MUSIC VIDEO: from the LP "Music to Suffer By", by Leona Anderson

I don't believe we've ever postsed two music videos in a row, let alone three, but the news this week, ranging from ridiculous to depressing, is such that Walt just can't bear to write about it. It's time for an interlude!

Accordingly, we are pleased to present, from the library of rightly forgotten music, "Italian Street Song" from "Music to Suffer By", a 1957 LP by Leona Anderson. As you can read below, Ms Anderson was a star of the silent screen. When you listen to this, you'll know why her career faltered with the coming of "talkies".

 

Leona Anderson (née Aronson) was born on 3 April 1885 in St. Louis MO. She was the younger sister of Broncho Billy Anderson, who co-founded Essanay Studios in Chicago in 1907, for which company she appeared in several films, beginning in 1914, without much success.

In 1915, she appeared with Charlie Chaplin in the Essanay Studios comedy In the Park. In 1922, she starred opposite Stan Laurel in the comedy Mud and Sand, a spoof of the Rudolph Valentino film Blood and Sand.

In 1953, Ms Anderson revived her career in music, billing herself as "the world's most horrible singer". Who could argue with that? She became a favorite of comedian Ernie Kovacs and appearing several times on his TV show. Mr Kovacs' widow, Edie Adams, later recalled that "She (Anderson) knew she was camp, but she was very funny, and very sweet."

Discography: In 1953, Leona Anderson recorded a single, "Fish", for a small New York City record label. The song would later appear on the 1997 CD "The Ernie Kovacs Record Collection." This led Columbia Records to issue two singles by Anderson in 1954–55. This was followed by "Music to Suffer By" published by Unique Records in 1957, later reissued in 2011 on Trunk Records. 

"Music to Suffer By" featured Ms Anderson slaughtering several classics and standards, such as Georges Bizet's "Habanera" from Carmen and Cole Porter's "I Love Paris", as well as new material such as "Rats in My Room" and "Limburger Lover". By the late 1950s, she had become widely known for her bad singing, which was apparently an act she created to mock the pompous style of serious opera singers; "Opera singers just can't kid themselves properly," she said. "They can never let their voices go."

Leona Anderson came to Walt's attention and affection for her recording of the theme song for some of the Bob and Ray radio shows on WINS, New York. Yes, we have the video... well, the audio...

Leona Anderson's final film appearance was as the frightening Mrs. Slydes in the 1959 horror film House on Haunted Hill, starring Vincent Price and directed by the legendary William Castle. She died in Fremont CA in 1973, at the age of 88.

VIDEO: "The Dukes of MAGA"

This brilliant parody may have been intended as a campaign ad, but Walt didn't see it until today. MUCH deserving of this repost.

No wonder the Trump Republicans won Georgia... and over 50% of the popular vote.

Brazilian woman tries "Weekend at Bernie's" trick to get bank loan

Walt loves stories about stupid criminals, and this is the best one I've heard in a looooong time. Erika de Souza Vieira Nunes, a resident of a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, has been arrested after she brought her uncle, Paulo Roberto Braga into a bank to co-sign for a loan. Unfortunately, Mr Braga, who was brought in in a wheelchair, was determined to be dead.

The Rio newspaper O Dia reports that, in a CCTV video, Ms Nunes is heard calling Braga her uncle as she speaks to the body and props up his head. "Uncle, are you listening?" she says. "You need to sign [the contract]. If you don’t sign, there’s no way, because I can’t sign for you."

She then grabs a pen and forces it into the hands of the corpse, saying, "Sign so you don’t give me any more headaches, I can’t take it anymore." According to the video, she replies "He doesn't say anything, that's just how he is," before turning to the dead body and adding: "If you're not okay, I'm going to take you to the hospital." 

Bank staff soon became suspicious as the man's head kept falling back so they called the police who arrested Ms Nunes. The cops allege that Mr Nunes, who was 68, had died just hours before, while ly ing down. "She knew he was dead," said the investigating officer. "He had been dead for at least two hours."

