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      Dave Chappelle and the Perils of Button-Pushing Comedy

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      His comments on the Mideast conflict have been the subject of news reports, but the polarizing coverage has ignored how comics have treated the situation.Halfway through a sold-out show at the PNC Arena in Raleigh, N.C., on Wednesday, Dave Chappelle stopped to ask the audience about screaming coming from the balcony. “I’m scared it might be the Jews coming for me,” he said, a mischievous tone in his gravelly voice.This was a reference to a previous show, in Boston, where Chappelle’s criticism of Israeli policies reportedly led to cheers and pushback from the crowd, hundreds of walkouts and one patron posting online that she never felt more “unsafe.” Press descriptions of the event were often vague. The reports of cheers for Hamas didn’t specify if they were coming from one person or a large group. But what seems clear from the reports is that along with defending Harvard students who had signed a letter saying Israel was “entirely responsible” for the violence, Chappelle had denounced the Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis and got sidetracked when someone in the crowd told him to be quiet.Chappelle’s follow-up show on Wednesday was as much the work of a diplomat as a provocateur, telling the audience to pray for both Israelis and Palestinians and calling the situation for both a nightmare. At one point, he addressed American Jews, saying, “Whatever they can do to take the violence or the danger out of a situation, they should do it.” Then he added, “I’m not about antisemitism, but I’m allowed to disagree with whoever I want to.”Chappelle, wearing a sleeveless flannel shirt that hung down to his thighs, never figured out what the commotion at the top of the arena was about, but he said he had heard someone say there was a medical issue. Chain-smoking, Chappelle made a few jokes, then added: “You know what it will say in the paper tomorrow: Dave Chappelle makes fun of man as he dies.”It’s an understandable complaint. Of course, Chappelle seeks out contentious subjects — his lawyerly explanation of the antisemitism of Kanye West on “Saturday Night Live” last year does not help his cause in this current controversy — and no one exaggerates their own victimhood more. He’s still saying, “Any minute they’re going to cancel me” despite the fact that he’s performing for huge crowds and has another Netflix special on the way. But the media attention that Chappelle’s comedy gets is obsessive, polarized and often tediously literal.It brings to mind one of the most memorable bits of this century, his 2004 joke about Ja Rule being asked to weigh in on Sept. 11. Mocking how our media ask celebrities to be sober authorities making sense of tragic events, Chappelle said, “I want some answers that Ja Rule might not have right now.”This joke has aged tremendously well. Social media has only amplified the opinions of the Ja Rules of the world. The algorithms that run our feeds are making sure you have Justin Bieber and Gigi Hadid to explain the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now every corporation and middle school seems to have its own foreign policy. Comedians have been perhaps the most outspoken of artists, with Sarah Silverman and Amy Schumer consistently commenting on Israel and antisemitism on social media, earning praise and condemnation. The comic Bassem Youssef went viral for his appearance on Piers Morgan’s show. Obviously, in a democratic society, it’s important for people to feel free to speak out on matters of gravity, and an emotional response on this issue is not only understandable but necessary. But it’s also reasonable to think that you should want some answers that Dave Chappelle might not have right now.Chappelle is a tricky case, because since his Ja Rule joke, he has embraced the sober truth-teller role, telling magnetic stories that sometimes end in lessons, not punchlines. His take on Israel has been mostly sober, but other comics are incorporating the issue into their work. Matt Ruby put 10 minutes of his jokes from a club set online, defending himself by saying, “This is how Jews handle crisis.” The German stand-up Shahak Shapira released a 25-minute special, “Baklavas From Gaza.” Both sounded like rough drafts, but they seem motivated less by a blunt interest in changing hearts and minds than in comforting them.The seeming hopelessness of the conflict in the Middle East has always drawn comics looking to push buttons. In one of the most high-risk “Saturday Night Live” monologues ever, Louis C.K. likened Israelis and Palestinians to his daughters fighting, with him as America trying to mediate. Since he had sandwiched this metaphor between a joke about his “mild racism” and another about trying to understand pedophilia, he managed the feat of making the subject seem safe.In recent years, several sharp Muslim comics have made funny comedy on television from the Palestinian perspective. In “Mo,” set in Texas, the Palestinian American comic Mo Amer, who plays a likable fool, gives his pitcher nephew a pep talk on the mound of a Little League game, telling the boy that he’s a Palestinian so “if there’s one thing you can do is throw things accurately.” Then, as another adult tries to shuttle him off the field, he advises the boy to imagine a tank coming at him.This show was created with another comic, Ramy Youssef, whose own superb, self-named Hulu series, “Ramy,” recorded an episode in Israel portraying daily life in the occupied territories of the West Bank, including the tedium of waiting at a checkpoint to cross over. Playing a jerky American bull in a China shop, Youssef tries to relate to a Palestinian love interest by saying he gets it, comparing the experience to traffic at the Lincoln Tunnel. Both these shows humanize the Palestinian experience in ways that feel new.No one has been funnier on this least funny of subjects than Larry David and an episode of his “Curb Your Enthusiasm” about an incredible Palestinian chicken restaurant that causes controversy by moving next door to a Jewish deli. It’s invariably high on lists of the greatest installments of the series. It ended with David walking between competing protest groups: one from the chicken restaurant led by his Palestinian girlfriend (dirty talk during sex includes her calling him an occupier and him quoting Theodor Herzl) and another made up of many of his Jewish friends waving signs in front of a deli.The anguished look on David’s face, eyes bulging, face contorting in confusion, has become a popular meme. It’s used so often that people don’t even realize what it refers to. My sense from Chappelle’s show is that he could relate.While Chappelle still jokes about transgender people, which was the focus of his last special, his new hour, due in December, throws fewer bombs than his last one. It’s a bit humbler and even has a silly side along with some moony philosophizing about the Will Smith slap, with him calling Smith and Chris Rock “fellow dreamers I met along the way.”In Raleigh, the one time he told the crowd he would do a “dangerous joke,” it turned out to be something like a parody of one: “Two Jews walk into a bar. I’d say the punchline, but there might be a transgender person here.” He smiled as if he knew how corny this sounded.When a woman in the audience yelled out, “Free Palestine,” he told her he heard her but added: “Don’t start that up or there will be a news cycle for another week.” More

