"From 2013, Marc talks with Carl Reiner about his journey from writing to acting to directing, as well as his collaborative relationships with..."

"... Sid Ceasar, Dick Van Dyke, Steve Martin and, of course, Mel Brooks. Carl died on June 29, 2020 at age 98."

Listen to that. I did. I'm in awe. What a life!

By the way, it's spelled "Caesar." There's a whole story about Sid's recognition of Carl's ability to imitate James Mason, so I give you this:

"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?

"If you want to find the ur-texts of ‘The Producers’ and ‘Blazing Saddles,’ of ‘Sleeper’ and ‘Annie Hall,’ of ‘All in the Family’ and ‘M*A*S*H’ and ‘Saturday Night Live’..."

"... check out the old kinescopes of Sid Caesar."

Goodbye to Sid Caesar. He was 91.



ADDED: "Everybody thinks that Sid waited to be pumped up with intelligence and with material from his writers. They thought that he was just like — he'd sit there like a crazy empty balloon and that we would come in and we would pump him up and make, you know, we'd make a human being out of him. His tongue would stick out and he would talk and be funny, you know? But, believe it or not, Sid was one of the funniest guys, even away from the writers and the writing room."

Said Mel Brooks.

"Sid was the flame... Every writer was a moth who wanted to hang around that flame. There wasn't a writer in television who didn't want to be licking around that flame."

Said Carl Reiner.

"Rosie O'Donnell Show On Rush's Hu Mocking: Why Can't Chinese Accents Be Imitated?"

Rosie basically defends Rush. If what Rush did was so bad, how can we tolerate the Swedish Chef?



Here's Rush defending himself, bringing up Sid Caesar and Mickey Rooney in "Breakfast at Tiffany's."

Back in the old days, Sid Caesar, for those of you old enough to remember, was called a comic genius for impersonating foreign languages that he couldn't speak. But today the left says that was racism; it was bigotry; it was insulting. And it wasn't....

Have you ever seen the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's?... Then somebody needs to call Mickey Rooney and say, "Pal, that movie is very popular. You don't know how much of Chinese, Japanese culture you destroyed." They had Mickey Rooney playing, I forget whether it was a Japanese or Chinese character, complete with the buckteeth and the fake phony accent. I mean it's one of the greatest movies reputed of all time, Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, any number of people in that movie.

But do you really want to use Mickey Rooney in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" as part of your self-defense?



ADDED: I must say, I never found the Swedish Chef funny. It's just about laughing at the sound of a foreign language. Pretty low humor. I think the criticisms of the humor are overdone and obviously politically motivated.

AND: In case you didn't listen to the Rosie clip, Rosie's defense of Rush is interesting because she herself was savaged for imitating Chinese speech. That was back in 2006. Here's Michelle Malkin attacking her — mainly for hypocrisy. Malkin's point is: Don't ever go PC on conservatives, now, because you yourself were not PC.