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      Bob Orben, One-Man Gag Factory and Speechwriter, Dies at 95

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      He wrote tens of thousands of jokes in his career. Among those who told them were Dick Gregory, Jack Paar, Red Skelton — and, for a while, President Gerald R. Ford.Bob Orben, who after writing jokes for Dick Gregory, Jack Paar, Red Skelton and others in the 1960s found a new avenue for his wit when he became a speechwriter for President Gerald R. Ford in 1974, died on Feb. 2 in Alexandria, Va. He was 95.His death, at a nursing home, was confirmed by his great-niece, Yvette Chevallier.Mr. Orben was a one-man gag factory. He wrote joke books. He dispatched one-liners to entertainers, politicians and disc jockeys through his subscription newsletter, Current Comedy. And he wrote a column, My Favorite Jokes, for Parade magazine.“I don’t mean to blow my own horn,” he told The Washington Post in 1982, “but between Johnny Carson’s monologues, the political cartoonists such as Herblock and Oliphant, and me, if we all decide what the hot subject in the country is, that’s what it is.”In 1968, Gerald Ford, a Michigan Republican who was then the House minority leader, needed someone to spice up a speech he was going to give to the Gridiron Club, an organization of journalists whose annual dinner was an opportunity to lampoon political figures. George Murphy, the former actor and United States senator, knew Red Skelton, for whom Mr. Orben was a writer, and recommended him.Mr. Orben’s goal was to make Ford funny, or at least funnier than Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, another speaker at the dinner. After listening to tapes of Ford’s delivery, Mr. Orben came up with a few zingers.“Ford was the surprise hit,” Mr. Orben recalled in 2008 in an oral history interview with the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation. Among the Orben lines Ford delivered was the observation that he had no interest in the presidency, except that “on that long drive back to Alexandria, Virginia, where I live, as I go past 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I do seem to hear a little voice within me saying, ‘If you lived here, you’d be home now.’”Mr. Orben continued to feed jokes to Ford during his vice presidency. When Ford became president in 1974, after President Richard M. Nixon resigned, he hired Mr. Orben.A 1975 profile of President Ford in The New York Times Magazine quoted him reading aloud from a speech written by Mr. Orben that he was going to give to the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association. It included references to a prominent Democratic senator and an agriculture secretary known for his off-color remarks.“I have only one thing to say about a program that calls for me to follow Bob Hope,” he read. “Who arranged this? Scoop Jackson? It’s ridiculous. Bob Hope has enormous stage presence, superb comedy writing and the finest writers in the business. I’m standing here in a rented tuxedo — with three jokes from Earl Butz!”Mr. Orben cautioned the president not to pause when delivering a good one-liner.“Watch Hope,” he told him. “You’ll see he really punches through a line.”Mr. Orben fed Ford self-deprecating lines that suited his personality. One of those lines, also delivered in 1975, played off something Lyndon B. Johnson had famously said about him.“It’s a great pleasure — and great honor — to be at Yale Law’s Sesquicentennial Convocation,” he said. “And I defy anyone to say that and chew gum at the same time.”Mr. Orben became the director of the White House speechwriting staff in early 1976 and served through the end of the Ford administration.Mr. Orben at the White House with President Ford in 1976. He fed jokes to the president and coached him on how to deliver them.Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.John Mihalec, a speechwriter for President Ford during the 1976 presidential campaign, said it was not surprising that a comedy writer should excel at writing speeches.