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      Dave Chappelle Laments ‘Nightmare’ Facing Israelis and Palestinians

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      The comedian, whose remarks about the Israel-Hamas war last week made headlines, returned to the subject at a show in North Carolina.Dave Chappelle was about 24 minutes into his set on Wednesday night in Raleigh, N.C., when he briefly touched on remarks he had made about the Israel-Hamas conflict at a show in Boston last week that had led to cheers, some walkouts and headlines.“Right now, I’m in trouble because the Jewish community is upset,” Mr. Chappelle told a packed crowd of more than 20,000 people at PNC Arena. “But I cannot express this enough: No matter what you read about that show in Boston, you will never see quotation marks around anything I said. They don’t know what I said.”“It’s all hearsay,” said the comedian, who, like many others, requires audience members to surrender their smartphones at shows.Mr. Chappelle, a satirist whose reputation for diving into polarizing topics has increased in the latter stages of his comedic career, returned to the Israel-Hamas conflict near the end of his set Wednesday.“The other night, I said something about Palestine in Boston and got misquoted all over the world,” Mr. Chappelle said. “And I will not repeat what I said.”A woman in the crowd responded by shouting, “Free Palestine.”“Please, please, miss,” Mr. Chappelle responded. “Listen. Don’t start it up or I’m going to be in the news cycle for another week. This thing that’s happening in the Middle East is bigger than everybody.”“This is what’s happening and, believe me, I understand what’s happening in Israel is a nightmare,” Mr. Chappelle said. “What’s happening in Palestine is a nightmare.”He continued: “There’s only two kinds of people in the world: people who love other people and the people that have things to make them afraid to love other people. Pray for everyone in Israel. Pray for everyone in Palestine.”“And remember that every dead person is a dead person,” he said, calling the situation a “tragedy.”At the show last Thursday in Boston’s TD Garden, Mr. Chappelle was drawn into speaking about the conflict by members of the audience. He raised concerns about how a group of Harvard students had been treated since signing an anti-Israel letter, condemned the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas and criticized Israel for its role in causing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, according to remarks first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The Los Angeles Times reported that perhaps 200 people in the roughly 17,000-person audience in Boston had departed toward the end of the show.A few minutes after initially discussing the interaction on Wednesday, Mr. Chappelle noticed a commotion stemming from the arena’s upper level. “That still might be the Jews coming for me,” said Mr. Chappelle, who has often used his penchant for causing offense as fodder for jokes.He urged for someone in the crowd to call emergency medical responders before being reminded that audience members did not have their phones. He said he had never thought about what would happen without them in an emergency.“Sorry,” Mr. Chappelle said, stretching out the word. “I don’t want the Jews to know what I said.”On Wednesday night, Mr. Chappelle, wearing a red, black and gray flannel shirt with cutoff sleeves and taking frequent drags from a cigarette, filled his set with jokes about Madison Cawthorn, a pro-Trump former North Carolina congressman and material about transgender people that has drawn widespread criticism. He also joked about being attacked onstage last year by an armed man while performing at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.The audience cheered him loudly, and the hour-and-15-minute set did not appear to have caused the kind of walkouts that marked the Boston show. More

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      Speaker Mike Johnson Is Butt of Late Night Comedy

