Goodbye to Norman Lear.

"Norman Lear, Whose Comedies Changed the Face of TV, Is Dead at 101/As the producer of 'All in the Family' and many other shows, Mr. Lear showed that it was possible to be topical, funny and immensely popular" (NYT).

 
“You looked around television in those years,” Mr. Lear said in a 2012 New York Times interview, referring to the middle and late 1960s, “and the biggest problem any family faced was ‘Mother dented the car, and how do you keep Dad from finding out’; ‘the boss is coming to dinner, and the roast’s ruined.’ The message that was sending out was that we didn’t have any problems.”

ADDED: I've written about Norman Lear on this blog a few times:

July 27, 2022: I blogged Norman Lear's NYT piece — "On My 100th Birthday, Reflections on Archie Bunker and Donald Trump" — and said: "Lear says Archie, if he were around today, would probably watch Fox News and vote for Trump. Probably?! He also imagines that Archie would have disapproved of the January 6th incursion on the Capitol. But why? Seems to me he'd approve, but Lear doesn't want him to, so okay. "

"Woody Harrelson hosted Saturday Night Live and used his opening monologue to criticize Big Pharma's response to COVID-19."

Woody Harrelson hosted Saturday Night Live and used his opening monologue to criticize Big Pharma's response to COVID-19:

"The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in… https://t.co/3elrFv53GW pic.twitter.com/i0PfNrlcGd

— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) February 26, 2023

Let's analyze the comedy stylings of Woody Harrelson.

This Woody Harrelson character is saying that if we #defundthepolice he and his friends would just start murdering people, which is a weird way to show support of the police but fandom is wild sometimes pic.twitter.com/8gITCs1TFw

— Paul F. Tompkins (@PFTompkins) June 9, 2020

This made me look up Woody Harrelson to see what exactly are his politics. I found "Woody Harrelson: I'm an anarchist" (Politico, 2013):

So you dislike Democrats as much as you dislike the GOP?

It's all synchronized swimming to me. They all kneel and kiss the ring. Who's going to take on the oil industry or the medical industry? People compare Obama to Lyndon Johnson, but I think a better comparison is between Obama and Nixon. Because Nixon came into office saying he was going to pull out of Vietnam, and then he escalated the war. A lot of us were led to believe that Obama was the peace president, but there are still, I think, 70,000 troops in Afghanistan....

Do you want to get more involved in politics?

No. I don't believe in politics. I'm an anarchist, I guess you could say. I think people could be just fine looking after themselves.

So... presumably the real Woody would like to dismantle the police, and he adopts a redneck character to taunt the abolitionists. He has the character speak as though he would wildly kill people if left to his own judgment of how to behave in a police-free America. I'm going to guess that what Woody is trying to do is make fun of the people who want to scare us out of getting rid of the police. What do you think?

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Commenters question whether that's really Woody Harrelson, but couldn't get to a definite answer whether it is or not! I did a search and found "George Floyd protests: Is Woody Harrelson defending police brutality? Video of lookalike man baffles internet" (at meaww):

In the video, a man who resembles Harrelson, (perhaps it is Harrelson himself, we wouldn’t know) is supporting the police saying the public needs to deal with him before attacking the cops.... While the video has garnered a lot of attention...

Garnered!

... internet users are rather concerned if it’s actually Harrelson who has featured in it. While one wrote, “I'm scared to even look up what's going on with Woody Harrelson”. Another tweet read, “@WoodyHarrelson stop with your hillbilly mean guy videos. I'm skeert.” However, a few have established that it isn’t Harrelson but a random man who holds a striking resemblance to the actor....

Meanwhile, a few were convinced that the viral video was in fact a parody by Harrelson. “I ain’t gon’ lie, I thought this was Woody Harrelson doing a parody of a redneck,” wrote one follower.

I'm going to say that if it isn't Harrelson in the video, then Harrelson ought to have done something by now to disavow the video or try to get it taken down.

SNL spoofs the CNN Equality Town Hall — with Kate McKinnon excellent as Elizabeth Warren and Lin-Manuel Miranda pretty good as Julian Castro.

There's also Woody Harrelson as Joe Biden:



I'm glad to see SNL making fun of the Democrats, but it's obviously much gentler fun than what they've been doing with Trump for years. I'd say just be really funny. Gentle or cruel, I don't really care. Just do it well. That is: funny.

After 30 years of marijuana use, Woody Harrelson gives it up because it was "keeping me from being emotionally available."

"Still, he has nothing bad to say about marijuana, which he calls 'a great drug.'"

He's right — isn't he? — about the biggest problem with marijuana.

"Why did I stop midway through episode 2 [of 'True Detective']? It wasn't the sex. It was the mumbling."

"Between McConaughey and the other guy who looks too much like him (Woody Harrelson), it was way too much 2 guys mumbling. This show could not fill the aching gap left by 'Breaking Bad,' which we watched, all 60 episodes in just about exactly 60 days. In 'Breaking Bad,' not only was it easy to tell Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston apart, but the 2 actors frequently spoke quite clearly."

That's what I wrote yesterday, and a reader sent me this spoof from "The Soup" which had us laughing here at Meadhouse at 5:50 a.m.:

)

"Don’t get me wrong: I love a nice bouncy rack. And if a show has something smart to say about sex, bring it on."

But Emily Nussbaum has "turned prickly, and tired of trying to be... the Cool Girl: a good sport when something smells like macho nonsense."

She's writing about "True Detective," in a New Yorker piece titled "Cool Story, Bro/The shallow deep talk of 'True Detective.'" That's from March 3rd, before the season finale, which she writes about a week later in "The Disappointing Finale of 'True Detective.'"

I was reading those 2 things this morning after getting halfway through the second episode last night. I'd watched episode 1 in it's entirety a few days before. I'd noticed the critical attention the show was getting, and Matthew McConaughey had just won the Oscar, so I gave it a chance. Why did I stop midway through episode 2? It wasn't the sex. It was the mumbling. Between McConaughey and the other guy who looks too much like him (Woody Harrelson), it was way too much 2 guys mumbling. This show could not fill the aching gap left by "Breaking Bad," which we watched, all 60 episodes in just about exactly 60 days. In "Breaking Bad," not only was it easy to tell Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston apart, but the 2 actors frequently spoke quite clearly.

"So you dislike Democrats as much as you dislike the GOP?"

Details asks Woody Harrelson (who played Steve Schmidt in that movie about Sarah Palin, "Game Change")"

It's all synchronized swimming to me. They all kneel and kiss the ring. Who's going to take on the oil industry or the medical industry? People compare Obama to Lyndon Johnson, but I think a better comparison is between Obama and Nixon. Because Nixon came into office saying he was going to pull out of Vietnam, and then he escalated the war. A lot of us were led to believe that Obama was the peace president, but there are still, I think, 70,000 troops in Afghanistan. Corporations like Grumman are so powerful that—I don't know, is this the kind of shit we want to talk about? It's making me depressed.

"I was startled by a paparazzo, who I quite understandably mistook for a zombie."

Woody Harrelson, explaining why he hit a guy.