Teenagers on sit-coms

You know how, on sit-coms, the kids get old, so they start bringing in new kids in vain hope of keeping the show alive? On The Brady Bunch, they brought in Cousin Oliver. They adopted a child on The Donna Reed Show, Leonardo DiCaprio moved in with the family on Growing Pains, they somehow adopted Ernie on My Three Sons even though it was the '60's and Fred MacMurray was a single father, and the list goes on and on.

I watched part of Modern Family yesterday and was horrified to realize that I was a typical viewer. I don't want to watch teenagers who aren't cute anymore. How can I be so callous?

Part of it is how the characters' personalities develop as they grow up. It seems like they all become successful, popular high schoolers, never social outcasts. Manny was coming home from a date and preparing for his prom when he should have been sitting around the house alone all the time or hanging around with friends even more socially isolated than him.

One final attack on Jerry Lewis

Am I wrong to hate Jerry Lewis? Should I identify with him? Defend and support him? He was abandoned by his parents who were on the road performing, held back a year in grade school. He dropped out of high school. I wouldn't believe it without evidence, but he claimed that he was kicked out of high school for punching his principal and sending him crashing through a plate glass window because he was an anti-Semite. I don't think it's that easy to crash through a plate glass window---if it were, people would do it all the time---Lewis wasn't that tough as an adult and I'm sure he was far less so at 15, and the guy couldn't have been very anti-Semitic if he passed up a chance to send a Jew who brutally assaulted him to reform school.

Lewis was even rejected by the Army---he stayed out of World War Two because he was 4F. He went for years talking about the "love" between him and Dean Martin, but Martin rejected him. Critics sneered at his moronic screen persona.

And it wasn't just his persona that was moronic. He was pretty much sub-verbal. He never said anything funny. His "comedy" consisted entirely of making faces and talking in a funny voice. He never said anything funny in interviews---he was like Gallagher and Dustin Diamond in this regard.

No wonder he abused his children.

Now, compare him to Woody Allen. Allen isn't educated but wants people to think he is. So he drops names. Throws in a few Kierkegaards and Shopenhauers. He shows no sign that he knows anything about them, but people assumed that he must be smart. Jerry Lewis, borderline verbal as he was, just told you straight out that he was a genius.

There's a video on You Tube of Lewis talking about Joan Rivers. He was glad she was dead simply because she once said that he was promoting his career with his telethons. Lewis said that he responded to Rivers' comment by writing her a note threatening to hire the mafia to go after her if she ever said anything about him or his career or telethons again.

There have been feuds between comedians before, but usually they weaponize their comedy to attack each other. Andy Kindler, for example, said that the difference between Bill Maher and Hitler was that Hitler didn't laugh every time he told a joke. I've never heard of comedians responding to each other with direct physical threats, although Buddy Hackett probably did at some point.

But Jerry Lewis's thing worked. He went for years crudely stating that he was a comic and cinematic genius and a great humanitarian, and apparently people went along with it, even those who had to have known better.

Jerry Lewis's alleged IQ

I turned on the radio. Fresh Air with Terry Gross happened to be on and they were playing an interview they once did with Jerry Lewis. At one point, he said he got his way in negotiations with studios because of his 168 IQ.

How would he know what his IQ was and how would that help in negotiations? I googled it when I got home.

It turns out that Lewis used to claim to have an IQ of 190. He's quoted on imdb.com as saying, "I'm a multi-faceted, talented, wealthy, internationally famous genius. I have an IQ of 190 -- that's supposed to be a genius. People don't like that. My answer to all my critics is simple: I like me. I like what I've become. I'm proud of what I've achieved, and I don't really believe I've scratched the surface yet."

He must have decided that 190 was too high to be plausible and was a suspiciously round number. So he decided it was 168. More recently, an interviewer asked if he really had a 190 IQ. He said no, it was 145.  

The other implausible claim in that quote was "I like me." If he did, he wouldn't have spewed that nonsense about his IQ.

Jerry Lewis RIP

"RIP to Jerry Lewis, a giant of comedy, film,

 and philanthropy" is what he'd want us all to say today.

 --J Elvis Weinstein

"He blatantly tells you on network TV that he is the epitome of 

the socially conscious man, a great humanitarian ... Actually,
he’s one of the most hostile and unpleasant guys I’ve ever seen."

--Elliot Gould

Jerry Lewis and his brutalized son, Gary.

In 1989, Jerry Lewis's son Joseph talked at length to the National Enquirer. One thing he said that stood out in my mind is that Lewis had a huge master bath in his house. He had back trouble and insisted that the bathroom floor was the only floor hard enough for him to lie on. The bathroom had a TV, an intercom, a mini refrigerator and maybe a kitchenette---I don't remember. He would stay in there for days. I wished I had a bathroom like that.

Lewis's son said that the house had an intercom system and they naturally assumed that they could turn it off in their rooms and have some privacy. But when Lewis moved out and abandoned his wife and children, they discovered that he could sit in his giant bathroom and listen in on them even when they had turned the thing off in their rooms.

Several things from the Enquirer article were confirmed here on a YouTube video of Lewis's 1968 appearance on what looks like a daytime talk show hosted by Joan Rivers. Lewis proudly tells about one time that he belt-whipped his fourteen year old son. He said that he "literally put a couple of welts on his bottom."

No one had the bad taste to ask how he KNEW the kid had welts on his bottom. Obviously, he whipped his son with the kid's pants down. And, again, the kid was fourteen.

In this case, Lewis, who didn't graduate from high school and was held back a year in elementary school, was punishing his son for bad grades.

In the video, Lewis says he sent his son to his room then went to the intercom because "I wanted to hear him cry." It confirms what the Enquirer said about him having the intercom set up so he could lock himself in the bathroom and listen in on his family. They should just be glad CCTV wasn't widely available back then.

I had heard that Lewis bragged to Tom Snyder on The Tomorrow Show that he would spank his sons at parties in front of guests. My impression was that he would have parties and make the kids come down in their pajamas and bathrobes and greet the guests before going to bed and he would become enraged if they didn't do this in exactly the way he wanted.

So. Jerry Lewis, dead at 91.

I think I was fairly nice in recent posts about him. I didn't mock The Day the Clown Cried. I expressed some sympathy for his feelings of inferiority and noted his artistic success. I didn't make fun of the French for taking him seriously.

I was going to write something nice here until I saw that YouTube clip.

The murdering Nazi James Alex Fields, Jr

In school, there were always a few kids who had a not-entirely-grudging admiration for the Nazi military in World War Two. The Brits had more attractive and perhaps better aircraft, but Messerschmitts looked so manly.

In the '70's, there was a report on a TV news magazine. A neo-Nazi explained that he first got into Nazism because he was into military stuff and the Nazis seemed so good at it. He was in the Army himself and got married in an Army uniform with a Nazi armband added (can't they be court martialed for that?)

And now we have this Nazi, James Alex Fields, Jr, who is charged with murder after he drove his car through a crowd of counter demonstrators. His high school teacher said he had written a long paper on the Nazi military. The teacher tried unsuccessfully to steer him away from Nazism. 

Fields joined the Army himself but got kicked out after four months for unknown reasons and he was once accused of beating his disabled mother and threatening her with a knife. He was on medication at the time to control his temper tantrums. In another incident, she told him to take a break from a videogame so he "smacked her in the head" and locked her in the bathroom.

In 2015, Fields went on a school trip to Europe. Fields hated the French and only wanted to visit "the Fatherland", Germany. 

A classmate, Keegan McGrath, told reporters, "He just really laid on about the French being lower than us and inferior to us." He argued with Fields. It became so heated that he went home after a few days because he couldn't stand being in a room with him.

Why did that Nazi bastard get to go to Europe? They never did that at my school.

Fields had taken high school German for two years. He made a Holocaust joke in class.

Well, let's all hope that his life is over and that he'll never see the light of day again.

He was from Kentucky. Defense attorneys have noted that people from out of state are often treated more harshly by courts. Let's hope they're right in this case.

Nolan Gould vs Shia LaBeouf

I saw this thing online. A photographer liked Nolan Gould from Modern Family who was about 12 at the time. He contacted Gould's agent and asked to photograph him. So they said okay. He took pictures of the young fellow on a beach wearing a tuxedo with no shoes. I thought they were pretty good.

See, THAT'S the way an artist should use a celebrity.

Much better than the lazy, stupid Shia LaBeouf performance art crap. They should try to make up for the lack of aesthetics in conceptual or performance art by being interesting or intelligent, but they haven't bothered.

I suppose chanting "He will not divide us" for four to eight years might be art, but it's stupid art. Seems like the intrusion of Nazis created a little interest, a little tension, something for them to triumph over with their refusal to be divided, but LaBeouf and the other "artists" thought their brilliant work was ruined.

It was somewhat less annoying than the paper-bag-on-his-head art.

Do the "artists" make any money off this stuff?

The Naked Witch (1961)

I'm apparently not the only one who does this. You can turn on the same movie night after night and it will put you to sleep. I've been watching The Naked Witch over and over. Directed by Larry Buchanan. It was bankrolled by a Texas drive-in theater owner who wanted as much nudity in it as possible. It was made in 1960, and apparently very little nudity was possible back then.

It was only an hour long. First there's several minutes of documentary narrated by Gary Owens about witchcraft through the ages with paintings as illustrations. Then there's several minutes of travelogue about central Texas which, it turns out, is full of Germans.

Then we get down to the story. A college boy studying the history of witchcraft arrives in Luckenbach, Texas. He inexplicably digs up a witch's grave with his bare hands and steals the stake that was stuck through her causing her to come back to life. Her clothes had disintegrated over the 120 years she had been buried requiring her to walk around bare naked as she seeks revenge.

It was pretty good. When your only purpose in making a movie is to show as much nakedness as possible, you don't think too hard about the storyline. Contrast this with Plan 9 From Outer Space with its four or five separate plots which all come together in the end.  I found myself mindlessly accepting the implausible digging up the grave thing. The story drifts along. A lot of it is silent with narration. The college boy feels guilty about bringing the witch back to life and feels he should help stop her.

I wondered about the children in this movie. The travelogue portion features a German Texan children's choir all dressed in traditional German costume. Did they know they were in a nudie film? They had a close-up of a little German girl cheerfully singing to the camera. Those poor kids couldn't go to their own movie because it was full of nudity. Although, come to think of it, it wasn't released until four years after it was made so some of the kids might have been 18 by then or may have looked old enough to bluff their way in.