When John and Yoko 'borrowed' an idea from Deceased Artiste Stan Freberg

Comedy fans “of a certain age” are in mourning today because the last of the great novelty record masters is gone. Stan Freberg, who died yesterday at 88, had a career that could've only existed in the Fifties. Freberg is best known for two things: a series of comedy singles that were essentially pieces of radio comedy retooled for the shorter, tighter 45 format; and a series of TV ads that were bold, brash, self-referential, silly, and yet still hyped the products in question.

There will no doubt be many encomiums thrown Stan's way, and rightly so. I just wanted to focus in on the moment at which John Lennon appropriated one of Stan's old ideas and turned it into an avant-garde “experiment.”

Firstly, Freberg talking about his interactions with John and Yoko on talk shows. When he came on Dick Cavett's ABC show, he was informed that he would be on an episode that contained the remainder of an interview with John and Yoko, and he noted that that same thing had happened when he'd been on David Frost's show in London:

The fact that Lennon knew who Freberg was and wanted to meet him makes perfect sense, as John was a Spike Milligan cultist who counted master-humorists Peter Cook and Viv Stanshall (gents he inspired and whom I would argue inspired him greatly) among his friends in mid-Sixties Swinging London.

John most certainly knew Stan's popular singles, and one in particular, called “John and Marsha,” in which two voices (Freberg as both John and Marsha) act out a full soap opera in two and a half minutes by just saying each other's names in different ways.

Yoko Ono has been accused by commentators like Camille Paglia of having taken away John's sense of humor, a notion that is patently untrue. Well, on further thought, it did occasionally seem like it was true — not in the political moments so much as the avant-garde experimental mode where the “Joko” team created music, films, and epigrammatic poetry that seemed to be ripe for satire.

Their three LPs together, the Unfinished Music duo and Wedding Album, are works executed in this mode. I am a devoted Lennon fan, but even in my most diehard period of Beatle worship, I knew I would listen one time and one time only to each of these LPs, so I stopped even trying to acquire them (after finding an inexpensively priced copy of Two Virgins, playing it once, and realizing that the old nasty “play the album cover and throw the album away” review wasn't far from wrong).

On the 1969 LP Wedding Album, which was more of a commemorative package of the Lennons' wedding (a box filled with various artifacts, including a photo of wedding cake) than any kind of actually doted-on album, John (or Yoko, or both, or some engineer they supervised) assembled an audio collage of Lennon-Ono interviews for the second side of the album.

The first side, however, contained a specially recorded item, “John and Yoko,” a 22-minute experiment in which the Lennons said each other's names over and over in different tones while a recording of their heartbeats was heard throbbin' away. The piece does start out as a joke, with John and Yoko goofing around, but at various points they do try to reign it in and pretend they're having sex or nuzzling each other, or “losing” each other. In other words, they try to be serious, while “appropriating” (let's be kind) a concept that Freberg did at one-eleventh the length as a purely comic notion.

It is mighty silly, and you will most likely never listen to it more than once, but now, thanks to the wonder that is YouTube, we can readily summon up both Stan's original and John and Yoko's “variation on a theme.” The Freberg name appears nowhere in the album's credits (then again, this is around the time that John unconsciously transformed Chuck Berry's “You Can't Catch Me” into “Come Together”), but John did say that they recorded it as “an extended, very extreme version of 'John and Marsha' that was out years ago by Stan Freberg.”

He also said, “It also really makes your hair stand on end.” The latter makes it appear that, yes, they weren't totally fooling around with this album side-long riff on a two-and-a-half-minute novelty record. Perhaps it isn't as Paglia believes, that Yoko was neutering John's sense of humor — perhaps it was just the drugs....

*****

As a bonus, I will note that I am proud to have featured Stan's Chun King-sponsored Chinese New Year special from 1962 on the Funhouse TV show (and will probably rerun that episode soon) more than once. I was unaware that he made another, somewhat similar, special in 1980.

Stan's “Federal Budget Revue” was a PBS special in which he talked, sang, and danced about government expenditures. Freberg lives up to his appearance here (he had the look of a Fifties “egghead” smart-guy), but the best part of the show, as was always the case with Stan, are his musical numbers, arranged by the great Billy May. The whole half-hour show can be seen here:

Whatta head of hair that guy had! And what a mind underneath it.

He'll always be 'Chuckles' to me: Deceased Artiste Gene Saks

I don't want to make my tribute to Gene Saks an echo of my goodbye piece to Mike Nichols, but since he achieved his greatest fame as a director of comic plays (and was also associated with Neil Simon), let me run quickly through a few of the same points. The first and most important is that, while in film the director is truly the “auteur,” onstage (and most definitely in the kinds of plays that Saks and Nichols directed), the playwright is everything. And what he/she isn't, the performers are.