“Comedy writing is so precise — the setup and the punch line and everything has to be at exactly the right volume and in the right place,” Mr. Mihalec said in a phone interview. “It’s good training for the precision of presidential speechwriting.”Robert Orben was born on March 4, 1927, in the Bronx to Walter and Marie Orben. His father was in the hardware business. Bob was smitten by magic at an early age, and when he was 12 he and his brother, Walter, performed a mentalist act in the Catskill Mountains, “The Boy With the Radio Mind.” It flopped.After graduating from high school in 1943, he attended Drake Business School. He also started his short-lived career in magic.He was hired as a magic demonstrator in a shop in Manhattan, but he found his métier not in performing magic but in writing about magicians; he was impressed by one magician’s onstage comedic patter, which led him to publish a pamphlet, “The Encyclopedia of Patter,” in 1946.Over the next decade he would publish books like “Blue Ribbon Comedy,” “The Working Comedian’s Gag File,” “Tag-Lines,” “Bits, Boffs and Banter” and “The Emcee’s Handbook.” He published dozens of joke collections in his career.He began writing his comedy newsletter in 1958, and in the 1960s he wrote for “The Jack Paar Program” and then for “The Red Skelton Hour.”After coming to the attention of the groundbreaking Black comedian Dick Gregory, Mr. Orben said, he sent him a page of jokes every day. Another one of Mr. Orben’s clients was someone very different from Mr. Gregory: the conservative Arizona Republican senator Barry Goldwater, for whom he wrote during his unsuccessful campaign for the presidency in 1964.“One of the jokes that I wrote for Greg was talking about Goldwater,” Mr. Orben said in the Ford Presidential Foundation interview. “And as you know, the campaign slogan was, ‘In your heart, you know he’s right.’ And Greg used to say, ‘In your heart, you know he’s white.’”Mr. Orben never returned to the White House. But he kept writing joke books, among them “2500 Jokes to Start ’Em Laughing” (1979), “2100 Laughs for All Occasions” (1983) and “2000 Surefire Jokes for Speakers” (1986).He also continued to write his newsletter through 1989, as well as writing speeches for business executives and working as a consultant to IBM.Mr. Orben’s wife, Jean (Connelly) Orben, died last year. He leaves no immediate survivors.In 1974, Mr. Orben was helping Vice President Ford rehearse his speech for the Gridiron Club dinner. One line, about Ronald Reagan, who was then the governor of California, worried Ford: “Governor Reagan does not dye his hair. Let’s just say he’s turning prematurely orange.”He asked Mr. Orben, “Do you think the governor would take offense at that?”“Now, I’m looking at this blockbuster joke of the year go up in smoke, but I think I gave him a fair, honest answer,” Mr. Orben said in the 2008 oral history interview. “I said, ‘You know, Mr. Vice President, Reagan has been in show business a good part of his life. He has gone through a thousand roasts and I’m sure he has heard dyed-hair jokes. So I really don’t think so.’”To Mr. Orben’s relief, Vice President Ford delivered the line. More

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      John Cleese to Reboot ‘Fawlty Towers’ With His Daughter Camilla Cleese

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      Mr. Cleese will write and act alongside his daughter Camilla Cleese in a revival of the renowned BBC comedy.“Fawlty Towers,” the renowned 1970s British sitcom that starred John Cleese as a surly and snobbish hotel owner, will be rebooted with Mr. Cleese returning alongside his daughter Camilla Cleese, Castle Rock Entertainment announced on Tuesday.The original show, which Radio Times declared the best British sitcom of all time in 2019 after a survey of comedy experts, ran for two seasons of six episodes each, in 1975 and 1979. Mr. Cleese, now 83, played Basil Fawlty, who was forced to contend with disasters and ludicrous situations while displaying all the kindness and hospitality of sandpaper.In the reboot, Mr. Cleese’s character will open a boutique hotel with his daughter, whom he has just discovered he had, and deal with a more modern set of problems.Mr. Cleese, an original member of the Monty Python comedy troupe, has recently been dealing with a more modern set of problems in his real life as well.On social media, he has frequently railed against “cancel culture” and what he has deemed “woke” behaviors. He has signed up to host a show on GB News, a British right-wing television network, in which “no one will be canceled — and no topic will be too controversial for discussion,” the network said.In 2020, an episode of “Fawlty Towers” was removed from some streaming services because it contained racial slurs. Mr. Cleese called the decision “stupid,” telling the newspaper The Age that “if you put nonsense words into the mouth of someone you want to make fun of you’re not broadcasting their views, you’re making fun of them.”Some fans have also accused him of transphobia for his comments in support of J.K. Rowling, the author of the “Harry Potter” series.As with other British series in the 1970s, the original “Fawlty Towers” was shown in the United States on PBS. Despite interest from American broadcasters, the show’s small number of episodes and half-hour run time, without commercials, made it unable to fit American TV schedules.Castle Rock Entertainment did not say where the new series would air.Mr. Cleese said in a statement that he and his daughter developed the concept for the reboot with one of its executive producers, Matthew George, a producer of the films “Wind River” and “A Private War.”“When we first met, he offered an excellent first idea, and then Matt, my daughter Camilla, and I had one of the best creative sessions I can remember,” Mr. Cleese said. “By dessert, we had an overall concept so good that, a few days later, it won the approval of Rob and Michele Reiner. Camilla and I look forward enormously to expanding it into a series.”Mr. George, the Reiners and Derrick Rossi are the executive producers of the new “Fawlty Towers” series.“John Cleese is a comedy legend,” Mr. Reiner said in a statement. “Just the idea of working with him makes me laugh.”Amanda Holpuch More

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      Cindy Williams’s 6 Best Moments Onscreen

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      Her comedic work in “Laverne & Shirley” was career-defining. But the actress had other chops, too. Here’s a look at some of her best work and where to see it.To most people, the actress Cindy Williams, who died on Wednesday at age 75, was synonymous with Shirley Feeney of the hit 1970s and ’80s sitcom “Laverne & Shirley,” a spinoff of “Happy Days” about two unattached women in the 1950s and ’60s. But Williams was much more than that character. She had serious dramatic chops, as evidenced in her early film work. And as a comic actor, she demonstrated a Lucille Ball-like ability to combine sweetness and slapstick.Still, Shirley was a career-defining role — a lively, sometimes demure, sometimes daring bottle-capper at Shotz Brewery, in Milwaukee. The show resurrected a vintage style of zany comedy that freed up Williams and her co-star, Penny Marshall, to act both more adult and more childish at the same time. Audiences ate it up, and the show ran for eight seasons.Of the two lead characters, Shirley was the more relatable, restrained of the two, which made her moments of cutting loose just that much more memorable: Watch her hungry and diving for food on the floor in “Guinea Pigs” (Season 2, Episode 14); going agro in “Tag Team Wrestling” (Season 3, Episode 2); drunk-crawling across the dinner table in “Shirley and the Older Man” (Season 4, Episode 24); or panicking while chained to a giant computer, in protest of the local power company, in “The Right to Light” (Season 5, Episode 17).Since much of her best work was steeped in nostalgia, it seems only fitting to look back at a few career highlights, with some tips on where to stream them.‘American Graffiti’ (1973)In this hit boys-coming-of-age movie from George Lucas that set off a wave of 1950s and ’60s nostalgia (see “Happy Days,” two years later), Cindy Williams pulled off the difficult trick of standing out in a stardom-bound cast that includes Richard Dreyfuss, Harrison Ford and Ron Howard. In it, Williams plays a high-school head cheerleader who is losing her class-president boyfriend (Howard) as he heads off to college. In one great scene, he proposes that they see other people while he’s away; in an even better one, set at a school dance, she breaks the news to him that she has always been the controlling force in their relationship. You might be tempted to follow this memorable pair into adulthood in the sequel “More American Graffiti,” but don’t bother — it’s better if they stay 17 forever. (Read the original review of “American Graffiti” here.)Rent it on Amazon, Apple, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube and other major platforms.‘The Conversation’ (1974)In her earliest roles, Williams was often cast as a best friend or ingénue — a sweet slip of a girl and not much more. But in this paranoid thriller from Francis Ford Coppola, she showed us something darker. Playing one half of a young couple being covertly recorded by Gene Hackman’s security pro Harry Caul, Williams sounds at first — on audio tape — like the embodiment of innocence. But as Harry applies filters to clean up his recordings, the carefully nuanced nature of Williams’s line readings slowly becomes clear, and we’re left wondering whether her character might be the spider in this web of deceit. (Read the original review here.)Stream it on Showtime; rent it on most major platforms.‘Happy Days’ (1975)Season 3, Episode 10: ‘A Date With Fonzie’Following her dramatic turn in “The Conversation,” Williams was tapped to join her comedy-writing partner, Penny Marshall, in what was intended to be a one-time guest appearance on this popular sitcom set in the 1950s. In the episode’s story line, Fonzie (Henry Winkler) enlists Laverne (Marshall) and Shirley (Williams) to go on a double date with him and Richie (Howard), for whom Shirley was thought to be an easy conquest. Williams had a relaxed chemistry with Howard (who played her boyfriend in “American Graffiti”), but this time, her character got to enjoy herself. The Shirley persona freed Williams up: She was funny, cute and sexy, and she had a mean right hook. Naturally, Richie — and the audience — wanted to see more of her and her bestie, which in TV-world meant a spinoff featuring the twosome was in order.Stream it on Paramount+.‘Laverne & Shirley’Season 5, Episode 25 (‘The Diner’)“Laverne & Shirley” helped fine-tune a certain type of sitcom convention — the female duo, the “hangout” comedy — but if you want to do a deep dive, stick with Seasons 1 to 5. Once Laverne and Shirley move from Milwaukee to California in Season 6, the quality declines.For one of the funniest episodes, head over to “The Diner,” where the gals (briefly) take over the diner left to Lenny (Michael McKean) by his late uncle Lazlo (renamed Dead Lazlo’s Place, where you can get a Dead Lazlo Burger). It’s got the physical comedy: Laverne cooks and Shirley serves, resorting to carrying items to tables with her mouth. It’s also got some of the best lines, especially when the customers don’t even have the decency to call Shirley by her right name. You’ll want to plead, along with Laverne, “Please don’t harass Betty, please!”Stream much of Season 1 to 5 free on Pluto; bootlegs of individual episodes are easy to find online.Season 4, Episode 3: ‘Playing the Roxy’One of the best things about Season 4 is how many Shirley-centric episodes there are. In “Playing the Roxy,” the gal pals were reading a trashy story about a stripper before Shirley hits her head; suddenly, she believes she is that stripper, the best exotic dancer in North America. If Shirley’s body is a temple, Roxy’s is an amusement park — and Williams throws herself into the role with gusto, practicing bumps and grinds against a doorframe before staging an elaborate burlesque performance. If anything signaled that Williams wasn’t content to play it safe, it was this.Season 4, Episode 7: ‘A Date With Eraserhead’Granted, some of the sitcom’s plots are outlandish and require a suspension of disbelief. But then, occasionally, some are incredibly realistic. What would your best friend do if she believed your boyfriend was cheating on you? In “A Date With Eraserhead,” Laverne confronts Shirley’s beau, Carmine (Eddie Mekka), on her friend’s behalf (“I’ll hold him, you hit him”), only to learn that the couple has “an understanding” — that’s to say, an open relationship. This episode may not have the usual comic centerpiece, but it feels more true to the relationships at the core of the series, and Williams gets to show a few sides of Shirley that we might not have suspected were there, including heartbreak, jealousy and perhaps even love. More

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      Cindy Williams, Star of ‘Laverne & Shirley,’ Dies at 75

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      The show, in which Ms. Williams and Penny Marshall played roommates who worked in a Milwaukee brewery, was a spinoff of “Happy Days” and became a staple of 1970s television.Cindy Williams, an actress best known for her role on the 1970s slapstick sitcom “Laverne & Shirley,” died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 75.Her death followed a brief illness, her assistant, Liza Cranis, said by phone on Monday, adding that she had died “peacefully.” No cause was given.With Penny Marshall, Ms. Williams starred in the sitcom, which ran from 1976 to 1983 and was a spinoff of the television show “Happy Days.” It followed two young single women working at a Milwaukee brewery in the 1950s. Ms. Williams played Shirley Feeney, an upbeat and demure complement to Ms. Marshall’s brash Laverne DeFazio.“Laverne & Shirley” ran for eight seasons and, for several years, was among the highest-rated shows in the country. Ms. Williams appeared in more than 150 episodes but left in the final season of the show, after considerable on-set tension between her and Ms. Marshall. Ms. Marshall died in 2018, also at age 75.Ms. Williams is survived by her children, Emily and Zak Hudson, who, in a statement on Monday, described their mother as “one of a kind,” noting her sense of humor and “glittering spirit.” Her marriage to the musician Bill Hudson ended in divorce.Ms. Williams signing copies of her book “Shirley, I Jest! A Storied Life” in 2015.Beck Starr/Getty ImagesBefore Ms. Williams debuted in the role that would most define her career, she was cast in the George Lucas film “American Graffiti,” released in 1973. For her portrayal of Laurie in the film, she earned a nomination for best supporting actress from the British Academy Film Awards. The next year, she was in the Francis Ford Coppola film “The Conversation.” American Graffiti” and “The Conversation” garnered best picture nominations at the Academy Awards.Ms. Williams also auditioned for the role of Princess Leia in the “Star Wars” franchise, a part that eventually went to Carrie Fisher.Later in her career, Ms. Williams was a guest star on well-known television shows such as “Law and Order: SVU” and “7th Heaven” and earned several stage credits including the Broadway production of “The Drowsy Chaperone,” in which she briefly played Mrs. Tottendale.But she was best known as Shirley.“She was sort of an optimist, kindhearted, repressed, temperamental, fun-loving person,” Ms. Williams once said of her character. “I always saw her as having this fear,” she added, noting that while Shirley’s desires were never explicitly played out onscreen, both Laverne and Shirley strove for the comforts of modern life.“That was the sadness of those characters to me,” Ms. Williams added. “What if that never happens, then where are we? And that was sort of my life, too.”Born in Van Nuys, Calif., a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, on Aug. 22, 1947, Cynthia Jane Williams became interested in acting during high school and attended Los Angeles City College, where she majored in theater arts, according to biographies provided by Ms. Cranis. “I’m what you might call a ‘Valley Girl,’” Ms. Williams wrote in her 2015 memoir, “Shirley, I Jest! A Storied Life.”She worked at a pancake house, as well at the Whisky a Go Go nightclub in Hollywood, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Ms. Williams went on to perform in commercials for deodorant and sunglasses, some of which never aired, she said in an interview with the Television Academy. Her early television roles included parts on “Room 222,” “Nanny and the Professor” and “Love, American Style.”“I always played the lead’s best friend, always,” she said.Then known for her seemingly guileless American sweetheart presence, Ms. Williams turned that expectation inside out with an exceptionally sly performance in “The Conversation.” In the film, the viewer pieces together her words from a surreptitiously recorded conversation, expecting her to be a helpless victim, not the calculating femme fatale that she is. More dramatic roles might have followed, but she turned to situation comedy instead.Ms. Williams and Ms. Marshall were writing partners at Zoetrope, a production company founded by Mr. Coppola, where they were working on a prospective TV spoof for the bicentennial, when Garry Marshall, Ms. Marshall’s brother, asked if the two women would guest star on his show “Happy Days” as easy dates for Fonzie (Henry Winkler) and Richie (Ron Howard). Fonzie claimed Laverne for himself, while Shirley was meant for Richie, reuniting Ms. Williams with her “American Graffiti” co-star, Mr. Howard, who had played her boyfriend in that film.The episode of “Happy Days,” which aired in 1975, was so popular that Mr. Marshall pitched Fred Silverman, a top executive at ABC, about doing a comedy starring the two, arguing that there were no other shows about blue-collar women.The opening credits of “Laverne and Shirley” featured a school rhyme and a heartwarming mission statement that summed up the duo’s playful, hopeful ethic that anyone could relate to: They might just be young working-class women in the big city, but they are going to make their dreams come true.Laverne and Shirley’s high jinks were reminiscent of those of Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz on “I Love Lucy,” but, for this classic comedy duo, Shirley was (usually) the calmer and dreamier of the pair. With her breezy personality, Ms. Williams demonstrated an easy flair for portraying the awkwardness of youth in broad physical comedy.In a review of “Laverne & Shirley” in 1976, John J. O’Connor, the television critic for The New York Times, wrote: “Both title roles are played to a splendid noncondescending turn. Miss Williams and Miss Marshall touch all the best bases, a bit of Barbara Stanwyck in “Stella Dallas” here, a bit of Giùlietta Masina in “La Strada’ there, touches of Lucille Ball, Eve Arden and that crowd all over the place.”Though the actresses shared the screen, Ms. Williams sometimes felt that her co-star got preferential treatment because of her connection to Mr. Marshall. For her part, Ms. Marshall felt that Ms. Williams’s husband at the time, Mr. Hudson, who wanted to be a producer, was too demanding.At the beginning of the show’s final season, viewers watched Ms. Williams marry Walter Meeney — and become Shirley Feeney Meeney. Soon afterward, however, her long run had an ignominious end, with the plot claiming Shirley had followed her new husband overseas, leaving only a note to say goodbye. In reality, the actress had hoped to work with the show to hide and accommodate her pregnancy. She later sued for $20 million; the case was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.“‘Laverne & Shirley’” ended abruptly for me,” Ms. Williams wrote in her memoir. “When we shot the first episode, I was four months pregnant. But when it came time to sign the contract for that season I realized that the studio had scheduled me to work on my delivery due date.”“In the wink of an eye, I found myself off the show,” she wrote. “It was so abrupt that I didn’t even have time to gather my personal things.”In 2013, Ms. Williams and Ms. Marshall reunited for an appearance on the Nickelodeon series “Sam & Cat,” a modern show that riffed on the themes of “Laverne & Shirley” and starred Jennette McCurdy and Ariana Grande.Ms. Williams published her memoir two years later, and last year she completed a national theater tour of a one-woman show, “Me, Myself and Shirley.” In the show, she chronicled her life in Hollywood as well as her relationship with Ms. Marshall.“You couldn’t slip a playing card in between us because we just were in rhythm,” she said last year in an interview with NBC. “I couldn’t have done it with anyone else.”Sheelagh McNeill More

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      ‘S.N.L.’ Spoofs Merrick Garland’s Hunt for Classified Documents

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      Michael B. Jordan hosted an episode that was saved by a couple of commercial parodies.Classified documents are all the rage these days: They’re turning up in the homes of President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence, and on “Saturday Night Live,” which used these recent discoveries as grist for its opening sketch.This weekend’s “S.N.L.” broadcast, hosted by Michael B. Jordan and featuring the musical guest Lil Baby, began with a dramatic voice-over intoning, “Criminals beware. There’s a new sheriff in town, and he means business.” This person had already put away the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and, the voice-over added, “Now he’s searching for classified documents and he’s coming for whoever has them — Democrat, Republican or whatever Trump is now.”That person turned out to be Attorney General Merrick Garland, played by Mikey Day in an especially nebbishy manner. “I may look like I was born in a library,” Day said as Garland, “but there’s something you should know: Merrick Garland don’t play.” Though his voice was hardly intimidating, his bold assertions were often punctuated with head shakes and whip-crack sound effects.Day noted that “some have said the federal government classifies too many documents.” He added, “This has led people to ask, ‘Does recovering these documents even matter?’ To which I say: I don’t know. But it’s the law. And I am the law.” A pair of pixelated sunglasses then descended upon his face, accompanied by a caption that read “Deal With It.”He introduced three special agents that he had dispatched to the residences of elected officials, starting with Kenan Thompson playing an agent who said he had conducted a search of Pence’s home.