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      Stephen Colbert called the new House speaker “the most generic-sounding congressional leader since the election of Speaker James Kirkland Brand.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Who is Mike Johnson?After three weeks of Republicans struggling to agree on a nominee, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana was voted speaker of the House on Wednesday.“Our long national nightmare is finally different,” Stephen Colbert said on Wednesday. He called Mr. Johnson “the most generic-sounding congressional leader since the election of Speaker James Kirkland Brand.”Jimmy Kimmel joked that the House “swiped way right” on Johnson, who he remarked couldn’t be definitively “the best Mike Johnson they could have chosen.”“There’s Mike Johnson from Louisiana. He’s a Republican state representative who may have been a better Johnson overall. Mike Johnson might not make the list of the top 10 Mike Johnsons. You have quadruple Olympic gold medalist Mike Johnson, you’ve got Canadian bodybuilder Mike Johnson, you’ve got Swedish chef Mike Johnson, who would made everyone little meatballs every day. You could’ve given the gavel to any one of the at least five Mike Johnsons from the N.F.L., or even country music’s No. 1 Black yodeler Mike Johnson would have been great.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“You could go to the middle of the phone book and pick any of the hundreds of Mike Johnsons — each one would be a better choice for speaker, because not one of them tried to overthrow the presidential election in the House he now represents.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Wow, the speaker race was so embarrassing, they’re not even giving their real names any more. Mike Johnson is the name you give when you check into a motel with your mistress. That’s what Spirit Halloween calls their Michael Jackson costume.” — SETH MEYERS“But what we do know is that he wants nationwide limits on abortion, he wants to criminalize gay sex, and he even wants to ban reggaeton. All right, I’m lying on the last one, but that seems like his vibe.” — DESUS NICE, guest host of “The Daily Show”“Johnson was just elected this afternoon, getting votes from all 220 Republicans. Finally, a man who appeals to all factions of the Republican Party: the MAGA faithful, the social conservatives, the white nationalists, and the horny Beetlejuice goblins.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (More Mike Johnson Jokes Edition)“The House of Representatives voted today to elect Louisiana Congressman Mike Johnson speaker of the House. And apparently, this election result he will accept.” — SETH MEYERS“Now, if you don’t know Mike Johnson, don’t worry — nobody else does.” — DESUS NICE“That’s right, the new speaker of the house is Mike Johnson, and if that name sounds familiar, it’s ’cause it’s on every fake ID.” — JIMMY FALLON“That’s right, Republicans said Mike Johnson is their first choice, after the first 10 choices lost.” — JIMMY FALLON“Let’s just say if speaker nominees were Halloween candy, this guy’s a Necco Wafer.” — JIMMY FALLON“It’s like being at a restaurant and hearing, ‘Do you have Coke?’ ‘No.’ ‘Pepsi?’ ‘No.’ ‘Sprite?’ ‘No.’ ‘Fine, I guess I’ll have the Mike Johnson.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingSydney Colson, a two-time W.N.B.A. champion, talked about her team, the Las Vegas Aces, and her unscripted comedy series, “The Syd + TP Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe horror filmmaker John Carpenter will sit down with Stephen Colbert on Thursday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutLauren Halsey, an artist with David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, will be represented worldwide by Gagosian Gallery. She is a passionate collector of objects, gathered from her neighborhood.via Lauren Halsey, David Kordansky Gallery and Gagosian; Photo by Russell HamiltonThe activist artist Lauren Halsey has found a way to combine community and commercial success with her work. More

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      Halloween TV: Five Shows That Mix Horror and Humor

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      “Creepshow,” “The Fall of the House of Usher” and other shows serve up humor with their horror.Sorting through the seasonal bounty of horror and supernatural television series timed to Halloween, I have focused on shows that approach the grim task with a sense of humor. Here, in alphabetical order, are five series released this month that put more emphasis on wit than on sheer terror.‘30 Coins’The Spanish filmmaker Álex de la Iglesia careens through the conventions of the religious conspiracy thriller in this preposterous and highly enjoyable series that combines a “Da Vinci Code”-style premise with extremes of gore and a circling, tenuously comprehensible plot.In the first season, a Spanish village became the site of a battle among Roman Catholic cabals and emissaries of Satan over Judas’s 30 pieces of silver, which if collected would give their owner unimagined power. Or something like that. Fighting back against these forces of evil was a motley crew that included a renegade priest, the village’s unhappily married mayor and a plucky veterinarian.Paul Giamatti plays a cult leader in the new season of “30 Coins.”Manolo Pavón/HBOIn Season 2, which premiered this week on HBO and Max, the apocalypse has been averted but its likelihood is still palpable, and the number of creepy beasts in the manner of Bosch and Guillermo del Toro has exponentially increased. Also joining the show is Paul Giamatti as a science-fiction-writing cult leader who is human in form but as frightening as any beast.‘Creepshow’Now in its fourth season on the horror-centric streaming service Shudder (as well as AMC+), this anthology series wears its comic-book sensibility and B-movie aesthetic proudly. And the best of its 22-minute stories (two per episode) also exhibit the cleverness and industriousness that contribute to real pop-culture satisfaction. You’ll see the first twist coming, but the second and the third may take you by surprise.“Creepshow” doesn’t reach too far for its inspirations — Season 4’s familiar scenarios include a persecuted vampire family, a werewolf in a “Little Red Riding Hood” situation, a haunted video game and a cursed pair of 3-D glasses.But along with its unpretentious nature comes a willingness to be self-referential and provide fan service, and some of its most entertaining segments are unabashed in-jokes. The Season 4 opener, “The Hat,” suggests that the novels of a writer strongly resembling Stephen King were actually composed by a snappy homburg that refuses to stop writing. In “George Romero in 3-D,” Romero comes back to life in animated form to battle ghouls of his own creation. King and Romero were, of course, the writer and director of the 1982 film “Creepshow” from which the series was spun off.‘The Fall of the House of Usher’Mike Flanagan’s fifth horror mini-series for Netflix (a collection that began with “The Haunting of Hill House”) is, if you care about consistency with the source, a serious mismatch. The genuinely morbid intensity of Edgar Allan Poe’s writing, on prominent display in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” is out of tune with Flanagan’s well-upholstered, tongue-in-cheek, slightly synthetic approach to horror, where everything is right there on the surface.But that surface is often diverting, if not particularly frightening or memorable, and Flanagan can be counted on for large, capable casts. The eight-episode “Usher” offers Bruce Greenwood and Zach Gilford as current and past versions of Roderick Usher, reimagined as a Sackler-like big-pharma executive; Carl Lumbly as a prosecutor named Auguste Dupin; a raspy Mark Hamill as a corporate fixer named Arthur Gordon Pym; and T’Nia Miller as an Usher offspring named Victorine Lafourcade. The Flanagan regular Carla Gugino cycles through costumes and makeup, “Kind Hearts and Coronets”-style, as a seductive angel of death.Dupin, Pym, Lafourcade and many others are named after Poe characters who had nothing to do with “Usher,” an indication of how Flanagan’s series is less an adaptation of the original — it isn’t really that at all — than a Frankenstein’s-monster collage of references to numerous Poe stories and poems. Episode titles — “Murder in the Rue Morgue,” “The Pit and the Pendulum” — clue you in to the style of gruesome death that’s about to take place. Passages of Poe’s prose and poetry are frequently incorporated into the dialogue, making for very flowery conversations. Gugino’s character is named Verna, an anagrammatic nod to Poe’s favorite bird.Flanagan’s biggest change is to expand and update the story into a carnivalesque critique of capitalist greed and inhumanity. Roderick Usher, childless in the original story, now has six heirs whose lives are a catalog of wealth-and-entitlement motifs: nightclub bacchanals, sex with subordinates, wellness profiteering, antiquities looting, crisis management, A.I. infatuation, baking silly trompe l’oeil cakes. Poe’s Ushers were doomed by malaise and sheer malevolent ambience; Flanagan’s have to die because they’re a virus on the earth. As apocalyptic metaphors go, his “Usher” is reasonably entertaining.‘Shining Vale’Jeff Astrof and Sharon Horgan’s series cunningly blends horror, satire and situation comedy in its picture of a modern American woman’s dilemma: Has Pat Phelps, the struggling writer played by Courteney Cox, been driven crazy by the stresses of marriage, motherhood and career? Or does she act like a crazy person because her house is haunted and she’s fighting off demonic possession?Courteney Cox, left, and Mira Sorvino, in the new season of “Shining Vale.”StarzThe first season of “Shining Vale” on Starz was a riff on “The Shining,” with Pat eventually taking an ax to her suburban Connecticut manse and to her feckless husband, played with simpering perfection by Greg Kinnear. Season 2, whose third episode premieres Friday, tackles another celebrated film, “Rosemary’s Baby”; the herbal tea a neighbor provides to calm Pat’s nerves after her release from a psychiatric ward has the unexpected side effect of reversing her menopause.The avenging (but often friendly) spirit played by Mira Sorvino in Season 1 has supposedly been electro-convulsed out of Pat’s head, but luckily Sorvino returns, now playing the concerned neighbor. She and Kinnear, along with a stellar supporting cast that includes Judith Light, Merrin Dungey, Parvesh Cheena, Allison Tolman and the great Harriet Sansom Harris (Bebe in the original “Frasier”), bring a comic harmony to the show’s indelicate balance of tones.‘Wolf Like Me’A melancholy Australian romantic dramedy with werewolves, Peacock’s “Wolf Like Me” mixes tones and tropes in the manner of “Shining Vale” but with a quieter, less satirical effect. When “Shining Vale” sags, it goes flatly jokey; when “Wolf Like Me” runs out of energy, it gets blandly sentimental.But when the creator, writer and director of “Wolf Like Me,” Abe Forsythe, is on his game, it’s a funny, lovely and moving show that can tap straight into your emotions. Also crucial are the performances of Isla Fisher as Mary, an American werewolf hiding from the world in Adelaide, Australia, and the young actress Ariel Donoghue as Emma, a girl devastated by the loss of her mother who becomes Mary’s de facto stepdaughter and develops a fierce loyalty to her. Josh Gad plays Gary, Emma’s father and Mary’s unlikely new boyfriend, and does a nice job of staying out of Fisher and Donoghue’s way.Season 1 brought this accidental trio together, introduced a teasing note of magical realism (along with the outright full-moon supernaturalism) and established the theme of love’s triumph over grief and alienation. In Season 2, the focus shifts to Mary’s pregnancy, which is both a blessed event and a five-alarm crisis. Forsythe’s inventiveness occasionally runs low, and the characters can get strident and unengaging, but he builds to an exciting and wrenching finale that’s also a dire cliffhanger. More

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      Why ‘The Golden Bachelor’ Terrifies Me

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      Television celebrates older people — but only for seeming like sexy young ones.In the first episode of ABC’s “The Golden Bachelor” — the new 60-plus addition to the decades-old “Bachelor” franchise — Gerry Turner, 72, puts in his hearing aids, dons a tuxedo and cries within the first three minutes of airtime. Gerry, our Golden Bachelor, has been widowed for six years. His wife, Toni, died suddenly, of an infection, and in describing her passing he cannot contain his grief. We see photos of their lives together, from young marrieds to parents, from middle-aged partners to retirees enjoying themselves on a boat. Gerry is uncommonly slim and good-looking and seems to have been so throughout these various life stages. Toni, whose age is not specified, ages less magically. Her waist and eyeglasses thicken, as these things tend to. Clearly these changes did not dampen Gerry’s adoration. The type of tears he sheds on camera over her passing reveal what looks like a deep and enduring love — the thing every contestant on the set of “The Golden Bachelor” is now competing to find with him.Like the original, “The Golden Bachelor” presents around two dozen women, all vying for lasting happiness through marriage to a single, eligible catch. Other than the fact that contestants range in age from 60 to 75, the formula is familiar. Like “The Bachelor,” the season aims to end with a proposal. Like “The Bachelor,” most action takes place in a mansion full of bunk beds. Like “The Bachelor,” the contestants are typically lithe, sexy and hyperactive; some wear stilettos to breakfast, along with tube tops and hot pants and all manner of plunging décolletage; there are boobs everywhere, often huge ones. As the contestants emerge from their limousines, one by one, near the start of the first episode, making grand entrances with their mermaid hair and Pilates abs and buns of steel and snatched cheekbones and pneumatic-looking lips, often all over Gerry within minutes, a truth seems to dawn on the septuagenarian widower: Older women are not what they used to be. They are nothing at all like what they used to be. As if to underline this point, one of the contestants emerges from her limo with curler-set gray hair, baggy dress and walker — only to rip the whole kit off, fling the walker onto the paving stones and reveal her true self. This is Leslie, a 64-year-old dancer and former aerobics champion in a tiny lace corseted minidress. Leslie looks about 40 and acts even younger. The show, of course, is fun to watch. Many of the women are beautiful and spirited and accomplished. Gerry seems like a lovely man. Still, there is something here that sends a chill down my spine. The show has received glowing coverage from predictable corners (USA Today) and scored huge ratings for ABC. But is any of this actually good? For older people? Or even for younger people? I mean, this is “The Bachelor,” a mainstay of reality TV — a certain amount of desperation and superficiality is built into the DNA of the genre. But plunging older people into this context and then valorizing them because, perhaps with some nipping and tucking, they can just about fit? This feels more like a denigration of aging. Some of these people have been on Earth for 75 years. Here is an opportunity for them to demonstrate that life, comfortingly, has many chapters — that there is always change and that this change is not only natural, but good. Instead, we get a tight-and-toned show in which success involves being able to repeat Chapter 3 for as long as possible. This version of freedom has nothing to do with wisdom or respite, with taking stock or giving back or the hard-won succor of age. It is about working extremely hard to remain the same as you were when you were younger (or maybe even more fabulously youthy), especially if that youthful you was wont to grind barelegged to “Don’t Stop Believin’” in a tinsel handkerchief dress.A state of nubile teenagehood already coats the age spectrum, from 8-year-olds with gel nails on Snapchat to middle-aged dads in hoodies on longboards. Now it is creeping ever further up the life span. Martha Stewart expanded from her cardigans and sheet-pan suppers to moue on TikTok and chitchat on talk shows about how she should date Pete Davidson. Madonna accuses critics of ageism as she rids her face and body of signs of time, to the point of looking like a different person. The idea of not aging is not only normalized but treated as an accomplishment. No surprise, then, that one “Golden Bachelor” contestant shows up on a motorcycle or that another, age 70, flashes Gerry her “birthday suit” upon meeting him or that everyone stays up all night dancing in skyscraper heels, apparently bunion- and sciatica-free. Other than the odd passing remark about “ear candy” (code for hearing aids) or taking the bed nearest to the bathroom, this show — sold as a showcase for how fabulous and free growing old can be, and how “it’s never too late” to find love — actually negates aging, erases lateness. More than 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 in America every day; by 2034, there will be more Americans over age 65 than children. What we are being told is that they will be vital and relevant mostly insofar as they have maintained arms like Jessica Biel and off-the-chart libidos.A couple of weeks ago, I watched a few episodes of the 1980s sitcom “The Golden Girls” with my daughters. Like any other woman of 50 who knows how old those mostly gray-haired characters were supposed to be — at the start of the series, Blanche, Dorothy and Rose were in their early 50s — I experienced some cognitive dissonance. “Do they seem like they are the same age as me?” I asked my 11-year-old. No, she said. They seemed “more comfortable, like grandmothers used to.”Odd, but true: The kind of aging depicted on “The Golden Bachelor” is itchy and awkward. We hear a contestant say it’s nice to see older women enjoy how they feel in their skin; we hear contestants say they are breaking stereotypes of what it means to be old. But what good is that when those stereotypes are instantly replaced with “Girls Gone Wild” stereotypes about what it means to still be young? In Episode 1, after most of the contestants have sashayed into the mansion, another woman emerges. She is 84. She is wearing a nice blouse and forgiving trousers and flat shoes, like a normal person in her 80s. She says she is Jimmy Kimmel’s aunt — Aunt Chippy, as featured on his show — and she just wanted to meet Gerry, as she was sure he was lying about his age. The gag is that she is not really in the game, because she is old. Sitting with the other women in the mansion, she says: “I don’t belong here. Those ladies are really something. Look at this one. I’m in the wrong place.” She is later caught napping; at least one person here is comfortable with where she finds herself.But of course, Chippy leaves the set. I imagine her going home, making coffee, putting her feet up and calling a grandkid or an old friend to talk about the truly weird day she had, and how — thank God — she doesn’t need to be like that anymore, with the hair and the boobs and the sex. Because she was already young once, and even then it was exhausting, and now? She can’t even imagine.Source photographs for illustration above: Brian Bowen Smith/ABC; Ricky Middlesworth/ABC; Rosemary Calvert/Getty Images; Jonathan Knowles/Getty Images. More

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      Jimmy Kimmel: ‘Altoids Last Longer Than These Republican Nominees’

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      “This morning, I didn’t even know who Tom Emmer was,” Kimmel said about a short-lived candidate for House speaker. “Now, I still don’t. I have no idea.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.‘You Will Be Googled’Representative Tom Emmer, Republican of Minnesota, was nominated for speaker of the House on Tuesday before withdrawing because of a lack of support from the right.Jimmy Kimmel joked that it was just the latest history-making delay of the House “ungaveling before our eyes.”“In the history of our country, there has never been a situation like this. And there’s nothing in the Constitution that covers it, because the founding fathers, as forward-thinking as they were, never imagined such a large group of elected officials being so unbelievably dumb.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“This morning, I didn’t even know who Tom Emmer was. Now, I still don’t. I have no idea.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“According to people I pay to care about it, Emmer is the House majority whip. He sits on the Financial Services Committee, and, perhaps most notably, he got two D.U.I.s, then sponsored legislation to lower the legal penalties that face accused drunk drivers. OK, so a little self-serving? He also introduced H.R. 2435: That Mailbox Was Already Knocked Down.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Altoids last longer than these Republican nominees.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Martin Scorsese’s out here making movies that last longer than speaker candidates.” — DESUS NICE, guest host of “The Daily Show”“Farewell, Tom Emmer. You will be Googled.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“At this point, I’d call the G.O.P. a clown car, but clowns go to college.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Who Flips Next? Edition)“Trump 2020 campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty today to a criminal charge in the Georgia election interference case, making her former President Trump’s fourth co-defendant of the trial to plead guilty. So I guess, in the end, he did teach them all ‘The Art of the Deal.’” — SETH MEYERS“That’s three Trump lawyers in one week! Which leads us to America’s favorite new game show: ‘Who … Flips … Next?’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Right now, half of Trump’s lawyers are trying to keep him out of prison; the other half are trying to keep themselves out of prison.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingMick Jagger joined Jimmy Fallon to divulge some “Freezer Secrets” on Tuesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe Canadian stand-up comedian, actor and writer Mae Martin will appear on Wednesday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutThe Birmingham Royal Ballet performing “Black Sabbath: The Ballet,” which has had sold-out runs in England in Birmingham, Plymouth and London.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesHeavy metal meets classical dance in the Birmingham Royal Ballet’s smash hit, “Black Sabbath: The Ballet.” More

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      Book Review: ‘If You Would Have Told Me’ by John Stamos and ‘Being Henry’ by Henry Winkler

