Posted 10:53 AM by Gene

We see that Larry Gelbart has died. Of course he was famous for the M*A*S*H TV series (forgive us but we never watched it, thinking it a hip Hogan's Heroes with big hair -- and those guys cracked wise for eight years longer than the Korean War). But there was more: He co-wrote two musicals that don't seem so funny now, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and City of Angels, smashes in their day; the former is a perennial in colleges because it's Plautus made EZ and acceptably bawdy; the latter became notorious as the hit no one liked and in twenty years it hasn't been revived. He also dumbed down Volpone and produced a domestic sitcom called United States that had no laugh track and the revuers called hilarious and earth-shattering and ran six weeks, thus setting the stage for the Curse of the Critically-Acclaimed. The Daily Kaplan gives what it supposes a clue by saying "socially innovative" in the first graf (i.e., news-hack-approved) and by quoting the infernal PERFESSER THOMPSON in the twelfth. The thing is, in his defense, he was at the tag end of the age of Neil Simon and Nat Hiken and Sid Caesar and Ernie Kovacs, a time when TV comedy flourished, and for that alone he deserves better than to be called politically and culturally PC.

Which reminds us, Broccoli: Where's the story on You-Know-Who's THESIS?