Ms Nunes now faces charges of violating a corpse and attempted theft through fraud. Her lawyer says that Mr Braga was alive when he entered the bank. "The facts did not occur as has been narrated. Paulo was alive when he arrived at the bank. All of this will be cleared up. We believe in Érika’s innocence."

In-car entertainment: not as trendy as you might think

As you drive to work this morning -- none of Walt's readers would take the bus, surely!  -- enjoying in-car entertainment on the latest electronic gadget, consider this. Before there were 8-track tapes, cassettes, CDs, Walkmans [Walkmen? Ed.] and MP3s, Laurel and Hardy had this... way back in 1933.

Hope that today, in Brandon's America, you too have a good job to go to -- not you at CNN! LOL -- and wish you a great day!

Thanks to Agent 5 for sending this along.

VIDEO: Bill Burr explains why the kung flu isn't so bad after all

Funny how some stand-up routines stand the test of time. Two of my favourite comedians, George Carlin and Bill Burr, have had some good things to say, long ago, which are even more relevant today. In this short clip, from a performance in 2010, Bill tells us why he's in favour of the flu!

VIDEO: What was Bill Burr doing on "Saturday Night Live"?

Walt doesn't watch Saturday Night Live for obvious reasons -- there's enough anti-Trump propaganda on the news -- so was mildly surprised that they had Bill Burr on this weekend. I wondered if BB would dilute the vitriol in his usual routine to suit the tastes (read: prejudices) of SNL's New York liberal producers... and audience. Here's what happened.

   

Seemed to me that Mr Burr stayed more or less true to form. But so did the audience. He was dying out there! The American people -- those on the coasts, anyway -- are so woke that nothing is funny any more. Everything must be taken seriously, so you can't rag on gay pride, white women, "wokeness" or any of the liberal shibboleths and expect to not be the next victim of the cancel culture. 

One of our assiduous readers commented, "I find the whole drift into swearing, open sex, and incorrectness sad." Maybe our reader never listened to one of Bill Burr's monologues before, but I have to tell you, this wasn't your normal Big Balls Billy speaking. Compared with something like "The Philadelphia Incident", he toned his act down for lamestream TV. 

Even so, the usual suspects dropped the shithammer on him for being insensitive, politically incorrect, yada yada yada. But "Being furious about Bill Burr's caustic comedy is a waste of time", as the Globe and Mail's John Doyle wrote yesterday. For those who can't or won't punch through the paywall, here's part of his review.

Bill Burr...opts for that old-fashioned stance of reason over passion. Some comics are enraged by what they call "cancel culture" and deliberately provoke in order to push boundaries and buttons. Burr simply takes the view that, as he sees it, sensitivity issues have gone too far. He's a 52-year-old white guy, married to a Black woman, he tells jokes and acts for a living, and he's skeptical about a lot of things.

It's easy to take Burr's jokes out of context, string them together and paint a picture of him as a misogynist jerk. In a recent interview, he said, "Comedy is a pastime. The pastime is making fun of something you're not supposed to make fun of because that gives you a mental break from all the taxing crap you have to do. Not everything has to be important."

Bill Burr: Paper Tiger, taped at the Royal Albert Hall in London, is the most recent and a fascinating example of Burr's tactics, and it's especially trenchant because he's not talking to an American audience in the venue. He gets busy mocking feminism, the #MeToo movement and Michelle Obama.

Paper Tiger is where he is now. He's like someone who shed the straitjacket of insecurity about his role and his humour. He's not aiming to demolish the current culture of outrage and sensitivity. He sees it for what it is, a movement that sometimes puts passion over reason and his lived experience tells him to be skeptical. He's nobody's enemy and he's no destroyer. He's just saying that everything is flawed, including him.

Couldn't have said it better myself. [You can say that again. Ed.] I hope Bill Burr keeps talking. It's so good to hear someone say what so many of us are thinking, and if the "woke" types don't like it, that't too [expletive deleted. Ed.] bad!