I'm not the biggest fan of Saks as a movie director – he made eight films, a few of which were very funny, but all of which had no discernible style. As was the case with Nichols, though, I absolutely loved Saks to pieces as a performer. To return to his direction for a bit, I will note that, it is said that Saks did his finest work as a director for the Broadway stage.

I saw only three productions of Neil Simon plays he staged (and the last one was reworked by another director). I found the first one mesmerizing, because it was the very first Broadway play I saw as a child, California Suite. (So the experience was more memorable than the play itself.)

I have the feeling I wouldn't find it as mesmerizing these days (and the other, Jake's Women, was somewhat torturous). Neil Simon, the undisputed king (in terms of success) of Broadway comic playwrights, had certain rhythms to his work. His plays of the Sixties and early Seventies are wonderfully charming and have some delightful situations and characters – they are prime meat for good performers to make hay with and steal a scene. Thus the key to directing his work, and in my mind the key to theatrical direction, is working very closely and sympathetically with the actors (the visuals are the turf of the set designer; the action is purely the playwright's domain).

Simon's plays are, to my mind, director-proof; it didn't matter which director supervised them onstage, they would've turned out pretty much the same (assuming the director had any innate talent and could make the wise casting decisions that make or break a B'way hit).

There was an overt sentimentality that plagued Simon's later works. He wanted to convey something *important*, goddammit! For me, The Prisoner of Second Avenue is his masterpiece (first staged in 1971, during the thick of his most productive period in NYC). It is one of his few pieces where the emotion flows beautifully and not artificially. It also doesn't "date," since a good deal of its plot is about the middle-aged protagonist's struggle to find work after being laid off.

I noted in my obit for Nichols that, if I wasn't aware of which film director made which picture, I would find it hard to distinguish between the work of Saks, Nichols, Arthur Hiller, and Herbert Ross – I should add Melvin Frank here, because he is the one who directed the film of Prisoner in 1975.

I recently rewatched The Odd Couple (1968) and Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972), both directed by Saks. Both films contain funny dialogue and situations, and both star supremely talented comic actors. Any one of the directors mentioned above (or several others who made similar films in the Sixties and Seventies) could've made them and they would've been pretty much identical.

My experience seeing Saks' movie Mame (1974) as a small kid was memorable as well, in that it alienated my mother (who loves movie musicals to pieces). It is painfully rendered – most likely due to the fact that Lucille Ball's ego outshone everything else involved in the production (and every single close-up of her is seen through a lens caked with Vaseline).
*****

So let me now rhapsodize about Saks the performer. He began in show business as an actor, but he appeared in less than a dozen roles on TV and in film after his directing career took off. To illustrate the point that it ain't how much you do but how well you do it (think of Laughton and his one work as a filmmaker), Saks was a tremendous scene-stealer as a movie performer. He was offered the supporting role of Jack Lemmon's brother in the film version of Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975) and is just beautiful as the less-loved sibling who, in the end, is the only one who really cares about our neurotic hero besides his wife.

While Neil Simon was the most successful comic playwright of the Sixties and Seventies and did some truly wonderful work, for me Herb Gardner remains the true master (with Murray Schisgal coming up close behind). And, in Gardner's work, there was no better scene-stealer than Gene Saks.

Thus, while Saks acquired a sterling reputation as a comedy director on B'way (and, to a lesser extent, in the movies), for those who have seen and loved A Thousand Clowns (1965), he will forever be known as Leo Herman, aka “Chuckles the Chipmunk,” the former employer of Murray Burns (Jason Robards). Chuckles is a hyperactive kiddie-show host who gets nervous around children.

Gardner spoke at the Film Forum in NYC in the Nineties and decided to reveal where the character of Chuckles came from. He told us how he had once worked for Bob Keeshan, alias Captain Kangaroo, and that Bob was incredibly nervous around children (he also mentioned that the Captain kept flasks in those big pockets).

This was one way in which the character of Murray was based on Gardner himself – I asked Gardner at a book signing if Murray was based on Jean Shepherd, and he said that Jean believed that but it wasn't so. Murray, Gardner said, was based on his own bachelor life and behavior. (Attention Shep biographer Eugene Bergmann and others who have repeated Jean's accusation!)

The way Saks plays him, Chuckles is nothing like Capt. Kangaroo, but we've all met people like him – a well-meaning but dense guy in a position of power who claims he's looking for something better to do with his life, but in the meantime keeps doing the mediocre stuff. Saks literally does steal the show away from Robards for awhile (which is amazing, given how wonderful Robards is throughout the picture).

Another thing Gardner revealed at the Film Forum: Saks was the first choice for the role but was unavailable. They shot the Chuckles sequence with another actor and it wasn't working. Saks somehow found the time, and so they reshot the scene, but only the angles that involved Chuckles on his own, or he and Murray or Nick (Barry Gordon). Thus, the cardboard cutout of Chuckles changes from shot to shot – when it's seen clearly it's Saks, but when it's in long shot you can see another face. [UPDATE: Fellow Gardner-fan and all-around comedy expert/aficionado Bob Claster has uncovered the identity of the original Chuckles, whose face is seen on the cutout in long shots: character actor Paul Richards. Thanks much, Bob!]

Saks is killer in the part (“You're an old monkey, aren't you, huh?”), and makes a great film even greater. Below is the whole film, but you can go straight to Saks' scene here.

Saks did the scene-stealing honors in Gardner's film of his play The Goodbye People (1984). I featured scenes from the film a few months back on the Funhouse TV show (where I'm always showing stuff you ain't seein' anyplace else!), because it has pretty much been forgotten. No DVD release, no bootlegs, a friend noted it isn't even haunting the darkest depths of the Bit Torrents, where much of cinema history is tucked away.

The Goodbye People was clearly a labor of love for Gardner, because he kept mounting the play over and over again, and it kept failing. It's a classic Herb Gardner tale of the struggle for nonconformity: a boisterous old man (Martin Balsam) who has been having health trouble wants to resurrect his old hot dog stand on the Coney Island boardwalk in the middle of the cold season. He lures a nervous dreamer (Judd Hirsch) into his plan, as well as his daughter (Pamela Reed).

Gardner directed it when it bowed on Broadway in Dec. 1968 with Bob Dishy as the dreamer, Brenda Vaccaro as the daughter, and Milton Berle (!) as the old man. The play failed then, but he got it restaged in L.A. in 1979 (directed by Jeff Bleckner) with Peter Bonerz as the dreamer, Patty Duke Astin as the daughter, and Herschel Bernardi as the old man. It hit B'way again in '79 with Ron Rifkin, Melanie Mayron, and Bernardi in the leads.

Elaine May intro'd The Goodbye People in the book Herb Gardner: The Collected Plays, noting that she directed Gardner's rewritten version of the play (he clearly never did give up on it!) as it debuted in Stockbridge, Massachusetts (presumably pre-B'way in '79). She listed the cast as Gabe Dell, the great Zohra Lampert, and Gene Saks – one assumes he played the old man in this instance.

From May's intro: "It is a quintessential play about America, about discounting the odds, about having hope without evidence, about the refusal to accept old age or anything else without an argument, about thumbing your nose at death with dignity and, in fact, thumbing your nose at dignity. It is about the tough, unregenerate, screw-you exhilaration of the old West, still alive and doing business in Coney Island."

In the film Gardner cast Saks as the old man's business partner who has sold out his interest in the hot dog stand to a big chain (the role had been played by the same actor, Sammy Smith, in both B'way productions and the '79 L.A. run). Saks winds up stealing the picture again, this time with an even shorter appearance than he had in A Thousand Clowns.

His character, Marcus Soloway, delivers a monologue on how he's happy being an old man, a speech that I should note Gardner wrote when he was in his early 30s. I uploaded this scene to YouTube myself (and, yes, it came from a VHS prerecord!) because I wanted to share Saks scene-stealing magic – and Gardner's truly sublime writing.

Uncle Jean returns: portrait of the artist as an old comedian

Godard likes nothing better than to provoke. The filmmaker who is the cinema's finest visual poet can also be something of a ham. He has shown this side only sporadically, sometimes in other filmmakers' works but to best effect in his own films.

He created his comic alter-ego in one of the best, most entertaining, and entrancing films of his “comeback” period in the early Eighties, Prenom Carmen (aka First Name: Carmen, 1983). In that film he played the supporting role of “Uncle Jean,” an off-kilter version of himself that found him embracing and mocking the things that had been said about him over the years by critics who didn't like his work. It's a tight-wire act he pulls off very well (and in case you weren't clued in, his character carries around a coffee table book about Buster Keaton):

“Uncle Jean” showed up again, this time as the lead (called “the Prince,” taking a leaf from Dostoyevsky), in the episodic feature Soigne Ta Droite (Keep Up Your Right Up, 1987). Again, his character is a demented filmmaker who is prone to saying odd things at odd moments.

Godard has been far more serious in his onscreen appearances in recent years – in his epic Histoire(s) du Cinema, JLG by JLG, and Notre Musique. But Uncle Jean still lurks within the heart of Godard, and so his comic side emerges again in his latest video, a little number with the rather unwieldy title Prix Suisse, remerciements, mort ou vif (Prix suisse, my thanks, dead or alive).

