The Mark Twain Prize to... Tina Fey?: A list of far more deserving candidates for a lifetime achievement award

[The pics used to accompany this blog post are meant to illustrate a point. A pretty obvious one.]

The American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award shows were really something to watch back in the 1970s and ’80s. The folks receiving the prize were bona fide A-list talents who were without question worthy to get a lifetime achievement award. Two-hour award presentations were made to performers and filmmakers on the order of Ford, Welles, Hitchcock, Capra, Huston, Astaire, Cagney, Gish, Davis, Stanwyck, and Fonda.

In the 1990s, as U.S. culture and entertainment took its precipitous slide toward the utter soulless crap that is extremely popular in today’s mainstream, the AFI Award began going to performers and filmmakers whose careers were still in full flourish, but who could guarantee a solid audience for the TV airing of the award show. What had been amazing about the AFI was that, even though the usual “mavericks” (Ray, Fuller, Sirk, and on and on) were going to be ignored, in the '70s and '80s you were treated to CBS (I believe that was the network) presenting a two-hour show saluting the work of Lillian Gish or John Ford or Orson or some Golden Age star who worked in the era of black and white that network television wants to stay far, far away from (the opening and closing moments of Wizard of Oz aside).

Then, with the sole exception of Robert Wise, the AFI turned to honoring only those who would attract TV ratings and a roster of current-day Hollywood names to salute him/her. Nicholson, Eastwood, Spielberg, Scorsese, Streep, and others whose careers were still moving along at a steady clip were then honored, and the result was similar to the many, many moments in the Oscar ceremony when Hollywood slaps itself on the back and reminds us all what wonderful movies used to be made, and how the pap that comes out these days is the obvious continuation of what came before. The most interesting thing about the list of winners that can be found here is that the recipients have gone from being in their 70s and 80s to 45 for the extremely charming but oh-SO-non-versatile Tom Hanks (45).

I bring up all this about the valuelessness of the AFI awards, and the shameless grab for TV ratings (or even a network to air the event — for a bit it was relegated to cable from its original network home), to bring up the subject of yet another valueless encomium, the Mark Twain Prize for Humor. The Kennedy Center presents this honor, and it has been sort of dubious since its inception — what makes the Kennedy Center board experts on humor in America? Whatever their qualifications are or aren’t, the award has followed the same trajectory as the AFI award, except it has been even more singularly pathetic in its choice of honorees, its ignoring comic legends who deserve appreciation, and its craving for viewers (especially since the show airs on PBS, and not a commercial network).

The prize jumped the shark when it made its first fourth honoree, and its first female, Whoopi Goldberg, in 2001. I’m not going to debate Goldberg’s comic pedigree — she did do great accents and voices back when she did standup, but that was a very long, long time ago. In any case, they leapfrogged over the first modern female standup, Phyllis Diller, the second, Joan Rivers, and the many women who populated variety television (never mind the women comedy writers) to move on to Whoopi, after having saluted two national treasures and comic innovators — Richard Pryor and Jonathan Winters — and one gent who had a good run in the Fifties and Sixties, Carl Reiner.

Probably the next horrific honoree was Lorne Michaels in 2004. Michaels spearheaded a show that was brave, bold, and innovative for five years, and has been a walking-dead example of everything that is dull, boring, and formulaic in TV sketch comedy since then (with the exception of the sterling 1984-85 season, which was cast almost entirely with “ringers,” meaning people who were already proven commodities as sketch/character comedians). There have been others whose contribution to American comedy is indisputable (Neil Simon, Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Lily Tomlin), but the obvious mandate is to interest TV viewers in the ceremony, and so this year the winner of the prize is none other than the pin-up of snarky sketch and fake-news comedy, Tina Fey.

I am not going to debate the merits of Tina Fey as a comedian here. I find her stuff pleasant but not memorable. The hubbub that surrounded her Sarah Palin imitation in 2008 was fascinating, in that there were other comic actresses on the Web doing equally good impressions of the Brainless One, and Fey’s “material” was essentially direct quotes from Palin’s own verbal missteps. Fey is a good-looking woman (never let that slip out of the equation), and she is currently a powerhouse to be reckoned with in terms of reputation, paycheck, and drawing power. But is she the 2000s equivalent of Dorothy Parker? Not on your life. Except, of course, to those who consume only contemporary mainstream culture, and are not familiar with anything old, foreign, or even slightly "alternative."

In any case, since the Mark Twain Prize has now irredeemably jumped the shark, I would like to submit for public view a list of the people they’ve forgotten to honor (in case you haven't been looking at the pics I've scattered throughout this post). Maybe they feel these people wouldn't be “ratings bait” — then again, on PBS you’d think an older name would be ratings bait, but PBS is as dull and lifeless as the rest of American broadcasting these days.

I’m leaving out the names of such folk as Professor Irwin Corey and Bob Elliott, as I think that, though they richly deserve the prize, a mainstream board like the Kennedy Center’s would never be that hip. I also leave out the solid gold name of Woody Allen (who was without doubt in the top rank of American humorists of the second half of the 20th century), since I have the feeling that he has already turned the honor down. I can’t help but feel that they’ve never asked Mel Brooks, though, since I don’t think he would turn it down (not a man who revisits an item like Spaceballs). I know that they’re probably already prepping the Twain Prizes for Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, and Jack Black, so let me remind everyone who is still alive and deserves the Prize. If it really had any meaning.