VIDEO: Sunday Funnies with George Carlin

This seems like a good time to give you, dear readers, a break from the bullshit of the impreachment witch-hunt ["hearings", shurely! Ed.]. But we mustn't forget what a steaming load of bullshit is excreted in Washington every day -- past, present and future. To remind us, who better than George Carlin. Here's an old(ish) and long(ish) but good (for sure) video of a speech he made at the National Press Club, in which he spends much time dissecting and rejecting the way politicians talk, thus implicating (as Mr Carlin says) the press corps which faithfully records the bullshit and passes it along to a gullible public.

You can skip the introductions, including Mr Carlin's self-introduction. The good stuff begins at 10:40.

VIDEO: Tim Conway: Mr Tudball hires a secretary, all the outtakes

Tim Conway, the second banana who quickly became the star of the Carol Burnett Show (IMHO) passed away yesterday, at age 85. In memoriam, we're reposting the long version of the outtakes of the sketch in which Mr Tudball and Mrs Wiggins meet for the first time. There's a shorter version on YouTube, but the long version disappeared some time ago. Fortunately, Ed. downloaded it for the WWW archives. You need to see the first couple of minutes, before the entrance of Mrs Wiggins, to understand what follows. Enjoy.



Farewell, Tim, and RIP. Hope you're looking down on us from above and laughing.

VIDEO: "Cheesy the Christmas Rat", sung by Red Green (and Harold)

Ed. here. Walt had to go all the way into downtown Fort Mudge to do his Christmas shopping -- left it till the last minute as usual -- and has called to say he won't be back until sometime tomorrow, too late to write anything to fill this space. But that's your good luck, because Walt's absence allows me to post a delightful new(ish) song which is bound to become a Christmas classic. It's "Cheesy the Christmas Rat", sung(ish) by Red Green and his nerdy nephew Harold.



Red (Steve Smith) and Harold (Pat McKenna) and the other members of Possum Lodge have been entertaining millions of real men (and a few women) since 1991. Reruns currently air on The Comedy Network and various PBS stations. Click here to visit the official Red Green website.

VIDEO: Is Trump funny? SNL alumnus Norm Macdonald answers

Norman Gene Macdonald, better known as Norm Macdonald, is a Canadian stand-up comedian, writer, producer, actor and all-round funny guy, eh! (Why so many of these funny guys are Canucks is one of the Great Mysteries of the North.) He is known for his five seasons as a cast member on Saturday Night Live, which included three years as anchor of the "Weekend Update" segment. Early in his career, he wrote for the sitcom Roseanne and made appearances on shows including The Drew Carey Show and NewsRadio. He starred in The Norm Show from 1999 to 2001. Paste named him #31 of their 50 Best Stand-up Comics of All Time.

Norm has a brother, Neil Macdonald, an arch anti-Trumper and all-round liberal who masquerades as a journalist with CBC News. I wanted to find out if Norm shared his brother's gene for progressive bullshit, so tuned in to an interview he gave to Joyce Napier on rival CTV's Question Period earlier today. Turns out Norm has a better opinion of President Trump than does brother Neil, and shares Walt's opinion of Hellery Clinton. He has comments, too, on the Prez and Alec Baldwin's unfunny impression of President Trump. Give a listen.



Note from Poor Len Canayen: I trust that all you hockey fans noticed the CH on Norm's cap.

Thoughts on viewing "SNL40": we are getting old

Have you ever played, or just thought about "the Six Degrees of Separation"? The nub of the parlour game (or idle pastime) is that you're probably no more than six handshakes away from just about anyone on earth. Think "I'm a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of [fill in a name here]". Pick someone -- anyone -- and put his/her/its name in the blank, then work the connections backwards until you come to yourself. You can probably do it in five or four steps, maybe fewer.

I was thinking about this last night, watching the Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special. (Poor Len saw it too. He reckons it was on Sunday night to avoid a conflict with the excellent Habs-Leafs hockey game on Saturday.) One of the guest introducers was Jack Nicholson, one of my all-time favourite actors.

Jack Nicholson knows Lorne Michaels, the Canadian-born creator and producer of SNL.  Lorne Michaels went to school with a Toronto businessman who went to the same school as Agent 3, who later worked with that same businessman. And Walt has known Agent 3 for donks. So there you are.