Godard has made it a practice not to show up at any awards ceremonies or film festivals in the last few years. Instead he sends really wonderful short videos to serve as an acknowledgement and thank-you note. These videos will, of course, last a lot longer than any speech he might've made at the ceremonies.

It's important to remember in this instance that, although Godard is one of the greatest French filmmakers, he was raised in Switzerland and is half Swiss (on his father's side). The particulars of the award presentation are as follows (and I must thank Craig Keller for his English-language account on the Mubi site). The “Prix d’honneur du cinéma suisse” was given to Godard earlier this month for his body of work. The prize brought with it an award of 30,000 francs, which Godard reportedly divided in four parts between himself and three charities. His cinematographer Fabrice Aragno accepted the award on Godard's behalf.

The most notable thing about the short video he sent along to the award ceremony is that it represents the “return” of Godard's Uncle Jean character – one presumes that talking about his native land (where he has also lived and worked for several decades) brought back his eccentric comic side. Here he takes a fall — not exactly a common thing among 84-year-old filmmakers — and plays the role of the crazy intellectual old man.

Keller's piece about the award does much to “decode” the many references in Godard's recitation here. As with all of Godard's work, it's probably best to watch the video — which is quite short (under five minutes) — then read the explanations provided in Keller's piece (and the very informative comments below the piece) and watch it again.

Suffice it to say that the poetry-speak that Godard indulges in here finds him stitching together a verbal collage of Swiss references – place names, quotes from a famous Swiss novelist's text for Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale, and references to a work he identifies with remembering one's childhood (a Pasolini poem).

As I have said before on the Funhouse TV show and in these pages, we are very lucky to live at a time when there are still new Godard creations coming out on a regular basis.

Thanks to friend Paul for supplying this subtitled copy of the video.

Shark jumped, better shows spawned: the “fake news” situation (Part 2 of two)

While the three major networks continue to program their late-night talk shows in the same lazy, overly predictable fashion — one part Johnny Carson promo-chats, one part bad SNL (read: anything from the mid-Eighties onward), and one part Jimmy Kimmel “building a show out of viral videos” — the cable networks have been trying to alter the formula for success in the late evening hours. E! had a hit with Chelsea Lately, and HBO has made Real Time with Bill Maher a Friday night ritual for many viewers.

Comedy Central has the best late-night comedy-talk franchise with its “fake news” duo of shows. I won't dwell on the recent decision by Jon Stewart to quit The Daily Show. Once before on this blog I discussed my feelings about him, and they haven't really changed much. I might be the only person not on the right side of the political spectrum who will publicly proclaim that I'm not heartbroken he's leaving. The shark, it jumped for me during the writer's strike several years back when I saw how limited Jon's comic repertoire is.

Granted, familiarity will breed contempt with almost any comedian. A friend of mine uses the expression “seen the dress...” when referring to Stewart and Colbert (he's left of center politically as well), and it's true that anyone appearing several times a week is going to run out of ideas and fall back on funny faces or voices. Two things that have distinguished The Daily Show, though, are the program's well-edited montages of hypocrisy on the 24-7 news channels, and their correspondents, many of whom have come from the groups that are shut out in the late-night talk “wars” (where you've gotta be white, middle-aged, straight, and male, and that's just about it....).

I noted my feelings about Colbert's comedy character in the first part of this blog entry, but following his lead there have been two other “spin-off” series from The Daily Show. One is good, the other great.

The good but still uncertain commodity is The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore. I've been watching it somewhat steadily since it went on, and it is a very pleasant program that works best if you think of it as a news panel show that happens to have a humorous component. Wilmore is a very engaging presence, and the show has been filling a void by having panels of women, people of color, and other communities that you will only see on the 24-7 news programs when their communities are undergoing a tragedy of some kind.

The show begins with a monologue made up of jokes about the news, then the panel, and then, for some wildly misguided reason, nearly every single show I've seen has ended with a segment called “Keeping it 100,” in which Larry asks an either/or question, the kind of thing people will quiz each other with when they're bored at work or at a bar.

It's a very simple comic idea, and the constant repetition of it (perhaps in an effort to carve out an SNL-style fan-favorite segment?) is puzzling. Is there no other notion the writers can think of to close the show with? Presumably, as the weeks move on, they will ditch this segment or just use it once every so often instead of on every episode.

Wilmore is talented enough that having him tied down to one piece of material is ridiculous. [UPDATE: Since I started writing this piece, Larry has presented varied “either/or” question bits to end the show, but tonight's episode, in which he discussed the Ferguson, MO, police force and gave up the “would you rather...?” segment entirely, was quite good.]