• SID CAESAR
  
• Mort Sahl
  
• Shelley Berman
  
• Nichols and May
  
• Dick Gregory
  
• The Smothers Brothers
  
• Mel Brooks
  
• the aforementioned grandma of women standups, Phyllis Diller
  

And after all that, I’m not even going to mention that Mark Twain was a WRITER for fuck’s sake, and that breed of humorist hasn’t even been given a second thought. Then again, when your comedy prize is little more than a joke, well… it writes itself, doesn't it?

A smattering of Smothers: clips from the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour

This week on the show I’m reviewing the new Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour box set. You can read a review I wrote of the box here. But I should note that I dearly love the Smothers and dug the box mightily. Here are four clips I wished I could’ve included in their entirety in my mere 28-minutes of program:
The set’s single best segment, an unaired medley by Harry Belafonte that was banned in 1968 by CBS, as it is accompanied by disturbing footage of the preceding summer’s Democratic convention in Chicago. It's a tour-de-force performance by the great Harry:


George Harrison dropping by to cheer on the Bros. (we have the visual for this on the program but I’m doin’ my review over it):



Mama Cass doing one of her finest ditties with Tom along for the ride:



The West Coast cast of Hair with Ragni, Rado, and Jennifer Warnes (then Jennifer Warren) in the cast:



Here are some items that aren’t on the box, but they deserve yer attention:
Ray Charles jams with… Jackie Mason? (this episode is on the box)



The legendary banned Pete Seeger song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”



The legendary appearance by the Who:



An amazing turn by the Jefferson Airplane. Grace made herself up in blackface in order to mock the show, and just wound up seemingly especially exotic and cool-looking (and extremely stoned). “Crown of Creation”:



The second song, “Lather”:



And watching the box ensured that I just can’t get the Smothers’ theme outta my head. Here it is being hummed and sung by a nice assortment of guests from the third season:



And the single most mind-warping item to show up on the Net Smothers-wise (as it never aired on E! when they reran the shows), an appearance by the always awesome (and seldom seen) Mr. Harry Nilsson:

The Psychedelic Lenny Bruce: Murray Roman

While I’ve been immersed in George Carlin material since his death last week, I have been brought back, time and again, to thoughts of George’s stand-up hero, the one and only Lenny. George used the lessons learned from Lenny in an original and innovative way, and went from outright impersonations of the guy (on his LP with Jack Burns) to doing linguistic and social hypocrisy bits inspired by him, to simply using his groundbreaking work as a springboard for his own precise and wonderfully silly explorations of everyday stupidity. He jettisoned the umbilical cord to the Great God Len by the mid-’70s when he turned “observational” commentator, with an anti-social edge.

A comedian who emulated Lenny to an incredible degree, and is mostly forgotten today, is the great psychedelic comic Murray Roman. I first heard a Roman routine on WFMU, when the now-departed but never forgotten DJ “KBC” (of overstuffed Xmas tape fame) played a war movie routine off of his You Can’t Beat People Up and Have Them Say I Love You. I was struck by how much the material sounded like the Firesign Theater, but Roman’s nasal, hip delivery was surely Bruce-ian (Bruce-esque?). Roman made only four albums in his lifetime, and though only two of them can truly be called finished products, he does serve as a bridge between the genius social commentary of Lenny and the “head” humor of the Firesign Theater. His records are mindwarpingly strange and cool, and perfect time capsules of their era.

Roman began, like Carlin, Pryor, and everyone else in the Sixties, as a “straight” comic playing nightclubs. He carved out a specialty niche in Aspen, Colorado, humor about skiing, which is explored at length in his forgettable first LP Out of Control. By 1968, he had opened the Doors of Perception (in fact, he opened for the Doors at one point) and became a psychedelic stand-up, who combined Lenny’s hipster cadences and expressions with a speculative tone that makes him a forefather to such Seventies drug absurdists as Cheech and Chong. His most notable gig was as a staff writer for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, undoubtedly one of the hippest shows on the air in ’68-’69. Following that show’s rapid finale, he apparently kept doing stand-up, and sadly died from injuries incurred in a car wreck in 1973 at the age of 44.

Roman worked as an opening act at rock concerts, but did very few TV appearances, aside from little acting gigs in Batman, That Girl, and the “Fairy Tale” episode of The Monkees (Michael Nesmith participated in his last album). Only two pieces of him as a comedian have survived: a bit from what appears to be a home movie shot at a social event with Keith Moon (see below) and the “writer’s episode” of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour which was rerun on the E! network in the early ’90s. Roman is a cipher, a guy whose cumulative legacy are his psych-comedy albums, the aforementioned You Can’t Beat People Up…, the black-covered album (decades before This is Spinal Tap….) called Blind Man’s Movie, and his final effort, a sort of mash-up of the previous two albums with some new material called Busted.

Very little has been written about Roman, aside from entries in a few comedy reference books and websites. It turns out, though, that one intrepid fan/journalist undertook some heavy research into the guy, and posted his findings on the WFMU Beware of the Blog site. A person known as Kliph Netsteroff (if that is indeed his name, as Ter Southern used ta say) has authored a great article on Roman that provides information on him gleaned from interviews with Tommy Smothers, Steve Martin, Bob Einstein, and Mason Williams. In fact, Kliph (who has written about other Funhouse faves like Henry Morgan and Arnold Stang) has even posted links to the unedited transcripts of his Roman/Smothers-related interviews (except for one thing Einstein refused to say “on the record”) on his blog, Classic Show Biz. The WFMU blog article also contains links to downloadable MP3 versions of You Can’t Beat People Up… and Blind Man’s Movie (1972). Check out the article and the albums. And also scope out this one tiny little remainder of this interesting comedian’s career: