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      I Survived ‘Guiding Light’

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      The long-running CBS soap opera had plenty of drama, onstage and off. A former cast member looks back on its last days.Deep inside the CBS Broadcast Center in Midtown Manhattan, I stood in a corridor observing a melee.The soap opera where I worked was going off the air, and the wardrobe department had filled an empty suite of offices with piles of designer purses and handbags. With a limit of four per person, everything was first come, first served — and free.I saw secretaries, producers, executives, actors and security guards crawling, clawing and snatching up bags. Every other person was on a cellphone, and someone shouted, “You gotta get down here!” A Daytime Emmy Award-winner dove for a purple bag with a silver clasp in the shape of a jaguar. I fled before I got trampled.It was the late summer of 2009, the final weeks of “Guiding Light,” which had started as a radio program in 1937 and moved to television in 1952. “Only love can save the world,” ran the refrain of the show’s theme song. Not true! Only ratings could save us, and we didn’t have them.People who work in daytime drama excel at suspending disbelief. It came naturally to us as we toiled in an environment where it was normal to see angels, clones and time-traveling housewives strolling the halls with a script in one hand and a coffee in the other. But now that “Guiding Light” was coming to an end, we had to face reality.It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Soap operas were supposed to be forever. They were what New York actors did between theater roles, commercials and “Law & Order” guest spots. And if you left a daytime drama, you could always come back, sometimes as your evil twin.Soaps were in their big-hair heyday in the 1980s, when I started playing an orderly on “Guiding Light.” My character was a loyal employee of Cedars Hospital, a place where paternity results were routinely switched, nobody was ever asked about their insurance and every patient had a private room.I had what was probably the smallest recurring role on the show, and I loved it. My acting responsibilities included trailing Dr. Bauer on his rounds and agreeing with every single thing Nurse Lillian said. Many of my lines consisted of one word, like “Stat!” During surgery, I sometimes yelled it extra loud, just to remind people I was there. By the end of my 26 years on the show, there wasn’t an actor alive who could beat my “Stat!”My greatest challenge had to do with the side-by-side doors to the Cedars Hospital emergency room. These were the most counterintuitive doors I had ever encountered. To go into the E.R., a “Guiding Light” player had to grab the metal bars and pull them back; to get the doors to open on the way out, an actor had to pull the metal bars ever so slightly — and then push them forward.So it was common for the show’s emergency room scenes to be ruined when someone got stuck as they tried to make their way in or out. The presence of a weeping ingénue or a flying gurney would only complicate matters. As the show’s orderly, I was the one who had to deal with this vexing issue most often.In the waning days of “Guiding Light,” the plots got zanier and the budgets got smaller. One character, who had previously starred in a story line about her struggle with menopause, miraculously gave birth. Another developed superpowers that allowed her to shoot electricity from her fingertips.In the studio, someone remarked that our last few episodes would be bittersweet. “What’s sweet about it?” a technician growled. “It’s all bitter.”To unload decades worth of props, costumes and furniture, the producers set up a tag sale in the rehearsal hall, with no item priced above $20. It was jarring to hear strangers crowing about a light fixture they had snagged for 50 cents or the Armani suit they would have bought if it hadn’t had a bullet hole in the back.One afternoon, a woman barged into the dressing room I shared with a fellow actor. She was carrying an armful of gowns and a fur coat.“Mind if I change in here?” she asked.“Yes!” I said. “This is our dressing room.”She gave us a dirty look and left. I just sighed. It was like when a family member dies and relatives you’ve never seen show up to cart stuff away.On our last day in the CBS studio, I made my way down to the set. As if it were any other episode, the wardrobe girl snapped a picture of me in my scrubs for continuity purposes. This suddenly seemed absurd. She must have had the same thought. Right after taking the photo, she shrugged her shoulders and laughed.People seemed distracted. Everyone was talking about the sale down the hall and the giveaway still taking place upstairs.“Focus, people!” the director pleaded. “We have a show to do!”An older actress approached as I sat on a gurney.“Do you think now would be a good time to say a few words?” she said.“Like what?”“Well, I feel that ‘Guiding Light’ has chronicled the emotional history of the United States and —”I interrupted her to suggest that maybe she could wait until the end of the day, when the episode was done. She looked a bit deflated as I stepped away to stand beside Dr. Bauer. He draped an arm around my shoulders in what struck me as a brotherly gesture.In the final Cedars Hospital scene, I followed Dr. Bauer as he led the show’s matriarch to the bedside of her dying brother. During their deathbed heart-to-heart chat, the doctor and I withdrew discreetly. While making our exit, Dr. Bauer grappled awkwardly with the troublesome E.R. doors, causing a loud bang, as I sneaked a look at the camera. This would normally be considered a huge no-no, but today I didn’t care. Nobody did.“Cut!” the director shouted. “Moving on!”A prop guy snatched the stethoscope off my neck. Like a thundering herd, the crew headed to the next set. Before returning to his dressing room, Dr. Bauer reminded me to be sure to come to the party later.I was now alone in Cedars Hospital. I had logged so many hours in this fictional place, through three different studios, four casting directors, nearly my entire adult life. Now it was time to say goodbye. And that is one thing that people on soap operas are absolutely, positively not good at — endings.I took a slow pass through the set, just for nostalgia’s sake. I must have been in a daze, because I exited via the E.R. doors without thinking. For the first time ever, they gave way smoothly at my touch.I resisted the urge to look back. Striding down the hallway, I tossed my CBS I.D. card into a wastebasket. Above me, the On Air sign was dark.Raul A. Reyes is a contributor to NBC Latino and CNN Opinion More