“I knew right away this man needed a friend,” Thompson recounted. “When he opened the door, he said, ‘You came!’ with a big smile, and he offered to make us pancakes.”His search turned up no documents, but, Thompson said, “In an envelope marked ‘tax stuff,’ we discovered photographs of the country pop-singer Shania Twain, cut out from several magazines. When confronted with this, Mr. Pence said, ‘I’m sorry; I’m disgusting.’ ”Ego Nwodim played an agent who had searched the home of Vice President Kamala Harris. “Come on now — Joe Biden won’t even give this woman a pen,” Nwodim said. “You think she has classified documents?”Finally, Bowen Yang appeared as an agent who was still star-struck by a recent visit to the home of former President Barack Obama. “No big deal, but it was really fun,” Yang said, adding that Obama had possessed “175 letters from Lin-Manuel Miranda begging the president to attend a performance of ‘Hamilton.’ ”Day shared a final message for anyone still potentially holding onto classified documents: “Do you think this is a game?” he said. “Who do you think you’re playing with?”Thompson said to him, “Hey boss, when we done playing with these little papers, we gonna head down to Memphis and make sure justice is served down there, too, right?”“I sincerely hope so,” Day replied.Commercial Parody No. 1 of the WeekA pair of pretaped commercial parodies really rescued this week’s broadcast, beginning with this segment poking fun at the recent difficulties faced by Southwest Airlines. The carrier canceled thousands of flights around the holiday season, costing the company more than $1 billion.As the airline’s employees (played by Jordan, Heidi Gardner, Devon Walker and others) explain, Southwest has since taken steps to provide customers with a better, more modern experience: The company has upgraded its entire communications system — to 2008 Dell computers, replacing their old 2002 IBM ThinkPad laptops. And the airline has ditched its old pen-and-paper method of air-traffic control in favor of computers: that’s right, 2002 IBM ThinkPad laptops.Commercial Parody No. 2 of the WeekThis weekend’s second noteworthy commercial parody is also an effective little suspense thriller.It begins innocuously by lampooning a line of State Farm insurance ads, with Day and Gardner playing a married couple seeking the consultation of the company’s red-shirted spokesman, Jake From State Farm (Jordan). But as the story progresses, Jordan — who never fully exits the family’s house — begins to displace Day in all of his household roles, taking his wife and children out for pizza and to church and even supplanting Day in his marital bed.Day’s efforts to change insurance providers don’t go so well either: You’ll never hear anyone make a basic sales pitch sound as sinister as Jordan does when he says, “Even if you do find cheaper coverage, we’ll just match it.”Weekend Update Jokes of the WeekOver at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che continued to riff on the discovery of classified documents in the homes of Trump, Biden and Pence. Other jokes targeted Facebook’s decision to reinstate Trump’s account and a Senate hearing investigating the concert promoter Live Nation.Jost began:Facebook announced that it will reinstate former President Donald Trump’s account, but this time they’ll put guard rails in place to keep him under control. Which I think is the same thing they said every time they tried to reopen Jurassic Park. Also, what even are guard rails on Facebook? And can they apply to my uncle? Because he’s posted some very disturbing fan fiction about the green M&M.In the wake of the classified document scandal, representatives for Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama issued statements saying they all turned over all classified records before leaving office. While Jimmy Carter issued a statement saying, “Come and get ’em, you bastards” [his screen showed a photo of President Carter wielding heavy firepower].Che continued:A lawyer for Mike Pence says that after they discovered classified documents in his home, Pence stands ready and willing to fully cooperate. Incidentally, “I stand ready and willing to cooperate” is also what Pence says before sex. During the Senate hearings investigating Live Nation and their monopoly on concert ticket sales, fans of Taylor Swift protested outside the Capitol. Aw, that’s sweet. And only two years after their dads were there [his screen showed a photo of Jan. 6 rioters at the Capitol building]. More

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      Jay Leno Is Recovering From Surgery After a Motorcycle Accident