The other show that qualifies in a way as a Daily Show “spin-off” is the wonderful “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” on HBO. As a second banana to Stewart on TDS, Oliver did both brilliantly funny segments and goofy ones where he dressed up in silly costumes. Last Week offers extremely intelligent comedy and, more importantly (don't be scared!), there is an educational aspect to the show, as Oliver and his writers are tackling very serious issues in a satirical fashion – real facts are dispensed with jokes as punctuation (yes, this is possible on American TV!).

The first wonderful thing about Last Week is that the most grating aspects of The Daily Show formula are gone: no audience cheering the host's name; no private jokes for the studio audience; no interviews with movie stars pitching their latest film, or authors who get a nice plug but only six minutes to quickly describe their book; random cursing is indeed allowed on HBO, so it *makes sense* on Last Week. (I've never understood cursing that is going to be bleeped – we're supposed to laugh at the absence of a word?)

It's also important that the show is a weekly one — in this regard (despite the title) it's not a true accounting of what happened in the preceding week, nor is it pretending to be. The topics are more generic, but are very important ones that are part of today's social and political scene. The notion of a “daily” comedy news program is problematic from the get-go, in that The Daily Show has gone away for weeks on end, with no Internet updates whatsoever (Oliver and his team are indeed supplying new content during the “off season” — it really is the only way to maintain momentum and continuity).

Also, Stewart, Colbert, and now Wilmore, are often wildly out-of-synch with that day's politics – witness the recent night when *the* story of the evening was the State of the Union speech, which of course hadn't yet occurred when Stewart and Wilmore taped their shows. Thus the shows are constantly playing catch-up and having to ignore the only political events people are caring about on the nights they air (on the recent State of the Union evening, Wilmore's show offered a full episode about the Bill Cosby allegations).

The most important decision made by Oliver and co. was to avoid the latest “blow-ups” and instead cover issues that the average viewer is unaware of. The concept is outlined in fine (and funny) detail, while the phrase encapsulating it — for instance, “native advertising” or the slice of legalese that is “civil forfeiture” — is repeatedly used so that we can wrap our minds around the concept. 

Last Week can thus lay claim to being arguably the smartest political humor show on the air in the U.S. It’s not a surprise that Oliver is at the helm of the show, since he is a fan of the best that British humor has had to offer in the last decade and a half — in interviews he has cited his favorite standups to be Stewart Lee, Dylan Moran, and his friend Daniel Kitson (whom he evokes each time he gets into a “bam!” turnabout moment). He attended Cambridge with future comedy stars Richard Ayoade (The IT Crowd, The Double) and David Mitchell (Peep Show).

Oliver has hosted a podcast with political humorist Andy Zaltzman called “The Bugle” for years now (done with Oliver in NY and Zaltzman in London), and, among his other early credits, was a contributing writer for 2004: The Stupid Version, a special created by the sharpest TV comedy producer in England, Armando Iannucci. I also have it on good authority that he is a diehard fan of the original “fake news” shows created by the visionary Chris Morris.

Thus far, the gold standard for humorous news and media commentary has been the year-end and weekly “Wipe” shows on the BBC hosted by former TV critic turned social commentator Charlie Brooker. Brooker's programs are brilliant dissections of the 24/7 news channels, minus the whooping and hollering (and vaudevillian dick jokes) of The Daily Show. 

Last Week is very different from Brooker's programs, but it shares with them a concern for the way in which news is reported and the public is deceived – or, as in the case of a lot of the topics treated on Last Week, are unaware that these phenomena exist in the first place. The Daily Show is smart- and wise-assed, while Brooker's “Wipe” series and Last Week offer the kind of intelligent, adult news and media dissection that needs to be done on a wider basis but seems only to occur in a humorous context.

Oliver is no longer a comedy sidekick dressing up as Peter Pan or a chimney sweep. He is on premium cable and thus doesn't have to worry about time limitations — perhaps the single most important aspect of the show is that the main segments on Last Week sometimes run as long as 16-17 minutes, something that isn't possible on commercial TV. Jokes are dished out every few minutes, but time is taken to discuss the very serious ramifications of what is being talked about.

The program also comes from a left perspective and is not as Democratic Party-centric as The Daily Show. Last Week has been taking the high ground since it came on, and its newly begun second season has thus far operated on the same high plane.