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      Netflix Builds a ‘Squid Game’ Universe as It Awaits a Second Season

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      A reality show and a live experience are two ways of keeping the dystopian series in the public eye. Is the original’s bleak message being diluted?On the same soundstage where Bob Barker lorded over “The Price Is Right,” “Squid Game” is coming to life.On Wednesday, Netflix will unveil its latest live experience, based on the dystopian hit show in which desperate South Koreans competed in a brutal contest of simple schoolyard games for a prize of 45.6 billion won (around $38 million). Winners moved closer to the money. Losers died. The live attraction mimics both the popular iconography of the series — the massive piggy bank filled with cash, a giant animatronic doll named Young-hee, the sterile white dormitory — and the childish games.For $30, fans of “Squid Game” will compete in some 70 minutes of play, with moral twists and turns and six group activities, including the schoolyard race Red Light, Green Light and a nonlethal version of the series’ terrifying Glass Bridge challenge, which forced contestants to choose between two clear squares for each step across a bridge. If they chose incorrectly, they descended hundreds of feet to their death.To feel even more like a character on the show, customers can buy a tracksuit for $50 and wear it during the experience. There is also a $100 V.I.P. ticket option: In a nod to the original, you can watch the unfortunate masses compete in the games while you sip cocktails in a swanky lounge.“It’s all the fun without the death,” said Greg Lombardo, Netflix’s head of live experiences.A game called Harvest Festival at Netflix’s live experience, which is scheduled to open to the public on Wednesday.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesNetflix plans to expand the live experience into other cities, but no additional locations have been confirmed. It’s one of several “Squid Game” adaptations that Netflix has planned in the hope of keeping viewers engaged during the long gap between the show’s first season, which debuted in September 2021, and its second, which is filming in South Korea and will come out next year.One is an unscripted English-language competition show, “Squid Game: The Challenge.” Its first five episodes debuted on Nov. 22, and a second batch became available on Wednesday; the final episode will arrive Wednesday.Also coming soon is a video game in which players will be able to compete with characters from the series. A virtual reality game is already available, and in Brazil, Burger King has been offering “Squid Game”-themed food combos in four cities. (Care for an umbrella-shaped onion ring to go with that shake?)The brand offshoots follow a formula that Netflix has employed successfully for other popular shows, like “Bridgerton” and “Stranger Things.” A “Stranger Things” play that the streaming service helped develop will open in London’s West End on Dec. 14.The expansion of intellectual property like the “Squid Game” brand, however, is getting more scrutiny in Hollywood. In recent years, the closest an entertainment studio could get to a sure thing was a franchise spun from a popular piece of intellectual property: A film begets a sequel begets a theme park ride begets a line of consumer products. Now a certain amount of audience fatigue has set in.Marvel films like “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “The Marvels” struggled at the box office. The recent Harry Potter spinoff, “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore,” and the D.C. Comics film “The Flash” also underperformed. The industry has been forced to ask: What deserves franchise-building attention, and when is it too much?“I’d say in general when you have I.P., if you just do too much of something, that can dilute what it is,” Netflix’s chief content officer, Bela Bajaria, said in an interview. “The other thing we look at is, are you being true to the DNA of the show and why people loved it but expanding that connection?”Losing competitors are marked off at Squid Game: The Trials. Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesThe reasons that Netflix is trying to expand “Squid Game” are obvious. Not only is it the most-watched show on the platform but unsanctioned merchandise from the game, including tracksuits and Young-hee dolls, began selling almost immediately after its debut. Netflix now works with two global partners to meet the demand for the green athletic wear, especially around Halloween.Influencers have also capitalized on the show’s popularity. Last year, the YouTube star MrBeast enlisted 456 contestants to compete for $456,000 by playing tug of war and Red Light, Green Light. The video of the content generated 112 million views in the first five days online.With that kind of interest in an outside version of a real-life “Squid Game,” Netflix decided the time was right to try to capitalize with a reality show of its own, but in English, so as not to confuse audiences.“I was very curious how people would react to those games, the situations, the moral dilemmas,” said Minyoung Kim, Netflix’s head of Asian content, who was responsible for bringing the South Korean show to the service.The contests inspired by “Squid Game,” which is shooting its second season in South Korea, include Red Light, Green Light. Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesStill, some question whether a reality show based on the South Korean filmmaker Hwang Dong-hyuk’s bleak view of his country’s class struggles and the global inequities of modern-day capitalism should exist at all.While “Squid Game: The Challenge” debuted at the top of Netflix’s English-language TV list with 20.1 million views and the original show vaulted back into the Top 10, reviews of the reality series have been scathing. Most criticized the 10-episode season for missing the broader critique of capitalist culture that is at the heart of the nihilistic series.A scene from “Squid Game: The Challenge,” a Netflix reality show, displaying an interim cash prize.NetflixThe show drew 20.1 million views when it premiered.Netflix“I see it obviously as an attempt to expand and monetize a franchise, but it seems particularly absurd given the anticapitalist message of the show,” said Miranda Banks, the chair of Loyola Marymount University’s film, television and media studies department.“‘Squid Game’ was a South Korean series, and it’s inflected with the politics of South Korean culture,” she added. “So part of this is not just a translation of the genre, but it’s also a translation of a nation. And in doing that, it is not surprising — and it’s arguably quite hilarious — that it becomes a pro-capitalist dream fulfilled.”The producers of the reality show are aware of the irony. But they said that by hewing as close to the original as possible — the same number of contestants (456) and a life-changing amount of prize money ($4.56 million) — they felt they could create compelling television despite the lower stakes.The live attraction is just one prong of Netflix’s campaign to expand the “Squid Game” brand.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times“This was a drama that was so much about the fact that people who were eliminated were killed,” the producer Stephen Lambert said. “We were obviously never going to do that, but having such a big prize pot meant that when you were eliminated, your dreams died, and they were really big dreams that people had.”(The filming of the reality show has generated its own drama, with complaints from several contestants about “inhumane” conditions. When asked about the complaints, the producers said in a statement that they “take the welfare of our contestants extremely seriously.”)Still, does allowing fans to play along with a social satire cheapen its integrity?Ms. Banks doesn’t believe so.“I think that you probably have the fans who are there for the social commentary and the drama and the state of the game,” she said. “And then you have the people who love to play games. That might be different age groups. It might be different demographics.”A happy ending to Warships at Squid Game: The Trials. Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesFor Marian Lee, Netflix’s chief marketing officer, the brand offshoots are doing their job — bringing renewed attention to “Squid Game” — yet she acknowledges the risks of creating so many versions that relied on the same source.“We have a hugely popular show that basically captures the cultural zeitgeist, but the doll, all the iconography, is carried through to the unscripted,” she said. “For us as a marketing team, how do you make sure that people understand that this is an unscripted version of that, and not the second season yet? You have to make sure that fans are following along: Oh, this is the unscripted version. Oh, this is the live experience. Oh, Season 2 is coming.“The fandom is there. It’s just making sure that we’re able to create distinct moments for each of those things.” More

