September 9, 2015--Take My Husband, Please

Suddenly everyone is talking about funny.

Last night Stephen Colbert took over the Late Show. People have been anticipating and talking about it for nine long, long months. Would he be as funny being Stephen Colbert as he was inhabiting his crazed right-wing persona? People wondered if what we will get on CBS as opposed to the Comedy Channel will be the "real" Colbert.

Illusion and reality. Remember that from your introductory college lit course?

We managed to stay up late enough to see at least a little of the new show and it only served to remind me how much I miss his old one. Not that he wasn't funny. It's just that he wasn't so trenchantly and deliriously funny. But time will tell.

It will help if he'll soon move on from all the self-referential shtick that made up so much of last night's monologue.

One of his guests was Jeb Bush, about the least funny, low energy politicians in America. OK, you got me, there's George Pataki. And Ben Carson. And, to be fair and balanced, Martin O'Malley.

These days you can't run for the presidency without appearing on the equivalent of Laugh In (Richard Nixon) or Arsinio Hall (Bill Clinton in shades playing the sax) or John McCain on Saturday Night Live (of course Sarah Palin too--both as herself and in Tina Fey's realer-than-life incarnation).

When he was running, Barack Obama showed up everywhere, from Jay Leno to doing skits on SNL to boogying with Ellen to trading quips with Letterman and Kimmel.

Wooden candidates from Michael Dukakis to Al Gore, some say, lost the presidency because they lacked a sense of humor. They were missing the "likability" factor.

Speaking of likability, do you recall back in 2008 how when candidate Hillary Clinton was faulted for not being likable, during one of the debates, Obama was asked what he thought about that?

With impeccable timing he said, "She's likable [one beat, two beats] enough." He was roundly criticized for that.

But you know (one beat, two beats) he was right.

She was, and is, not a natural politician and thus comes across as not that likable. Which these days can be a fatal problem.

But that's about to change.

Her campaign over the weekend announced that they're going back to the drawing board and the new Hillary Clinton they promised will be likable.

The scripted, extra-careful, humorless Hillary is about to be funny.

And, risking a gender-bending reaction, it was announced she will be more spontaneous. In the words of her campaign managers, she will speak "from the heart."

What they failed to note is that claiming they can just turn on the funny switch and thereby humanize Hillary is further confirmation that her campaign, and the candidate herself, is an artificial construct.

One minute she's sober and presidential, the next she's hanging out in the back of the press bus knocking down beers and cracking jokes with reporters and getting booked on Ellen and The Tonight Show.

How phony will her new personality seem? I suspect she will come across as pandering and desperate. And it will ironically underscore what many think about her--that she's inauthentic.

Yes, Hillary makes fun of her 'dos ("The hair is real, the color isn't"), which is sort of funny, at least the first time you hear it. But the fact that it is now part of her anti-TRUMP stump speech--he clearly has hair issues--makes it less funny every time it's repeated.

Pretty pathetic.

But, hey, this is 2015! Get with it. It's all about social media and because of social media it's all about being cool and likable. And being likable means you have to be funny.

Even if you aren't.

January 16, 2015--Size Matters

The one place size really matters is when it come to the size of one's apartment, condo, or house.

We're talking less about the number of bed and bath rooms (though this counts too) but square footage. And we're not talking about how much square footage one needs to be comfortable--700 per person is more than enough--but how much square footage one needs to feel, literally, like the king of the hill. In this case we could be talking about seven bedroom-seven bathroom houses ranging upwards from 10,000 to 20,000 square feet. Places that begin at $5.0 million and could set you back $75 million or more.

Mine is bigger than yours is the name of the game.

A cautionary tale--

Out in Malibu, ordinances restrict houses to no more than 11,100 square feet; and so back in 2007 when Hong Kong multi-multimillionaire Hiroshi Horiike saw one advertised by Coldwell that was 15,000 square feet and was going for only $12.25 million he plunked down cash and was a happy camper.

Happy, that is, until more recently when he wanted to add a sunroom and, after submitting plans to the county planning commission, learned that the house was not 15,000 square feet as advertised but a mere 10,000. So he is suing everyone in sight, especially the celebrity broker, Chris Cortazzo, who sold him the house. The same Cortazzo who peddled properties to Ellen DeGeneres. Pamela Anderson, Kid Rock, and other such luminaries.

I think he has a strong case and understand why he would want $5.0 million in damages; but here's what I don't understand--

Mr. Horiike seemed to like his Tuscan-style mansion enough to want to add a sunroom so why is he now so unhappy with it? Because he feels tricked? Because he feels like a fool for not having someone independently verify the square footage? Didn't he realize that real estate brokers can be a lower form of life right down there with used car salesmen?

Not for any of these understandable reasons. In his own words, according to a story in the New York Times, the house he loved when he learned it's a third smaller than he thought, he no longer loves--

"I don't love my house. It has become a bad dream. It has broken my heart and broke my dream about American people. Before I thought everything here is beautiful. And perfect."

So he didn't love the house. He love its size. Not a size that offered him enough space to roll around in and feel happy but the size itself. Or at least the idea of it.

March 4, 2014-Oscars

I think I figured out why the Academy Awards are so boring.

It's not because neither Bob Hope nor Johnny Carson are available to serve as hosts. Though for me almost anyone other than Ellen DeGeneres would be an improvement.

It's not because the actresses are so afraid of what Joan Rivers will say the next day about their gowns on Fashion Police that they tend to pick and wear ones that are so safe and predictably "glamorous."

The show is not awful because there are so many technical awards--after all films are a technical medium and camera work, sound, editing, and special effects are much about what makes movies special. Besides, without all these awards the show would be over in an hour and a half and we would miss all the commercials.

And, though the winning songs tend to be the worst of the ones nominate (this year's for Frozen a case in point), this too is not why the Oscar's show is so forgettable.

It's because the winners are so interminably borrrrring.

If I had thought to do so, in the tradition that it's all right, even expected, to be bitchy about the Oscars' show, I would have used a stop watch to calculate how much time was spent by the winners thanking people. They get a couple of minutes to make their acceptance speeches before music is played to get them off stage and for the most part, with the exception of Jared Leto, who won for best supporting actor, and Steve McQueen, director of 12 Years a Slave, every winner spent virtually all their allotted time thanking everyone from their parents (inevitable) to their hair person.

This left no time for anyone to say something funny or pithy. Forget memorable.

I was left to thinking that Jared Leto saying a few words about AIDS and Ukraine was courageous and wondering if Cate Blanchett would have the "courage" to thank her director, Woody Allen. He's in trouble once more because one of Mia Farrow's 100 children two weeks ago again accused him of molesting her when Woody was living with Mia, which must have been a nightmare. I mean, living with Mia Farrow.

Cate did manage to muster enough courage to mutter something about how Woody was good enough to cast her for the film. Cast, take note, not direct. I guess that made what she felt compelled to say seem more benign.

So here's my suggestion--as an experiment, next year, tell all nominees that if they win they are allowed to thank only their families and God. (Thank God this year only Matthew McConaughey pointed to the heaven and gave thanks before lapsing into incoherence.)

This way, they could get someone to write something funny for them or, who knows, maybe even something clever, witty, or meaningfully political. Or they could just wing it and look ridiculous. That would give people like me more ammunition to make fun of the whole thing.

By the way, the best performance by an actor was Bruce Dern's in the best film, Nebraska.