One of the best jokes in a segment about the use of drones was taken from a “cute” remark that President Obama made warning the Jonas Brothers music group that if they approached his daughters he would use “predator drones... you will never see it comin'!” Seeing the president joke about how deadly the drones are does, of course, remind us that we deal death from the sky, and our Nobel Peace Prize-winning Prez thinks it's okay to joke about it. A similarly pointed segment about the wealth gap in America noted how Americans continue to vote against their own best interests, in the delusional belief that they will some day be very rich and can benefit from the tax breaks that now cripple this country.

The last valuable thing Last Week does is to often conclude segments by offering e-mail addresses or Twitter hashtags that could be used to communicate to the parties responsible for a given problem (as in the case of net neutrality or student debt), or simply to spread the word about the issues being discussed. This is not done with tongue in cheek – the show's attempts to involve the viewer puts it leagues ahead of Bill Maher's Real Time, which simply preaches to the choir and lets an abrasive host tell us what is “right” and “wrong.” (I'm in political and most certainly atheistic agreement with Maher, but goddamn if that guy ain't an arrogant bastard.) 

Last Week started off in an interesting fashion in spring of 2014 by not pandering and doing easy material about U.S. politics, but instead presenting an in-depth segment about the very significant election campaign going on in India at that moment. (Note: This upload is slightly sped up, as you'll notice from the audio; it is, however, the only occurrence of the full segment on YT.)

Another early segment that was brilliantly constructed found Oliver exploring the death penalty issue, while promising that he'd end the segment with a cute-animal video from YouTube. In this way, he would “reward” the viewers who'd watch the intelligent segment – for me, though, the show was making a sharp, funny statement about how Americans require sugar-coating for every fuckin' thing that they watch:

A similar moment in a great segment on nuclear weapons highlighted the biggest problem surrounding a similar issue: that the American public doesn't give a shit about truly dire parts of modern politics (they're evidently too busy dreaming of being rich....).

When Jon Stewart announced his decision to quite The Daily Show, the biggest concern became who will succeed him as host. John Oliver has been mentioned as a top candidate, but I hope he doesn't do it. It certainly pays a shitload of money — Stewart has been earning more than both Letterman and Leno — but it's LCD stuff (not Lorne Michaels brain-damaged LCD, but LCD nonetheless), and Oliver has graduated into creating his own niche of intelligent, in-depth political humor (without the Maher-like arrogance).

It would be a shame if John went from the kind of high-minded, sharp comedy that Last Week Tonight represents and returned to dispensing dick jokes and dressing up like Peter Pan or a chimney sweep.
*****

You can keep up with Last Week Tonight in a totally legal fashion even if you don't have HBO (full disclosure: I don't subscribe to HBO), since the producers of the show have allowed the lengthy segments to be officially posted on YouTube a day or so after they air on HBO.

Fans of British comedy have also been posting the shorter segments to YT, so you can see this incisive piece on how China is trying to erase the memory of Tiananmen Square, this funny segment on Greece's slick finance minister, and a bit that I could not resist including here: a segment noting that wretched rich arrogant bastard Mike Bloomberg has been buying up new “.nyc” URLs that mock him (like fuckbloomberg.nyc). Oliver and his staff came up with insulting URLs that “Mayor Mike” the billionaire forgot to purchase.

The longer piece are the meat of the program, though, so let me spotlight four excellent segments. First, one on “native advertising,” in which the notion of advertisements disguised to look like news (both online and in magazines and newspapers) is examined and mocked at length. I enjoyed this not only as someone who very much agrees with the point that Oliver is making, but as a viewer who never, ever enjoyed Stephen Colbert's “tongue-in-cheek” promotions of real products on the Report (a snarky series of real commercials isn't satire, it's just commerce):

A superb segment on “payday loans” — the predatory lending chains (championed on infomercials) that charge up to 500% (!) interest. This particular segment was the one where I realized that Last Week Tonight wasn't cutting any corners and is a *really* intelligent show that also happens to be very funny. This isn't “fake news” at all, it's very real and very scary in its specifics, but the jokes are all solid as well:

Another excellent full-length segment, this time about “civil forfeiture,” the process by which the police can seize your property — everything from your money or possessions to your car or house — if they feel it has a link to a crime (or, as is outlined in this piece, they simply need the cash or wanted it in the first place). The show stakes out new territory with pieces like this:

To show that the second season of Last Week is thus far just as good, here's a segment that examines how, while smoking has plummeted in the U.S., the tobacco companies have grown in power in third world countries, making cig-junkies out of entire populations. This piece ends with another LWT “campaign” — this one a bit sillier than the others, but the message is very laudable:

And just because this struck me the right way (read: I fuckin' loved it), here's a piece on how the slow death of Radio Shack has been mocked by the media. The chain is perceived as a ridiculous reminder of the past, but Oliver and co. remind us how important the store was to us in years past (and I got news for ya: I have built the Funhouse TV show on a foundation of Radio Shack cords!). Bravo for this kinda satiric sarcasm:

‘Restless’ hosts and the current state of late-night comedy (Part 1 of two)

The last year has seen several late-night hosts flee their shows and others fly into the slots. One can quickly see the result of the hundreds of staff meetings that were held to decide how the new shows should make a splash:

— Don't worry about the “flow” of a particular episode, just assemble the shows out of a series of “viral” segments. To put it simpler: book an A-list guest and make certain to get them to either tell a short tale that works well as a YouTube video, or involve them in a “stupid human trick” (the kind of thing your local bar might find too stupid even for a trivia or talent night).

