

That's either mystical, metaphorical, or bullshit.

Are you concerned about what Bob Dylan fans think about these standards?

These songs are meant for the man on the street, the common man, the everyday person. Maybe that is a Bob Dylan fan, maybe not, I don’t know....

"Scary Lucy" — that horrible looking bronze statue of Lucille Ball...

... has been replaced with a not-totally-embarrassing bronze statue of Lucille Ball.

"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:

Relocating the unloved Lucy statue.

The NYT reports:

On Monday, the board of trustees in Celoron, N.Y., the village that had been the reluctant home of “Scary Lucy,” voted unanimously to allow the National Comedy Center to display this notorious statue after it opens next year in nearby Jamestown, N.Y.

Previously blogged here.

"We Love Lucy! Get Rid of this Statue."

A Facebook page devoted to ridding the Celoron, New York of the "frightening" statue of Lucille Ball.



We've talked about tearing down (or relocating) statues before, most recently in the context of communist propaganda, which might be good as sculpture per se but carries a message that the people of a particular place never wanted installed. Remember, you voted on it:



Now, the Lucy sculpture is different, because Lucy is not the symbol of a hated invader of Celoron, New York. She grew up there. They must love her. The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center is close by, and presumably they want Lucy lovers to make a pilgrimage. In that light, I think this statue is like the "Ecce Homo" painting in in the Sanctuary of Mercy church in Borja, Spain, the one no one came to see before it was rendered ludicrous by a well-meaning old lady:



It's a big tourist attraction these days, precisely because of its sublime badness. Perhaps this "We Love Lucy! Get Rid of this Statue" campaign is just a trick to get the hilarious image out there so the next time you're barreling across I-80, you'll take that little detour and get that Instagram selfie you know you'll want. You'll look much better than that aging American couple who, subjects of a half-assed NYT travel article, posed happily with statues of Lenin and Stalin in Lithuania.

I know what you're thinking: But wasn't Lucille Ball a communist?

As she had in her sworn testimony before the [House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953], Lucy insisted she knew nothing of politics in 1936 and registered as a Communist only to please her grandfather, Fred Hunt, who was a zealous Socialist....

[Lucy's mother] Mrs. Desiree E. Ball and [Lucy's brother] Fred H. Ball... both testified they had registered to vote communist in 1936 as the actress did to please “Grandpa.”...

“We’re lucky this happened to us in America, where newspapermen ask the questions,” Desi said. “In other countries they shoot first and ask the questions later.”

Sarah Silverman as Joan Rivers on "Saturday Night Live."

From last night's show:

[EMBEDDED VIDEO REMOVED]

And, yes, all the tags for this post are correct.

AND: Even better is the trailer for "The Fault in Our Stars 2: The Ebola in Our Everything."

So I tried to watch the pilot episode of "Breaking Bad."

There's much talk about the final episode of "Breaking Bad," and I've got a houseguest arriving on Sunday who importuned me to set the DVR to record that episode but told me I can't just watch the final episode with him. I've got to watch the whole series from the beginning, which is to say I've got to watch 61 hours of the thing before I can hang out with my newly arrived houseguest watching the show he's so excited about and (not that I care much) everyone in the media seems unable to shut up about.

Attending to the assigned recording task, I see that the network (AMC) is running a marathon of all the old episodes leading up to the big finale, so I set the DVR to lay in the requisite 61 hours. Last night, settling in to watch the new episode of "Project Runway," I see that I accidentally bumped it, what with all the incoming "Breaking Bad" and baseball games. (The DVR can record 3 things at once, but not more.) So I call up the "Pilot" episode of "Breaking Bad."

I turn it off after 22 minutes. Interestingly, 22 minutes is the classic length of a sitcom. Have I got Sitcom Mind? Reading the summary of the "Pilot" episode, I see that some exciting stuff was about to happen. When I turned off the show at 22 minutes, Meade and I had a conversation of untimed length about how perhaps there's a Hollywood plot to disparage ordinary American life through the depiction of the bored, boring, declining, dying white man. It started long ago with "The Honeymooners" — notice the shift to sitcoms — but the man we're invited to look down on has become more and more dull and meaningless until he's fully dehumanized and about to fall off the face of the earth anyway. (The "Breaking Bad" guy learns he's dying of lung cancer.)

If we'd hung on past the sitcom length of time, we'd have seen the police bust a meth lab, and other scenes of cooking up drugs, accidental fires, deadly fumes, sirens, a misfired gun, and a reactivated cock. I'm reading the plot summary out loud to Meade as I try to write this. We get into another conversation about television over the years and what it's done to our notions of masculinity. We're talking about Ralph Kramden and Ricky Ricardo as I dump sesame seeds into the stove-top seed roaster. (I like darkly toasted sesame seeds on cottage cheese for lunch, and Meade has been chiding me about over-toasting them, like sesame seeds are going to cause cancer.) The conversation continues as I follow Meade out to the front door, and it's on and on about "Bewitched" and "Leave It to Beaver" and Red Skelton.