But the real reason I'm mentioning Jack Nicholson and SNL40 is that I was appalled by how we're all aging -- Lorne Michaels, the Toronto businessman, Agent 3, and, yes, Jack Nicholson. This is how he looked in About Schmidt, released in 2002. Know what? I don't believe he needed a whole lot of makeup for that picture. He probably looked like that at the time, and now, even tidied up for the black-tie event, he looks even older!

And why not? Do the math. SNL debuted 40 years ago. The original cast members were mostly in their 20s or early 30s, which makes them 60-ish and 70-ish in 2015. Jack Nicholson was born in 1937, for goodness sake! That makes him 78! Robert DeNiro, who also appeared last night, was born just three days after Walt, and looks it too. Cornelius Crane* was born less than two months after Walt and Jack, and Lorne Michaels (né Lipowitz) a year later. Good grief! We're a bunch of geezers!

Baby-boomers in last night's all-star cast included Bill Murray (1950), Dan Aykroyd (1952) and Jerry Seinfeld (1954). The youngest SNL members I thought deserved top billings were Martin Short (1960), Eddie Murphy (1961) and Mike Myers (1963). Even Tina Fey is a child of the hippy-dippy 60s, born in May 1970 (so conceived around September of 1969) in Upper Darby PA (bit of trivia for you there). She'll be 45 in May. 45!   

They're all getting old, just like the rest of us. But I do wonder why there aren't more funny people in Generations X, Y and Z (or whatever today's 20-somethings are called). When we think about funny sitcoms, funny sketch comedies, funny movies, we think of people like those mentioned -- OK, Bobby DeNiro wasn't a comedian -- and shows like SNL, SCTV and Seinfeld. (Larry David appeared to. He was born in 1947.)

Where are the comic talents of today? Is it possible that life in America** just isn't funny any more? That's what I think. How sad.

PS - Ed. wants to know what I thought of the show itself. Well... in spite of all the high-priced talent -- working for free? really? -- SNL40 was... well... meh. Basically a clip show that could have been done (and done better) in 2 hours, tops, rather than 3 and 1/2.

PPS - Speaking of getting old... could Paul McCartney (DOB 18/6/42) ever sing? Did he need the money that badly?

* "Cornelius Crane" is the birth name of Chevy Chase. You're welcome.

** Poor Len craves leave to draw attention to the disproportionate number of Canadians who made it big with SNL and American comedy in general. Martin Short, Dan Aykroyd, Mike Myers, and SNL creator/producer Lorne Michaels are Canadians. So are (or were) John Candy, Eugene Levy, Rick Moranis, Andrea Martin, Catherine O'Hara and (reaching way back) Mack Sennett. When you come from such a nitwit nation as Canada, you can't help but be funny!

The Komodo dragon expert

There's a story on the AP mojo wire this morning from the wilds of eastern Indonesia. It's in that eastern part of the archipelago [How long have you been waiting to use that word? Ed.] that you would find the islands of Komodo, Padar and Rinca, home of the fabled and fearsome Komodo dragon.

Yes, folks, the Komodo dragon really does exist. And here's what one looks like.

Ugly brute, isn't it? How would you feel if one of those wandered into your workplace? Well, that's what happened at Komodo National Park, where one of the monster reptiles attacked two park rangers... in their office!

A KNP spokesthingy, Heru Rudiharto -- no hero he! -- said the 2-metre-long lizard bit the rangers badly enough that  both had to be evacuated to a hospital on Bali.

This story reminded me of a classic sketch by the greatest radio comedians ever to be heard on US airwaves. I refer of course to Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding,  known to legions of fans as "Bob and Ray".

The Bob and Ray Show began, more by accident than anything else, in 1946 on WHDH in Boston. It ran under various titles on national networks including NBC and NPR, until 1987. There was even a TV version, briefly, back in the golden (i.e. black-and-white) years. The TV version didn't do all that well, possibly because the spoofs were created for radio, and didn't depend at all on visuals for the gags.