The goofier the A-lister is willing to be (dress up, dance stupidly, sing badly, do a moronic physical stunt), the higher the recognition and the stronger the “brand” will become. (Conceiving of a show as a 30- or 60-minute entity is so 20th century — just forget it!) Getting an A-lister to act like an idiot = ratings gold.

— Make certain to repeat segments that the audience likes. In some cases, it's possible the audience can made to like anything, so just repeat the segment until the audience becomes so familiar with it that they begin to look forward to it.

Viewers like myself who dread segments that are run into the ground (Larry Wilmore, no more “Keepin' It 100” please!) are not the demographic these producers want — it's those who will devote time to something they don't quite enjoy; hey, people have been watching the walking corpse called SNL for decades after it last exhibited any originality or innovation.

— When a host exits, make sure to ramp up the sentiment as he prepares to say goodbye. Make certain the publicists issue lists of their “last-ever” guests, as if it actually means something. Evoke the specter of Johnny Carson's last shows (Bette Midler singing to him; Johnny alone on the stool; the low-key, homespun farewell). 

— Make sure you replace your white, middle-aged, straight male host with another white, middle-aged, straight male host. If somehow a woman or a person of color gets a show, kill it the instant the ratings dip – if a white guy's ratings start to slide, make certain to keep him on the air for-fuckin'-ever. He is an institution, he has some kind of fan-base, we can save his show.

The women hosts, the black/Latino/Asian hosts (oh right, there never was an Asian host) must hit the scrap heap if there's any question of stability. I know, I know — Chelsea Handler was doing wonderfully at the time she quit; what she did, brilliantly, to attract an audience was move daytime gossip-talk into the late-evening hours... and she got big ratings for a cable network. But not enough for CBS or NBC to want her....

— LCD, LCD, LCD. There is no such thing as too much LCD-thinking. And don't worry about the viewership suspecting this – they'll eventually come around and get used to the host and his (always his!) way of doing things. In fact most of them won't even know that LCD stands for lowest common denominator....

The late-night changes in the last few months have all revolved around three networks: NBC, CBS, and Comedy Central. In the case of NBC, the less said the better — I was never a big Leno fan, but his being edged out because of age was ugly, as was the handing over of all late-night slots to Comedy Criminal No. 1 (tm), Lorne Michaels.

Michaels has been single-handedly responsible for more bad comedy in the last three decades than any other individual, thus earning him that sobriquet. He's now the “realtor” issuing placement on the late-night NBC schedule. His encroachment into weeknights began, of course, with the plucking of Conan out of the writer's room. Conan is pretty self-effacing and did have comedy talent; he's also, natch, a middle-aged, straight white guy.

Jimmy Fallon, on the other hand, is a habitual giggler, and giggling is rrrrreally annoying in comedy (see: Skelton, Red). One can only hope we'll someday discover that he's either drunk or high on the show, because dammit, the shit he's laughing at isn't at all funny. (He's the Harvey Korman of the 21st century, splitting his sides over things that aren't amusing.)

Fallon's version of The Tonight Show took the Jimmy Kimmel formula of fabricating episodes out of “viral videos” (“celebs read their mean tweets – people will love that!”) and ran with it, so that it now can't be classified as a talk show. It is “stupid human tricks” with some sit-down promotional chatter. For his part, Kimmel is now fast on his way to becoming an eminence grise in the late-night world; he's the “guy who next door” whose standup skill has improved somewhat, but whose sketch-acting talent is non-existent.

The peacock network handing the keys to late-night to Comedy Criminal No. 1 (tm) has had nothing on the mess that is CBS late night. Letterman “decided” he would retire shortly after Leno was booted out (gray hair is a no-no in late night now; the latter-day Carson wouldn't last a day). Colbert was chosen as a replacement for him, which makes sense (and, again, adheres to the straight/white/middle-aged formula for late-night). I loved Colbert's character when it began and he was bold, obnoxious, and, on occasion, really mean. He was willing to not get laughs for a while in order to be funny, the true sign of a master comedian:

The interesting thing is that Colbert will be himself, not his beloved conservative blowhard character, on his CBS late-night show. Since the character had indeed jumped several sharks in the last few years (that good old Archie Bunker cuddliness is one of the central problems with American TV comedy), it will be a relief to see him not try to keep that persona up any longer — but will his new “real” persona be based entirely around snark?

