I praised the pleasant surprise that was John Oliver’s hosting of The Daily Show
when Jon Stewart took a sabbatical last summer. And I was not alone. Many TV critics predicted that Oliver would be promoted from correspondent to host of his own show — probably someplace other than Comedy Central, since a third half-hour* of satirical news and punditry there wasn’t likely. That someplace turned out to be HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
Jon Stewart will return to The Daily Show next week following a sabbatical. He
was in the Middle East this summer directing a film called Rosewater. For the eight weeks out of twelve after Stewart’s departure that the show was not on hiatus, writer/correspondent John Oliver stepped in to host in his stead.
If you don’t already know that, you may not be interested in the video I’m sharing of John Oliver’s appearance on Charlie Rose from Monday, Aug. 8th, just as John-with-an-h was starting his final week as Jon-without’s substitute.
Me, I love this kind of process talk. I’ve been reading behind-the-scenes stuff about
how comics, music, film, and television are crafted (theater and prose, to a lesser extent, too) since I was a kid. It’s not really the gossip, which in on-air conversations like this one is incidental to nonexistent, so much as it is the plain old nuts-and-bolts of how creative work — and in particular collaborative creative work — is made that fascinates.
Photo © 2011 and characters TM/® The Muppets Studio LLC.
Above is a neat homage to the iconic, oft-mimicked Robert Freeman photograph
used on the cover to 1963’s With The Beatles and early the next year for the US release Meet The Beatles! It’s from a recent Parade article titled “Meet the Muppets (Again!)” — which is also the general theme of this post.
Was your life was lacking Glee tonight due to baseball playoffs? Maybe this will get
you going again. Sesame Street has given us some great goofs on popular songs and TV series, from a Billy Idol lookalike Muppet singing “Rebel L” to the detectives of ABCD Blue. Now give it up for... G. [3:48]
I got a grin out of Rachel’s lines in the crowd noise that opens the skit, the bearded piano player who pops up out of nowhere, and more, but the grandest giggle goes to the amazing likeness of “Mr. Goo”.
Related: Harmony and Irony • Muppet Monday • Brittality
Grover and I share a birthday, according to the 1972 Sesame Street calendar — Oct. 14th.
Image from Sesame Street 711 © 1975 CTW.
A prototype of Grover called Gleep appeared as early as 1967 on an episode of The Ed Sullivan Show. I get that info from the Muppet Wiki link at the beginning of this post, which is not to be confused with The Monster at the End of This Book (on which more quite soon). Nearly all proper nouns seen in blue hypertext during Muppet Mondays, if not otherwise specified, head over to that expansive and entertainingly informative resource.
Here’s a 15-minute segment featuring Jim Henson that aired on Iowa Public Television in 1969.
I thought about running it last week but decided to start my Muppet Monday posts
with more of a bang; while it’ll surely suck in any Henson admirer, it’s longer and slower-paced than your usual Internet video link. Henson is so mellow that he makes Mister Rogers look like Gilbert Gottfried.
A few years ago I was thrilled to find a DVD compilation of childhood favorite The Electric Company. You can read a bit about it — and in particular its crossovers with predecessor Sesame Street — on the Muppet Wiki, as well as in greater depth on Wikipedia.
I have fond memories of the show, from Rita Moreno’s familiar opening shout to the animated Adventures of Letterman shorts to Morgan Freeman as Easy Reader to Skip Hinnant in Fargo North, Decoder, to — of course — the strangely silent Spider-Man. What surprised me when I popped in the DVD was how much was unfamiliar, including the delightfully absurd soap-opera parody Love of Chair. The first episode of the serial is up on YouTube, albeit bootlegged; one minute long, just when you think it’s started running on fumes it finishes with a couple of laugh-out-loud moments. [Warning: Very brief smash cut to Bill Cosby.]
Some interesting but spoilery trivia follows in the comments section below.
Related: Brittality • This Is the Title of This Blogpost • Muppet Monday