It came as something of a surprise, then, when stage versions -- Bob and Ray: the Two and Only and A Night of Two Stars -- played for months to packed houses at Carnegie Hall and on the road. Walt was there, and remembers clearly hearing and watching them do one of their best radio sketches, "The Komodo Dragon expert". No video has found its way to YouTube, but here's the audio portion.



Hey... they're not making that stuff up. What the expert told you are the facts about Komodo dragons. If you'd like to know more about life in the land they come from -- eastern Indonesia -- you're in luck, because one of Walt's agents lives and works there. Click here to read her blog, "Life is a gift; live it!" Good words to remember, especially if a Komodo dragon wanders into your workplace.

Red Green gives you some Christmas laughs

As is well known (see earlier post), Canadians suck at sitcoms and excel at sketch comedy. However, we have not discussed an eminently funny and internationally successful Canadian show which is neither. That would be The Red Green Show, sometimes known as The New Red Green Show.

The Wikipedia entry for The Red Green Show describes it as a cross between a sitcom and a sketch show. Walt says the only thing "cross" about it is Mrs. Walt's expression every time Red and the Possum Lodge gang come on the air.

Really the show is a series of monologues by Red (Steve Smith) or dialogues between Red and his nephew Harold (Pat McKenna) or other lodge members and friends, including such notable actors as Gordon Pinsent, Dave Thomas and -- as you'll see -- Graham Greene.

The writing, by Steve Smith, Rick Green (who appears but does not speak as Bill Smith) and others is brilliant, although some would say you have to be Canadian to get all the jokes. In keeping with the spirit of the season, Walt presents [geddit? ed.] a couple of Christmas segments.





The Red Green Show aired on various channels in Canada, with its ultimate home at CBC, and on PBS in the United States, from 1991 until the series finale in April 2006. It's in reruns on some comedy channels and PBS stations.

Yep, there's a website. PBS also has a Red Green page. "Keep your stick on the ice!"

SCTV is (back) on the air!

Let's face it. Canadian sitcoms stink. Remember King of Kensington? And how about the execrable Little Mosque on the Prairie?

You probably haven't seen or heard of either of those, even if you live north of the border. King was created by a Canadian Norman Lear wannabe. It tried to be sensitive and funny at the same time and succeeded at neither. As for Little Mosque, it starts with a ridiculous premise -- the title says it all -- and goes downhill from there.

It's not that Canadians have no sense of humour. There's a lot more good-natured irreverence in Canada than in the counterpart society to the south. Unlike their American cousins, Canadians know theirs is a nitwit country, and they're not afraid to laugh at themselves. Who do you think writes all those Canadian (and other) gags for The Simpsons and South Park?

Walt thinks the problem is that most Canadian sitcoms are commissioned by and for the deadly dull Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a public (i.e. government-owned) broadcaster so politically correct that it's impossible to poke fun at any identifiable group except maybe the Church.

Yet making fun of racial, ethnic and religious characteristics of one group or another is the essence of most of the jokes you'll hear around the water cooler or at the watering hole. Sketch comedy, fortunately, is another matter. Some would say that sketches are a lower art form, but in reality they require better writing and better, funnier ideas than sitcoms. There's a lot more to creating a funny TV sketch than dressing some actors up in funny clothes and makeup (e.g. Coneheads) and letting them do slapstick for a couple of minutes.

Canadians do sketch comedy superbly. And one of the best Canadian sketch comedy shows, SCTV, is back on the air. Incredibly, SCTV (Second City Television) was originally broadcast on the CBC from 1976 through 1984.

That network's insistence on political correctness led to the creation of the famous "Great White North" sketches, featuring Bob and Doug Mackenzie (Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis), which begat a movie, Strange Brew.

Even Americans found the Mackenzie Brothers hilarious. Thomas and Moranis said in an interview that they didn't think Americans realized the characters were Canadian, "only a couple of dumb guys". Here's a sample.



Check the cable and satellite listings for the comedy channels and you'll likely find SCTV somewhere. It's still funny, a quarter of a century later.

Postscript: These days the CBC would never allow the "Great White North" segment. God forbid that Canadians should ever say that theirs was a white society. That would imply that people of non-whitish hues don't belong. We couldn't have that...eh...