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      Candid memoirs by Henry Winkler and John Stamos reveal how lucky breaks — and Yale training, and a curling iron — made them into household names.IF YOU WOULD HAVE TOLD ME: A Memoir, by John Stamos with Daphne YoungBEING HENRY: The Fonz … and Beyond, by Henry Winkler with James KaplanWhen I worked for a casting director in the 1980s, the most fun part of the job was looking at the marked-up appointment sheet at the end of each day. Because film and TV auditions are intimate, often conducted over a desk, my boss had devised a code by which to secretly rate the sensitive actors sitting just inches away from her: CBNC (close but no cigar), LLIT (a little long in the tooth), and so on.Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.So you can imagine my surprise when, after a very chatty young actor known for playing snotty know-it-alls had auditioned one day, my boss abandoned her usual hieroglyphics and simply scrawled next to the actor’s name on the appointment sheet, in all caps, the seven-letter epithet that starts with “A” and ends with “E” and is synonymous with “backside.” Cowabunga!Neither of the smart and entertaining new memoirs by Henry Winkler and John Stamos inspires such odium — even if both TV stars have written books that traffic heavily in their authors’ lesser angels. These foibles elicited differing reactions from me — I wanted to give the adorably needy Winkler the kind of slow-burn hug that would both congratulate and pacify him; I wanted to abandon the businesslike and unidealistic Stamos in a black box theater with Stella Adler until he starts babbling about “making choices” and his “instrument.”Winkler’s essential m.o. in life, we learn, is to try to make everyone love him because his Holocaust survivor parents didn’t. After graduating from Yale Drama School, he got his breakout role as the too-cool-for-school Fonzie on “Happy Days” just six weeks after moving to Los Angeles.Playing the Fonz has been a meal ticket that has yielded Winkler interesting reactions from unlikely sources. “You do not have to tell me who you are,” Marcello Mastroianni made clear. “Finally, we meet,” Orson Welles uttered.On the flip side, Winkler has spent much of his post-Fonzie career trying not to be typecast — an obstacle not made easier by the fact that he didn’t learn he was severely dyslexic until he was 34. Winkler has made up for lost time by branching out into other pursuits — directing, producing, writing children’s books .But Winkler’s bigger obstacle, it seems, has been emotional immaturity: Until he started therapy seven years ago, he had intimacy problems, including not being able to tell his partner, Stacey, that he loved her. (Wonderfully, Stacey, now his wife, writes responses throughout the book, such as “There were times when I thought … ‘Now I have another child?’”)Winkler’s affective shortcomings throw his social anxiety and bouts of verbal diarrhea into high relief. After meeting Paul McCartney, Winkler, hoping to hang out with the former Beatle, called him 10 times without getting an answer; after chattering incessantly at Neil Simon’s house over dinner one night, he spent months summoning the courage to ask Simon over, only to be told twice that the playwright was “busy.” It’s this kind of candor — coming from someone who once duct-taped deli turkey to his shoes so his dog would play with him — that makes Winkler so lovable on the page. Under the juddering neediness lies a mensch: After Winkler had shot his role in “Scream,” he was told his name couldn’t be on the movie poster because the Fonzie connection would create the wrong expectations for a horror film. But, Hollywood being Hollywood, when the film came out Winkler was asked to do press. Which he agreed to. Winkler’s story is also aided by the fact that his deepest work as an actor — on the terrific recent HBO series “Barry” — came directly after the therapy sessions that helped Winkler with his intimacy issues. As my former boss might have written, VTEBNLPBI (very tidy ending, but no less powerful because of it).John Stamos, he of “Full House” and “E.R.” and Broadway, takes longer to warm to on the page. Stamos is blessed with some of Winkler’s candor — he admits to having had two nose jobs and having gone to Alcoholics Anonymous. However, it’s hard to rouse a head of steam for a thespian whose raison d’être is to “get famous” and who cops to “trying to achieve sex symbol status.” WIJJ (where is the joy, John)?Such dampening pragmatism seems to spill over even to Stamos’s love life. After saying of one actress more famous than he was that “it wouldn’t hurt to get to know her,” he dated her for almost a year. Later in the book, Stamos confesses that he used to want to partner up with “someone who has a bigger, more exciting life than mine to elevate me” so they’d be “a power couple always in the press,” but, once he started seeing his now-wife, Caitlyn, he realized that what he’d always needed was someone who’s cozy-making — someone who would tell him when he has “too much product in my hair.” Some Stamos fans may enjoy this kind of Malibu verismo, but I found myself repeatedly looking floorward in search of a dog to pet. That said, a few things save Stamos from hanging himself. For one, he’s great with period detail. When Stamos auditioned in the early ’80s to play the thief and urchin Blackie Parrish on “General Hospital,” he had his mother feather his hair with a curling iron — hair that was already streaked with Sun In. He rejected his father’s Members Only jacket in favor of his mother’s long leather jacket, and tied a yellow bandanna around his leg in homage to Chachi on “Happy Days.” Then he drove to the audition in an El Camino he calls “the El Co.” You can almost smell the Travolta.Second, we can chalk some of Stamos’s apparent lack of passion about acting up to the fact that music — specifically, drumming — seems to be his true love. After befriending at Disneyland a Beach Boys cover band called Papa Doo Run Run early in his career, Stamos proceeded to charm his way into the inner circle of the actual Beach Boys and then to play drums hundreds of times with the legacy pop group during the 1980s and ’90s. These sections of the book are some of its most exciting.Lastly, Stamos is a highly social creature. I enjoyed reading about his mentors, Garry Marshall and Jack Klugman; the charity work he has done with abused and neglected kids; and the strings-pulling that he did on behalf of both his first wife, the actress Rebecca Romijn, and his pal Don Rickles. Similarly, the chapter about his friend and “Full House” colleague Bob Saget, who died last year, is lovely.Speaking of tidy endings: Winkler, it turns out, was an early influence for Stamos. After meeting the affable fellow actor, Stamos decided, “I’m going to treat people the way he treats me.”ALAFWARHC: At last, a friend for Winkler who’ll always return his calls.Audio produced by More

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      New Memoirs by Henry Winkler and John Stamos