"Remember how Red Skelton used to say 'Thank you for inviting me into your living room'?" I ask, and Meade — picking up the dog leash — remembers and entertains my elaborate theory about TV needing to be different from theater and movies because it comes into your home and how in sitcoms you're mostly sitting in your living room looking into some fictional family's living room, and there's this interchange between the sitcom family and the viewers' family. I bring up the transfusion metaphor from "Atlas Shrugged" that we were talking about a couple days ago. How has the poison — is it poison? — been administered all these years? Why have we kept the channel open? Because it only takes 22 minutes? What subversion of our values has taken place? I go on about Archie Bunker in his chair, which faces the TV....



... and we are on the other side of the TV, in our chairs, looking through at them, as if we are on their TV. What are we doing? Are the women nudged to look over at their men and see them as Edith, above, sees Archie? What has been happening in these 22-minute treatments we've volunteered for all these years?

Meade inquires about the 22 minutes — the time for the show in a 30-minute slot with commercial — and he seems to notice for the first time that the premium cable channels don't have commercials, and I tease him that he's like these sitcom husbands who are never fully clued in. He's off to get Zeus (the dog) to take him for a walk, and I make some wisecrack — like I think I'm in a sitcom — about how he should do well with the dog, since dogs don't even know the difference between the show and the commercial.

Ha ha. Back in the kitchen of my sitcom life, I see — through billows of smoke — that the sesame seeds are on fire.

"Glenn Beck on the CNN 'Pit of Despair' and Why He Got Out of Cable TV."

Headline at Forbes, with the amusing correction:

An earlier version of this post quoted Beck saying the “Pit of Despair” was at Fox News. In fact, he was talking about his time at CNN when he made that remark. I’ve corrected both the article and the headline to reflect that.

Ha ha ha. Would that have been the headline if the mistake hadn't been made?

Before coming to Fox, Beck worked at CNN, where, he said, he had an office that looked out on an open-plan office area where producers and reporters had their desks. “I used to call it the Pit of Despair because there are all these people plunking out stories like, ‘I just want to hang myself, I just want to hang myself,’” he said.*

Among his frustrations at both networks, he said, was the rigid, formulaic thinking about how to produce a talk show. “Most of what we do on television was developed by Desi Arnaz” in the 1950s, he said. “There’s no reason we still do it that way, except that it works. It drives me out of my mind that they are still using what’s called the Desi shoot, three cameras on the floor.”

For Beck, who loves to amble around as he talks, it was an unwanted constraint. “I moved, and they couldn’t follow me,” he said. “I said to them, ‘Get me a sports director, please. Get someone with experience producing sports. Just tell them I’m carrying a ball. I think they can do it.’ But everybody in news was saying, ‘You’re supposed to stay here.’”

Even as Lucy wanted to get into show business, Glenn Beck wants to roam free.

Fictional characters with Wikipedia pages written almost like the pages of real people.

Here's an example:

Ethel Roberta Louise Mae Mertz (née Potter) is one of the four main fictional characters in the highly popular 1950s American television sitcom I Love Lucy, played by Vivian Vance....

Born around 1905 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where her father, Will Potter, owned a sweet shop and soda fountain with the slogan "You can lick our cones, but you can't beat our sodas!" Ethel has had a career in music and acting, yet got her start at Albuquerque's Little Theater, singing her signature number "Shortnin' Bread". A flapper in the 1920s, she met and married Fred Mertz either in 1933 (episode #2) or 1927 (episode #42)... Their wedding anniversary date is May 3rd (episode #121). After eloping (episode #113 - "Ethel's Hometown") Ethel worked in vaudeville with Fred before settling down and purchasing their own brownstone apartment building in New York City, containing the apartment they rent to Ricky and Lucy. ...

She has a fine soprano voice, among other artistic talents, but unlike Lucy is now unambitious and content as a housewife and landlady. Somewhat lonely, she is devoted to Lucy and her family. Despite her commonsense outlook, she is often fascinated by the possibilities for excitement opened up by Lucy's mad schemes. Although continually complaining about Fred's penny-pinching and other faults, she defers to him far more than Lucy does to Ricky....

Now, this article is is flagged with an exclamation mark and "This television-related article describes a work or element of fiction in a primarily in-universe style." Going to the link, I see:

"I'm free and I love to be free/To live my life the way I want/To say and do whatever I please..."

Consider the use of the old Lesley Gore song — "You Don't Own Me" — for political, pro-Obama purposes:



Now, I love old Lesley and her classic song. And it's fine with me if the Democratic Party is her party — and she'll cry if Obama loses, cry if Obama loses, you would cry too if it happened to you. "You Don't Own Me" dates back to 1963 — pre-Women's Liberation, pre-Beatles. But let's consider the lyrics and the extent to which they express the values of the present-day Democratic Party.