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      Julianna Margulies Apologizes After Remarks on Black Support of Jews

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      The actress had said on a podcast that some Black people not standing with Jews after the Hamas attacks had been “brainwashed to hate Jews.”The actress Julianna Margulies, who drew criticism this week after saying on a podcast that some Black people not standing with Jews after the recent attack by Hamas had been “brainwashed to hate Jews,” said on Friday that she “did not intend for my words to sow further division, for which I am sincerely apologetic.”On the Nov. 20 episode of “The Back Room With Andy Ostroy,” Margulies, who has starred on the television series “E.R.,” “The Good Wife” and, presently, “The Morning Show” on Apple TV+, accused Black and L.G.B.T.Q. people of showing insufficient support for Israel and Jews in the United States since the deadly Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas.“I am horrified by the fact that statements I made on a recent podcast offended the Black and LGBTQIA+ communities, communities I truly love and respect,” Margulies said in a statement on Friday afternoon to Deadline, which her publicist sent to The New York Times in response to a query. “I want to be 100% clear: Racism, homophobia, sexism, or any prejudice against anyone’s personal beliefs or identity are abhorrent to me, full stop.”Some social media users objected to Margulies’s comments as racist, and questioned why she was focusing her criticism on marginalized groups.Margulies, who is Jewish, contrasted Jews’ vocal support for Black civil rights in the 1960s with the present: “Now the Black community isn’t embracing us and saying, ‘We stand with you the way you stood with us?’”She added, “The fact that the entire Black community isn’t standing with us, to me, says either they just don’t know or they’ve been brainwashed to hate Jews.”She also said on the podcast that progressive protesters on college campuses, whom she accused of “spewing this antisemitic hate,” include gender nonbinary people who, she said, “will be the first people beheaded and their heads played like a soccer ball on the field” in places run by militant Islamist groups like Hamas.Margulies also said on the podcast, “There was a film being shown by this Black lesbian club on the Columbia campus, and they put signs up that said, ‘No Jews allowed.’” (The president of LionLez, a group for queer women and nonbinary people of color at the university, had emailed, “Zionists aren’t invited,” The Columbia Spectator reported.) Margulies said that to Hamas and its ilk, members of that student club would be “even lower than the Jews — A. you’re Black, and B. you’re gay. And you’re turning your back against the people who support you?”Margulies added that she was offended as someone “who plays a lesbian journalist on ‘The Morning Show.’ I am more offended by it as a lesbian than I am as a Jew, to be honest with you.”In her statement on Friday, Margulies said that she usually seeks to “forge a united front against discrimination.” More