      by

      Candid memoirs by Henry Winkler and John Stamos reveal how lucky breaks — and Yale training, and a curling iron — made them into household names.IF YOU WOULD HAVE TOLD ME: A Memoir, by John Stamos with Daphne YoungBEING HENRY: The Fonz … and Beyond, by Henry Winkler with James KaplanWhen I worked for a casting director in the 1980s, the most fun part of the job was looking at the marked-up appointment sheet at the end of each day. Because film and TV auditions are intimate, often conducted over a desk, my boss had devised a code by which to secretly rate the sensitive actors sitting just inches away from her: CBNC (close but no cigar), LLIT (a little long in the tooth), and so on.Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.So you can imagine my surprise when, after a very chatty young actor known for playing snotty know-it-alls had auditioned one day, my boss abandoned her usual hieroglyphics and simply scrawled next to the actor’s name on the appointment sheet, in all caps, the seven-letter epithet that starts with “A” and ends with “E” and is synonymous with “backside.” Cowabunga!Neither of the smart and entertaining new memoirs by Henry Winkler and John Stamos inspires such odium — even if both TV stars have written books that traffic heavily in their authors’ lesser angels. These foibles elicited differing reactions from me — I wanted to give the adorably needy Winkler the kind of slow-burn hug that would both congratulate and pacify him; I wanted to abandon the businesslike and unidealistic Stamos in a black box theater with Stella Adler until he starts babbling about “making choices” and his “instrument.”Winkler’s essential m.o. in life, we learn, is to try to make everyone love him because his Holocaust survivor parents didn’t. After graduating from Yale Drama School, he got his breakout role as the too-cool-for-school Fonzie on “Happy Days” just six weeks after moving to Los Angeles.Playing the Fonz has been a meal ticket that has yielded Winkler interesting reactions from unlikely sources. “You do not have to tell me who you are,” Marcello Mastroianni made clear. “Finally, we meet,” Orson Welles uttered.On the flip side, Winkler has spent much of his post-Fonzie career trying not to be typecast — an obstacle not made easier by the fact that he didn’t learn he was severely dyslexic until he was 34. Winkler has made up for lost time by branching out into other pursuits — directing, producing, writing children’s books .But Winkler’s bigger obstacle, it seems, has been emotional immaturity: Until he started therapy seven years ago, he had intimacy problems, including not being able to tell his partner, Stacey, that he loved her. (Wonderfully, Stacey, now his wife, writes responses throughout the book, such as “There were times when I thought … ‘Now I have another child?’”)Winkler’s affective shortcomings throw his social anxiety and bouts of verbal diarrhea into high relief. After meeting Paul McCartney, Winkler, hoping to hang out with the former Beatle, called him 10 times without getting an answer; after chattering incessantly at Neil Simon’s house over dinner one night, he spent months summoning the courage to ask Simon over, only to be told twice that the playwright was “busy.” It’s this kind of candor — coming from someone who once duct-taped deli turkey to his shoes so his dog would play with him — that makes Winkler so lovable on the page. Under the juddering neediness lies a mensch: After Winkler had shot his role in “Scream,” he was told his name couldn’t be on the movie poster because the Fonzie connection would create the wrong expectations for a horror film. But, Hollywood being Hollywood, when the film came out Winkler was asked to do press. Which he agreed to. Winkler’s story is also aided by the fact that his deepest work as an actor — on the terrific recent HBO series “Barry” — came directly after the therapy sessions that helped Winkler with his intimacy issues. As my former boss might have written, VTEBNLPBI (very tidy ending, but no less powerful because of it).John Stamos, he of “Full House” and “E.R.” and Broadway, takes longer to warm to on the page. Stamos is blessed with some of Winkler’s candor — he admits to having had two nose jobs and having gone to Alcoholics Anonymous. However, it’s hard to rouse a head of steam for a thespian whose raison d’être is to “get famous” and who cops to “trying to achieve sex symbol status.” WIJJ (where is the joy, John)?Such dampening pragmatism seems to spill over even to Stamos’s love life. After saying of one actress more famous than he was that “it wouldn’t hurt to get to know her,” he dated her for almost a year. Later in the book, Stamos confesses that he used to want to partner up with “someone who has a bigger, more exciting life than mine to elevate me” so they’d be “a power couple always in the press,” but, once he started seeing his now-wife, Caitlyn, he realized that what he’d always needed was someone who’s cozy-making — someone who would tell him when he has “too much product in my hair.” Some Stamos fans may enjoy this kind of Malibu verismo, but I found myself repeatedly looking floorward in search of a dog to pet. That said, a few things save Stamos from hanging himself. For one, he’s great with period detail. When Stamos auditioned in the early ’80s to play the thief and urchin Blackie Parrish on “General Hospital,” he had his mother feather his hair with a curling iron — hair that was already streaked with Sun In. He rejected his father’s Members Only jacket in favor of his mother’s long leather jacket, and tied a yellow bandanna around his leg in homage to Chachi on “Happy Days.” Then he drove to the audition in an El Camino he calls “the El Co.” You can almost smell the Travolta.Second, we can chalk some of Stamos’s apparent lack of passion about acting up to the fact that music — specifically, drumming — seems to be his true love. After befriending at Disneyland a Beach Boys cover band called Papa Doo Run Run early in his career, Stamos proceeded to charm his way into the inner circle of the actual Beach Boys and then to play drums hundreds of times with the legacy pop group during the 1980s and ’90s. These sections of the book are some of its most exciting.Lastly, Stamos is a highly social creature. I enjoyed reading about his mentors, Garry Marshall and Jack Klugman; the charity work he has done with abused and neglected kids; and the strings-pulling that he did on behalf of both his first wife, the actress Rebecca Romijn, and his pal Don Rickles. Similarly, the chapter about his friend and “Full House” colleague Bob Saget, who died last year, is lovely.Speaking of tidy endings: Winkler, it turns out, was an early influence for Stamos. After meeting the affable fellow actor, Stamos decided, “I’m going to treat people the way he treats me.”ALAFWARHC: At last, a friend for Winkler who’ll always return his calls.Audio produced by More