The more interesting slot, though, is the one after Letterman, the one which Craig Ferguson recently abandoned (and which was carved out by the always erratic and very watchable Tom Snyder — a straight, white, middle-aged guy, but one who was very much off the conventional charts, as he still valued conversation above all).

The strangest thing about Ferguson was that he was, in my opinion, the most compulsively watchable of the half-dozen-plus late-night hosts (do we count the unkillable Carson Daly?), simply because he made it all look so easy. He also was able to do something none of the others can do: be serious without mawkishness:

He is a standup comic by trade, so his opening monologue flowed beautifully. Of course it was scripted, but he was one of the few late-night hosts who was able to make it look like he was just ad-libbing the whole thing. The ridiculously cheap nature of his talk show made it all the more endearing — no in-house band, a cohost robot (voiced by Josh Robert Thompson), goofy segments involving puppets, and the hoariest of all showbiz clichés: a pantomime horse.

The thing that Ferguson did not excel at was interviewing. He was loose and informal, but he also seemed competitive with his comedian guests — not for him the classic straight-man role inhabited so beautifully by Steve Allen and Carson. He did ask the guests about their current projects and recent activities, but it was pretty much all trite talk inspired by the Carson show-biz model; once Johnny had settled in L.A. and The Tonight Show needed to be “souped up” for the Seventies, the seeds had been planted for today’s “non-interview interviews” (thanks to Robert Klein's “no-news news”) on late-night talk shows.

The single oddest thing about Craig's very low-key last episode was that he had as his sole guest Jay Leno, and the two pretty much admitted they had never really enjoyed conducting interviews. It not only seemed as if they burned out on it, it clearly sounded like they hadn’t *ever* liked doing it. This kind of explained why Craig had been so off-the-cuff while talking to guests (he didn’t care much about what they were saying), but it also sadly undercut the wonderful experiments he had conducted on the show, which included taking it to other countries (something which had been generally avoided since the heyday of Jack Paar and his former writer, Dick Cavett).

He also took a chance at doing a one-guest show, something that been done brilliantly in the b&w days of the medium and later, again, by Cavett. Ferguson’s choice for a sole guest in a show that aired in May of 2013 was the incredibly eloquent and funny Stephen Fry:

Now that Craig has ditched his late-night show (to go back to standup, something he clearly does like to do and does beautifully, and to host a rrrrrreally bad syndicated game show), the Late Late Show slot remains one of the few really interesting things on late-night TV, simply because CBS clearly wants to dump their Ferguson reruns forever and instead is offering a succession of different hosts, from all of the categories that are constantly overlooked for permanent late-night slots: women, people of color, gay entertainers, etc etc.

As a result, you can never be certain what you’ll see in that slot these days: it could be the mundane sight of someone who is under CBS contract (as so many of these hosts are — either because they have an upcoming CBS series coming on, or their older series was cancelled) simply hyping their new show (as Thomas Lennon did), or it could be a more “unconventional” host (like Sean Hayes) interviewing a guest you might usually see only in passing on a late-night show (as with Marion Cotillard, whom he spoke to for two full segments; her film clip was also [gasp] in French with English subtitles!).

So currently the Late Late Show is worth a look-see, if only to see different kinds of hosts doing the late-night thing, and witness their interaction with an oddly unpredictable group of guests. For viewers like myself who prefer an “edge” to their comedy, the late-night shows will never have that ever again. It's too costly for the networks to do anything unpredictable in such valuable “real estate” — thus the involvement of Comedy Criminal No. 1 (tm).

Seeing a revolving group of hosts take on a low-budget late-night show is far more interesting, though, than watching someone who is bored with his job and/or just aiming for the LCD. (Is there any greater way to measure a host's disinterest or tendency towards both LCD-thinking *and* OCD-behavior than to count the giggle-breaks?)

The late-night talk show should serve as both an arena for guests of different stripes (but it never is), and it should also have longer segments that are not purely motivated by a new film/series/book/CD (but it never is). What we can know with the utmost certainty is that The Late Late Show will soon be where it has to be, given the tunnel-visioned network mindset: helmed by yet another straight, white guy who's nearly middle-aged (36), British comic actor James Corden.

Corden may be an unknown commodity here in the U.S., but it's for sure that nothing too radical will occur on his show. It can't — it's late-night network TV....