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      Monica Aldama, Coach in Netflix Series ‘Cheer,’ Retires

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      The series propelled Monica Aldama to become one of the most famous cheer coaches in the country.Her obsessive goal of training an elite small-town cheer squad into national champions made Monica Aldama one of the most famous cheer coaches in the country.But Ms. Aldama, who entranced viewers in the popular Netflix documentary series “Cheer” before her team became mired in a series of controversies, will no longer be head coach at Navarro College. The community college in Texas announced her retirement from its cheer program on Thursday after nearly three decades of coaching.“There is not a larger figure in the sport of cheer than Monica Aldama,” said Michael Landers, the college’s executive director of student services and athletics. “She is an icon in the sport and built our program from the ground up with class, grace and a championship mindset.”A former cheerleader herself, Ms. Aldama was hired to teach mathematics and sponsor the cheerleading program at the college in the small town of Corsicana. Over the next few years, she built it into a championship-winning juggernaut that drew ambitious practitioners of competitive cheerleading, who often perform physically grueling stunts and gymnastics.Under her leadership, the team won 17 national titles in annual collegiate competitions in Daytona Beach, Fla., organized by the National Cheerleaders Association.The niche world of Navarro Cheer, and its head coach, burst into the mainstream in the 2020 Netflix series ”Cheer,” after a documentary crew followed the team as it prepared for a competition. The series gave audiences an intimate front-row seat for the trials of the squad’s cheerleaders, as they endured Ms. Aldama’s meticulous training sessions and confronted more personal problems.Ms. Aldama’s no-nonsense coaching style and demand for discipline left some viewers inspired. Others, however, were unsettled by her determination to push Navarro’s cheerleaders to win the title.The show’s success made stars out of Ms. Aldama, whose students called her “the queen,” and her cheerleaders, leading to appearances on talk shows, a spoof on “Saturday Night Live” and even a live tour. Ms. Aldama joined the ranks of reality TV royalty by competing on “Dancing With the Stars,” and she released a book in 2022.But the team also was shaken by scandal. One fan favorite cheerleader, Jerry Harris, was accused of using his status to solicit sexually explicit content from teenage boys. Mr. Harris was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2022 after pleading guilty to two charges of sex crimes involving minors. A second season of the show, two years after the first, showed Ms. Aldama and other members of the squad grappling with that revelation.Then, a former cheerleader on the team claimed in a civil suit filed in April that Ms. Aldama had pressured her to keep quiet after she accused another team member of sexually assaulting her on campus.Ms. Aldama called the allegations “demonstrably false,” in a statement, and said she had been temporarily suspended from participating in cheerleading by its national governing body, USA Cheer, as it investigated the complaint. Navarro College, which was also named as a defendant, also denied any wrongdoing.She was later dropped as a defendant in the lawsuit, according to an amended complaint filed in May. A lawyer for the plaintiff did not immediately respond to a request for comment about why Ms. Aldama had been dropped from the case.Ms. Aldama decided to retire in part because she and Elizabeth Pillans, an administrator who had also been listed in the civil lawsuit and later dropped from it, planned to file a lawsuit.“She did not want forthcoming litigation she and Ms. Pillans intend to file to distract from the upcoming Navarro College cheer season,” Russell Prince, her lawyer, said in a statement.Ms. Aldama has since returned to coaching and no longer appears on USA Cheer’s suspensions list. A spokeswoman for USA Cheer said in a statement that Ms. Aldama had been removed from the list after the organization completed its “investigation and adjudication process.”In an Instagram post last month, Ms. Aldama expressed “incredible relief” about USA Cheer’s decision, but criticized the organization for its handling of the investigation.“Everything Ms. Aldama has endured in the last year has done nothing to protect athletes and participants in sport,” Mr. Prince said, adding that she hoped USA Cheer would work with her to address her concerns.She will retire after finishing the fall 2023 semester, Navarro College said in its announcement.Lola Fadulu More

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      Netflix’s ‘Verified’ Gives Comedians a Path Forward

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      The path forward for comedians is especially confusing now. Netflix’s “Verified” showcases are giving them a national stage, even if they have to share it.How in the world do you make it in stand-up comedy?This question has long kept aspiring stars up at night, and we are living in a moment when the route to a successful career is more confusing than ever. Do you have to get on TikTok? Does Comedy Central still matter? The days of being told you just need a spot on “The Tonight Show” are gone, and with myriad platforms, there appear to be many roads, most leading nowhere. And yet, the one that still has the biggest reputation for elevating comics is Netflix. But it’s unclear how much the streaming service, known for specials by boldfaced names like John Mulaney and Adam Sandler, cares about minting stars.That’s why Netflix’s “Verified” is important. It’s two showcases, each about an hour, featuring emerging comics doing short sets. There is a promising precedent: The streamer aired “The Comedy Lineup,” originally in 2018, which starred relative unknowns doing 15 minutes of jokes. Three in the Class of ’18 have since gotten their own series (Taylor Tomlinson, Michelle Buteau, Sam Jay). One just played Carnegie Hall (Tim Dillon). Another has been a head writer and sidekick on late night (Ian Karmel, a James Corden stalwart).Rosebud Baker brought her hard-boiled persona to “Verified.”Marcus Russell Price/Netflix“Comedy Lineup” didn’t vault these performers to fame, but it helped. And in retrospect, the selection of the entire group (including Jak Knight, Phil Wang and Sabrina Jalees) reflected foresight and taste. The artists in the new showcases are not exactly newcomers. There’s a correspondent for “The Daily Show” (Dulcé Sloan) and a comic who recently played the theater at Madison Square Garden (Nimesh Patel). There are jokes about dating in your mid-30s (Leslie Liao) and a comic showing off her pregnant belly (Rosebud Baker, whose hard-boiled persona backs up a strong, spiky set).“Verified” doesn’t amount to more than a perfectly fine tasting menu of comedy. Sometimes, though, that’s all you want.There’s something pleasing about following the transgressive intensity of Robby Hoffman with the laid-back charm of Patel. In a recent column on Hoffman’s podcast, “Too Far,” I compared that bulldozing stand-up to Larry David because of her mountain-out-of-a-molehill kvetching, but her hilarious rage over people who complain about interruptions during a conversation makes her sound like a modern lesbian Andrew Dice Clay. I didn’t even think that was possible.Patel takes a leisurely pace, mixing crowd work and topical jokes (some solid roasting of Vivek Ramaswamy) with dated bits (a Mike Pence joke). Patel makes this hour seem casual, offhand, just another night at the club.Sloan may adjust to the form best because she starts quickly (“How y’all doing? Great”), ends abruptly and sticks to a couple of nontopical subjects, including a bit about the benefits of dating a poor man and a great observational joke that might have you looking differently at the way people buy weed. In less than 15 minutes, her set packs a wallop.It’s interesting what seeing all these comics in one place reveals about what is missing from most Netflix specials. Isiah Kelly begins his set with a joke about being broke, and how you know you’re having a bad week when you have to check your bank account before finishing an order at McDonald’s. Financial hardship is one of the most common subjects in live comedy, inevitably relatable to audiences today, but you’re less likely to hear about it from Ricky Gervais or Kevin Hart.Sabrina Yu brought nervous energy to the showcase. Marcus Russell Price/NetflixOne of the revelations for me was Sabrina Wu, who barrels into jokes with a nervous energy, then exploits it. “Oh my God,” Wu says to the roar of applause, sounding grateful, then offended: “That’s it?” This is a young comic who knows how to pivot. Wu’s standout bit involves talking trash about Amanda Gorman, the former National Youth Poet Laureate, at a contest early in her career, then describing the futility of a rivalry with her. It’s one of the better jokes from a comic on an eternally rich subject: jealousy.Class does not come up as much as race and ethnicity. Comics tend to introduce themselves by playing with their own background. Along with jokes about her deep voice and impatience with first dates, Liao, a Chinese American comic, draws attention to how Asian people’s faces are “gender neutral.” Asif Ali does some shouty jokes connecting the large Indian population to the lack of sex education. “You know why we’re not talking about it,” he says, before pointing in the air with mock aggression: “We’re too busy being about it.”Gianmarco Soresi, a Jewish comic who alternates between silkily feline physicality and frenetic gesticulation, digs into antisemitism, but only as it affects his act. His jokes parody his own solipsism. “I just feel if white people would stop complaining all the time about cancel culture and actually fought,” he says with passion, shaking his fist, “then all of us could do the Chinese accent again.”He then turns his back to the crowd and the camera shifts, giving viewers a moody shot of him looking downcast from backstage, adding a visual joke that stands out because it’s such a dramatically different camera angle. I have no idea how he convinced the producers to do this, but the effort was worth it.This shot is notable because there is something modest and safe about these sets. (Patel’s “Lucky Lefty” on YouTube is a better showcase of his work.) Partly, the length makes it feel low risk, but also maybe the stakes. If Netflix is where comics go to make it, then YouTube is where you go to complain about why you haven’t.Louis Katz, a bald, filthy veteran comic with slingshot punchlines, opens his new self-released special, “Present/Tense,” with better-known comics explaining why he never became famous. Nate Bargatze says he’s too dirty. Marc Maron points to his hair line. Dave Attell blames personality.It’s a funny way to begin a special, which goes on to offer its own theory. People today, Katz argues, don’t want jokes. They want comics to bare their soul. Perhaps. But in a way, his lament about the state of his career (“Stand-up comedy does not have a great retirement plan”) is his best attempt.David Drake, a strong joke writer, begins his latest YouTube special, “That’s It!,” with a pointed joke that has the ring of truth. “Here’s how you make it in this business,” he says. “Have a famous dad.” More

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      Henry Kissinger, Often Impersonated and Skewered by Sketch Comics

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      Countless depictions on “Saturday Night Live” and beyond cast light on the idiosyncrasies and vanities of this diplomatic hard liner.In a November 1976 episode of “Saturday Night Live,” Gilda Radner, in her recurring impression of Barbara Walters — a.k.a. Baba Wawa — interviews Henry Kissinger, played by John Belushi. After inquiring about his “silly, silly” accent, which she says “really, really irritates” her, Radner asks Belushi to repeat after her: “I am a really, really fat, roly poly diplomat.” He does.The sketch includes a joke about Kissinger’s German-Jewish background. In a 1987 episode of “S.N.L.,” his religion comes up again in a sketch called “The Assimilated Jew’s Hanukkah.” In it, Al Franken imitates Kissinger, who is selling an album of Jewish Christmas songs. “Dozens of your favorite Christmas songs with lyrics a responsible Jew can feel comfortable singing,” he says — songs like “Silent Eight Nights” and “White Yom Tov.”After Kissinger’s death on Wednesday at 100 years old, Franken posted a memory on social media that referred to an American bombing campaign in North Vietnam in December 1972: “Kissinger called SNL once late on a Friday night looking for tix for his son. The Stones were playing that week. I told him that if it hadn’t been for the Xmas bombing, he’d have the tickets.”It is of little surprise that Kissinger, a polarizing figure who advised 12 American presidents and was the most powerful secretary of state of the postwar era, has been skewered and caricatured by comics for decades. His pronounced accent and manner of speaking were primed for satire, as was how he would regularly make statements that he seemed to think were quite profound but many found trite or ingratiating. (“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” for instance.) He also appeared to be an irresistible target to those on the left in particular, who perceived him as an attention-seeking egotist and seemed to relish taking him down a peg by casting him as silly, albeit sinister.In the 1980s, the British comedy troupe Monty Python released a song titled “Henry Kissinger.” Among its lyrics: “You’re the doctor of my dreams/with your crinkly hair/and your glassy stare/and your Machiavellian schemes/I know they say that you are very vain/and short and fat and pushy/but at least you’re not insane.”In 1983, on “SCTV,” Eugene Levy took a drunken, stumblebum approach to Kissinger in a sketch that had him appear as a guest on a fictional late-night show hosted by Sammy Maudlin (Joe Flaherty). “I don’t want to talk about Watergate,” he says belligerently. “I don’t want to talk about Richard Nixon. He was a great president. He will go down as one of the great presidents in history. What do you know about Richard Nixon?” he yells, slamming his fist on the desk.At the start of the 2015 documentary “Call Me Lucky” about his life, the comedian and political satirist Barry Crimmins is seen giving a speech at an antiwar rally in Boston Common in 1990. “They tell us it’s not another Vietnam, and then they wheel out Henry Kissinger to tell us about it!” he yells before asking, “What, was Goebbels unavailable that day?” in reference to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Switching into a Kissinger voice, Crimmins says, “We must be very careful or war will be averted.”In 2015, Crimmins told The New Yorker that he was once in a green room with Kissinger, where he avoided being introduced. “I have a policy about not shaking hands with war criminals,” Crimmins said. Aside from being a guest in 2014, Kissinger himself made appearances in sketches (which drew pointed criticism) on “The Colbert Report,” Stephen Colbert’s satirical news program on Comedy Central in which he portrayed a conservative blowhard caricature for nine years. In 2013, Colbert danced to Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” through various scenes that featured several stars and notable names, including Bryan Cranston, Jeff Bridges, the Rockettes and Kissinger, who picks up the phone and calls security.Years earlier, in 2006, Kissinger weighed in on a rock music contest in which Colbert and Peter Frampton competed against the Decemberists. In the episode, Kissinger said, “It’s time to rock,” and “I think the American people won.” In 2013, in an event at the New York Comedy Festival, Colbert said that Kissinger was also supposed to say, “Where are my pancakes? I was promised pancakes,” but he didn’t appreciate the line. “We have the tape of him reading the copy,” Colbert said, “and then he goes, ‘That is too much,’” quoting him with his accent.Jason Zinoman More

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      Interview: Rick Riordan, the Man Behind ‘Percy Jackson’