By the way, Ms. Gore did not write "You Don't Own Me." It was written by 2 men, John Madara (who also wrote "At the Hop") and David White (who co-wrote "At the Hop" and was a member of the doo-wop group Danny & the Juniors who recorded "At the Hop"). Madera and White also co-wrote "The Fly," which was a dance that you could do at the hop, and here's Chubby Checker showing you how:



That was 1961, 2 years before Lesley sang Madera and White's declaration to female autonomy, which is no kind of dance song at all, though Diane Keaton, Bette Midler, and Goldie Hawn manage to turn it into a dance for the purpose of bringing a close to the execrable 1996 movie "First Wives Club":



That movie is best described by David Rakoff in "Half Empty": "A gynocentric comedy predicated on the scenario where men are cheating bastards and middle-aged women the goddesses who best them while cementing their sisterhood with Motown-scored makeover montages, vengeful shopping sprees, warmed-over Lucy-and-Ethel hijinks, and random humiliations visited upon women who are younger and therefore by definition stupid whores."

Anyway, look at the lyrics to "You Don't Own Me," words which a couple youngish guys put in the female singer's mouth, as repurposed for the 2012 election "war on women" theme:

I'm young and I love to be young
I'm free and I love to be free
To live my life the way I want
To say and do whatever I please

Sounds libertarian to me. But it's the Obama side using this, so presumably we're supposed to hear something like:

I'm free and I want my birth control to be free
To live my life the way I want
To say and do whatever I please and have the government pay for it

Deadline Hollywood summarizes the movie and TV history of men dressed as women...

On the occasion of the new TV show "Work It" (which we talked about yesterday):

While it may have deeper implications today than it did decades ago, men dressing like women is one of the oldest forms of comedy. It is at the heart of one of the best feature comedies ever made, Some Like It Hot, as well as several other classic comedy films, Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire and The Birdcage, and it has had a presence on TV, most notably with the 1980 series Bosom Buddies starring Tom Hanks, and Saturday Night Live where male cast members regularly impersonate female celebrities. And then there is the British school of comedy with Monty Python and Benny Hill. ABC’s president Paul Lee brought up his heritage when explaining his decision to pick up Work It to critics at the summer TCA press tour. “I’m a Brit, it is in my contract that I have to do one cross-dressing show a year,” he said. “I was brought up on Monty Python. What can I do?” As a fellow European who also grew up with Monty Python and Benny Hill, I can actually relate to that...."

I can see the Brit excuse, but it's really awful, if you're going to indulge in argument by listmaking like that, to leave out the most prominent — in more ways than one — cross-dresser in the history of television, the man who was called Mr. Television, Milton Berle.

Here's a great clip of Berle in drag — in a guest spot on Lucille Ball's show.  (If you've only got 2 seconds to spare, click here.)



By the way, what a concentration of comic acting in that 5-minute clip, from everybody involved, including Desi Arnaz, who, if he showed up on TV today, would probably elicit criticism from some dignity-protecting group that doesn't care whether or not comedy has room to breathe.

"We use a lot of rocks in our landscaping... Every time we take a trip, I'm somehow able to take a rock home in my suitcase."

Okay... but I remember when Lucille Ball did that in "The Long, Long Trailer." It was very disturbing!

"I didn't mean to lie to you, [R]icky. But they mean so much to me! [R]icky, stop it!"

"Do you realize she could have killed the 2 of us? She and her rocks and her raspberry jam!"

(Harrowing driving scene at the second link, and if you keep watching, you'll end up with hot Lucy-and-Ricky sex symbolized by the flapping of the trailer door.)

Is it possible that there will be "a comeback of 'The Comeback'" — my all-time favorite TV comedy?

The AV Club asks the wonderful Lisa Kudrow:

Well, you know… Yes. “Tentative” is the operative word, though. But Michael [Patrick King] and I can’t help but talk about it whenever we’re together, and as I said, we keep coming up with “Wouldn’t it be funny if she was doing this, this, and this” ideas. And then at some point, we start wondering, “Is it a special that we ask to do? Or is it a limited series that we ask to do? What are we asking to do? What is it that we want to do? What do we have time for? What would you be willing to do?” So that just keeps going back and forth. And Michael truly has no time right now, that’s for sure. 

If you don't know "The Comeback," it was a 1-season HBO show that, I guess, was a little challenging for viewers. Some say people had trouble watching the main character get into humiliating difficulties. (Were we more sophisticated back in the 1950s when we had great fun watching Lucille Ball get stymied at every turn?)

Here, buy every episode of "The Comeback" ever made (so far!), and either love it or complain to me about why it really did deserve to be cancelled.

Speaking of continuing great Lisa Kudrow things, the linked article also says there's a possibility of a sequel to "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion."