John Oliver returned last night with the new season of his Last Week Tonight.  After my recent move, my cable subscription changed -- since I was grandfathered in with my old Time-Warner subscription, and my new Spectrum account includes several premium channels at pretty much the same price.  And this includes HBO which means I finally got to see Oliver's entire show for the first time, rather than just segments.  

I've long been a huge John Oliver fan -- no, seriously, a huge fan beyond the norm, even recommending him to a movie producer only six weeks after his first appearance as a "correspondent" on The Daily Show (going so far as having a friend who was a writer on the show put together a reel of Oliver's best work).  So, this was a long-awaited treat.  And happily, the show did not disappoint.  It was quite wonderful.

But at the center was his look at what will happen with the deadline for the official Brexit only weeks ago.  It was deeply detailed and informative, highly entertaining, and (at its core, of course, this being a comedy show) incredibly funny.

Side Note:  The film project I recommended him for never ended up going forward, so it wasn't a case of him "rejected" by the producer.  Just normal Hollywood Development Hell.  So, the movie world's loss was HBO's gain.
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Happy Valentine's Day.  This is a video I've posted in the past with Conan O'Brien, and as it's about today that would make it seem to be a fine day to repeat it.
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James Corden sent his parents down to Atlanta to cover the Super Bowl there and its surrounding activities before the game.  Similar to when David Letterman sent him mom to events, I thought the segments with Dorothy Letterman were funnier because she was more endearing (and I suspect the writers had better set-ups), but the Cordens are more game to taking part, especially his dad.

In honor of the gobbldygook that will tonight's State of the Union Address, I thought it would be appropriate to post an excerpt from Larry Gelbart's masterful work, Mastergate: A Play On Words.  An excellent TV production of the Broadway play was done a while back, from which these four-minutes come.  It's classic Gelbart which is saying a lot, a virtuosic satire of Congressional hearings where a significant amount of effort is expended to sound like you're saying a great deal that is meaningful while doing your best to say absolutely nothing to protect yourself and hide what you did or may have done or might do, if you did it on the day in question...  

Being Super Bowl Day, I thought this comedy sketch was particularly appropriate.  But first a little bit of background.

​In the early 1900s, the University of Chicago had one of the powerhouse college football teams in the country.  They were particularly renowned for their coach, the legendary Amos Alonzo Stagg who began with the school in 1892, and stayed with them for 41 years, thought 1933.  But within just six years, the school dropped their football program in 1939.  And they stayed without an official football team in 1969.

Which brings us to the Second City and this famous 1961 sketch, "Football Comes to the University of Chicago."  It's a look at an attempt to bring football back to the college by first offering a class that teaches the sport, in hopes of recruiting players.

I was only able to find audio of the sketch on YouTube, but then audio is how I fist heard it years ago on the Saturday night Midnight Special radio show on WFMT in Chicago.  Several years later, I saw the Second City do the sketch on television -- and happily that exists, and I was able to track it down on Vimeo.

Here then are Andrew Duncan as the professor, and his few students -- a very young Alan Arkin, Eugene Troobnick, and coming in last, perhaps my favorite performer from Second City (who I've written about) the great Severn Darden, the fellow with the beard.

A caveat -- this isn't the full sketch, but an edited 3-1/2 minute version that cuts off early.  However, I'll also post the audio of the complete sketch afterwards with where it picks up after this lets off, for those who want to hear the whole thing.

​And here's the full sketch.  It basically picks up at the 2:10 mark from where the video above leaves off.

We haven't had a Jiminy Glick interview for much too long, so let's correct that.  Making this all the more fun, the guest is one of Martin Short's fellow-SCTV alum, Catherine O’Hara.  She improvs with 'Jiminy' more than most, creating some offbeat scenarios.

We have a new song parody from Randy Rainbow, the "Donald Trump Cell Block Tango (Part One -- probably)".  The song that this is parodying is one from the musical, Chicago.  It's a little different from some of his others, in part because of the original song, but he takes things a bit further.  It's also a bit darker than most, but very funny, with some very good rhymes and fun production value.

For a while now I've been posting these very funny video parody songs by Randy Rainbow.  I thought I'd take a step back and post a couple of videos about him.

This first is a nice, albeit low-key segment on Nightline.  And despite the heading on the video, it's really a look at him and his work process, rather than that one small part of the piece near the end.

And it turns out that his notoriety -- despite making parodies that deal very specifically with American politics -- has reached overseas.  So, this is an interview with him done on the BBC World Service.  That's intriguing to see, though the questions are sort of lousy, as if the interviewer doesn't know quite all that he does or what to make of him.  This isn't helped by it being early in New York, and he hasn't quite kicked in for the day.  Nor is it helped that they bizarrely don't play any clips of his work.  Their explanation is that his work is "too naughty" -- which is utterly ridiculous.  Some of it is, but just don't show those parts.  So, the British audience really wouldn't know who he is or what he does.  But still, it's fun to see.

This is an old comedy appearance by Steve Martin from very early in his career on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.  And by "very early," I mean he hasn't made a movie yet, and I don't get the sense that he's really broken through with his stadium crowds.  In fact -- and this is bizarre to type this, let alone realize it -- it's from almost half a century ago!  February 15, 1973, which is 46 years ago, nearly to the day.

But what stands out to me isn't that it's from so long ago, or how awkward Martin seems, or how uncertain Johnny Carson appears to be in what to talk about, though the conversation warms up.  No, what leaps out is the bold risk Martin takes in his monologue on probably the biggest platform a comic could have in those days -- he presents a comedy monologue for dogs.  In fact, he even tells the audience that you won't find this funny because it's not for you, it's written for dogs, and they'll find it hilarious.  And then there's the added risk of bringing out actual dogs and having absolutely no control of what they'll do.  All on the biggest platform that a comic -- and especially a comic starting out -- can have.

Randy Rainbow is back with another song.  It doesn't have as much "story structure" as some of his others, though that's largely because of the song it's based on, which is more of a "list" kind of song.  But it's lively and, as always,quite enjoyable.