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      What books are on your night stand?I usually have three books going at a time: one in Italian to improve my fluency, a novel in English and a nonfiction work in English. Right now it’s “Il Metodo del Coccodrillo,” a thriller by Maurizio de Giovanni, “Chain-Gang All-Stars,” a near-future dystopian novel by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and “The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s” by Piers Brendon.How do you organize your books?“Organize” might be too kind a word. I try to group books loosely by subject matter. Celtic studies and books in Irish take up two shelves. Another two shelves are for books in Italian. Not surprisingly, Greek and Roman mythology takes up about four shelves. The rest is a scattered assortment of novels, nonfiction, poetry and graphic novels.What’s the last great book you read?“How to Live: Or, A Life of Montaigne,” by Sarah Bakewell. I was not well versed in Montaigne’s work, but I admire any biography that can bring its subject to life in such a vivid and relatable way.Are there any classics that you only recently read for the first time?“La Divina Commedia.” I had only read portions of the “Inferno” in English, but my Italian finally got to the level that I could tackle the “Commedia” in the original. It was quite a challenge and took me about a year, but it was well worth the effort to appreciate the poetry in its original form. What struck me was how topical and regional Dante’s references were. For such a timeless poem, it is deeply rooted in the personal dramas and “pop culture” of 13th-century Tuscany.Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?So many. N.K. Jemisin has a brilliant iconoclastic imagination that has reframed fantasy and science fiction for me many times over. Madeline Miller has breathed new life into ancient Greek stories. China Miéville is a genius of speculative fiction whose quirky world-building always delights me. I also love the Irish-language poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).I am lucky enough to have a home office with a large window looking over the Charles River in Boston. During the winter evenings, when the trees are bare and the view is wide open, the sunset on the water is spectacular. With the fireplace going and a bit of soft instrumental music playing … I can’t imagine a better place for enjoying a good book.What kind of reader were you as a child?Reluctant. I rarely read assigned texts in school, and reading for pleasure wasn’t something that would have occurred to me. That changed when I discovered “The Lord of the Rings,” which was my gateway into fantasy, and from there into mythology and the wider world of literature. I like to say that my karmic punishment for never reading an English text in school was becoming an English teacher.What book should everybody read before the age of 21?I don’t really believe in a canon of must-read texts for everyone. My gateway books were J.R.R. Tolkien’s. Would I recommend them to most 12-year-old kids today to get them interested in reading? Probably not. The most formative books I had read by age 21 were probably Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” and “The Habit of Being,” a collection of letters by Flannery O’Connor. Great books, but again, I am not sure I would make them blanket recommendations for every young adult today.What is the best writing advice you have ever gotten?To avoid the cycle of dissatisfaction. Before I was published, I took a class from a mystery novelist who warned me that writing could turn into a succession of moving goal posts. It can be easy to lose sight of why a writer writes — because you have an internal need to turn your thoughts into words.What do you write when you sign books for fans?I usually sign 1,000-5,000 books at a time, in advance of each event, so alas, I don’t get to personalize many books anymore. My signature has become an illegible scrawl. On those rare occasions when I get to have a one-on-one interaction with a fan, I try to add a few vowels and consonants to my scrawl, and perhaps sketch a lightning bolt underneath.Do you count any books as guilty pleasures?Any time I relax and enjoy a book rather than working, or cleaning the house, or running errands, I consider that a guilty pleasure. The type of book doesn’t matter.Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?This is a complex ask, but I would personally love to read more anthologies of Indigenous folklore and mythology from around the world. When my family and I were traveling through the Pacific Northwest last summer, through the lands of the Tlingit, Haida and Chugach, we heard such wonderful stories. I’d love to learn more. Perhaps those books are out there and I’ve simply been unsuccessful finding them, or perhaps the books are not getting the coverage and attention they deserve. It’s also possible some Indigenous writers are wary of popularizing their sacred stories for a mass-market audience, which is totally fair. You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?I don’t do dinner parties, so I would probably invite the most introverted writers I could think of — perhaps Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson — because none of them would show up. Then we could enjoy a quiet evening at home by ourselves, reading by the fire. More

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      in Television

      Two New Books Consider Comedy and the Culture Wars

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      The authors of “Comedy Book” and “Outrageous” argue that culture-war worries about what’s a laughing matter have been overplayed.COMEDY BOOK: How Comedy Conquered Culture — and the Magic That Makes It Work, by Jesse David FoxOUTRAGEOUS: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars, by Kliph NesteroffDid you hear the one about cancel culture?Of course you did, several times over, if you’ve paid any attention to modern comedy and its purveyors, many of whom have groused about how hard it is to be funny in today’s climate. But two new books share an exasperation with the common sentiment that there’s never been a worse time to express oneself than the present. Taking them, well, seriously can liberate us from repeating the past.Kliph Nesteroff’s fact-packed “Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars” finds American entertainers in a perpetual state of despair over the censorious climate of their day — whatever day it happens to be. Steve Allen, the original host of “The Tonight Show,” complained about the “very touchy times” in 1955; in 2015, Jerry Seinfeld said he’d been warned away from playing colleges because of students’ sensitivities.Social media “gives the impression that people are more irrational, humorless and overly sensitive than in the past,” Nesteroff writes, but vintage letters to the editor contain “remarkably similar” sentiments.To Jesse David Fox, the author of “Comedy Book,” the risk of backlash is part of the point. Fox, a senior editor at New York magazine’s Vulture and a podcaster who regularly interviews comedians, puts it this way: “Does political correctness make comedy harder to do? Sure, in the sense that it would be easier to run for a touchdown if you didn’t have to worry about holding the ball, but that’s the game. It’s what makes it more exciting than watching a bunch of men sprinting with helmets on.” This is just one example of Fox’s keen insight in his energetic and wise book, which focuses on the ’90s and beyond, when, the author reckons, comedy became an “ever-present, important, valued societal force.” (Fox points out that before “Seinfeld” premiered in 1989, no comedian had ever headlined a show at Madison Square Garden’s arena, yet by the time he wrote his book, 18 had.) Within broadly named chapters (“Truth,” “Context,” “Audience”), he crams vivid examples; his “Timing” section, which explores 9/11 jokes and the notion of “too soon,” is particularly adept at illustrating the use of humor in the face of tragedy.Like many of his subjects, Fox knows his way around a pointed one-liner. “A roast might sound mean, but it’s another way of saying ‘I see you’” is one. “If you are saying supposedly offensive things and the audience is instantly all onboard, it is not a comedy show, it’s a rally” is another. That such rigorous thinking should at one point lead him to defend an Adam Sandler poop joke is a great gag in itself.Fox is allergic to the kind of snobbery directed at broad comedy, maintaining that “if it’s funny to anyone, it’s funny.” Still, he’s interested in parameters — how “8:46,” Dave Chappelle’s Netflix monologue inspired by the murder of George Floyd, functions as “a piece of work in conversation with the history of comedy,” and why the same comedian’s jokes targeting queer people fall short.Comedy, Fox writes, is fundamentally play, and in his deft hands, the analysis of comedy can be playful, too. Fox knows that grand pronouncements on what makes funny things funny is dicey territory: “The sense of what is funny is so subjective — so completely built into your person — that it feels objective,” he writes.His own life experiences and tastes are integral to his reporting. The first and last chapters of the book recount the deaths of immediate family members, which, he says, comedy helped him process. “Comedy Book” is not the definitive history of the past three-plus decades. It’s Fox’s history, and better for it.“Outrageous,” the product of herculean research, has a wider purview than just comedy. Nesteroff touches on rock ’n’ roll, talk radio, the initial blowback received by early critics of Hitler and more.However, what does and doesn’t, should and shouldn’t, make us laugh does take up a lot of space (Nesteroff’s 2015 “The Comedians” is a full-fledged history of the form). Sometimes the laughs are inadvertent, as in a 1959 complaint from a viewer of the TV series “Lassie” who compared its portrayal of a litter of puppies to a sex show.In no-frills prose, Nesteroff races through some two centuries of expression and backlash — from blackface minstrelsy (criticized early on by Frederick Douglass) to the (formerly Dixie) Chicks (the country music trio whose titanic profile shrank several sizes after its lead singer publicly criticized President George W. Bush) — rarely pausing for analysis and sometimes breezing by useful context. The book tends to home in on the moment when each brouhaha reached a fever pitch, which can give a distorted picture of the controversies and their ensuing fallouts.“Outrageous” is nonetheless a useful compendium. Placing so many outrages next to one another exposes a call-and-response pattern, in which both sides of the political divide have tried to dictate acceptable speech for all. We may be partial to the intentions of one side, but the mechanics often look identical.Unsurprisingly, it’s those already in power who often succeed. If there is a main character in Nesteroff’s sea of stories, it’s Paul Weyrich, a John Birch Society alum who helped build “an elaborate Culture War infrastructure” with corporate cash and evangelical muscle, eventually cofounding the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority.In sometimes clandestine ways, those groups have had a major impact in seeding American culture with conservative ideology, raging against what Weyrich called “the Cultural Marxism of an elite few to dictate words, language and opinions” while, Nesteroff writes, doing precisely that.“Outrageous” portrays a country divided; there’s no shortage of strife in Fox’s book, but he believes fundamentally in the unifying power of comedy, which “smooths conflicts and unites disparate groups.” His faith is contagious. Comedy is not stifled, he argues, but has “enmeshed itself in how millennials and now Gen Z communicate.” Superstars like Chappelle and Amy Schumer are endowed with the kind of trusted status once reserved for those in the purported truth business, like journalists, public intellectuals and politicians.“Can comedy make everything all better?” Fox asks in conclusion. “Of course not. But it makes it easier.”COMEDY BOOK: How Comedy Conquered Culture — and the Magic That Makes It Work | More