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      The former late-night host and comedian drove into a wire a few miles from his garage in Burbank, Calif., he said in an interview. It comes two months after he sustained burns while working on his cars.Jay Leno, the former “Tonight Show” host also known for his obsession with cars, had surgery on Tuesday to repair multiple broken bones after a motorcycle accident in early January, he said in an interview on Friday.He seemed to be back in good spirits: “A 72-year-old man driving an 83-year-old motorcycle. What could go wrong?” he quipped.In his latest accident, two months after he sustained burns while working on cars in his garage, Mr. Leno said he was test riding a 1940 Indian four-cylinder motorcycle with a sidecar on Jan. 17, when he noticed the smell of gas coming from the bike.He turned down a side street to check the motorcycle and was thrown off it after riding through a wire he could not see. The accident left him with a scar across his neck, two broken ribs, two broken kneecaps and a snapped collarbone that he had surgically repaired.“It’s a little painful, but it’s not the end of the world,” he said. “Luckily, I’m only 72. If I had been an older man, this could have been very serious.”Despite the injuries, the comedian insisted during the interview that he was in good physical condition and said he would be recovered enough to work this weekend.His Sunday night show at the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach, Calif., which he still plans to do, is sold out. He also has shows scheduled in Arizona and Ohio in the coming weeks.Mr. Leno cracked a joke about the crash on Twitter, writing on Friday, “I was riding my motorcycle up in Lake Tahoe and I came around the corner and bam, I crashed into Jeremy Renner’s snowplow.”Mr. Leno first shared the news of the motorcycle accident in an interview with a Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist on Thursday.The columnist, John Katsilometes, had asked about his recovery from a gasoline fire at his Burbank, Calif., garage in late 2022 that left him with serious burns. “That was the first accident,” Mr. Leno replied.He said in the Review-Journal interview that he had not wanted to talk publicly about the motorcycle accident because of the widespread attention around his previous accident just a couple of months before.In November, Mr. Leno had surgery after sustaining what doctors called “significant burns” to his face, chest and hands while working on one of his cars. After that fire, Mr. Leno said in a statement that he would “just need a week or two” to get back on his feet.He joked about the accidents on Friday: “I try to crash within five or six miles of my garage all the time so I can get stuff back,” he said.The comedian and car aficionado’s injury also comes amid CNBC’s decision not to renew his show “Jay Leno’s Garage,” he said, a program that since 2015 has showcased his extensive automobile collection alongside celebrity interviews.The move was part of a larger restructuring of programming at CNBC, Mr. Leno said. Representatives for the network did not respond to requests for comment.“I’d like to continue my relationship with NBC. So, you know, there’s no bad blood or ill feeling, right?” he said, adding: “I wish them luck in everything there. We had a good time while we were there.”Mr. Leno, who has been a mainstay of NBC’s television content for three decades, said he was looking for a new home for the show, possibly on a streaming platform, which he said “seems to be the wave of the future.” More

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      in Television

      ‘Game Theory’ Host Bomani Jones Calls an Audible

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      “Game Theory,” his HBO talk show, has pulled off the difficult feat of mixing sports and comedy with a political bite. Now he’s trying to up his game by going unscripted.You know Bomani Jones is about to say something funny, deadly serious or both when he spits out a sentence like “The question is simple” or “Let me tell you a secret” or, in this case, “Here’s the thing.”Explaining why he no longer regularly debates sports with people on television, Jones, 42, paused dramatically, his lanky frame swimming in sweatpants as he sat on the sofa of his Harlem apartment. “Don’t no one want to argue with me on television,” he said, a snap in his voice, dropping into a baritone. “Ain’t a whole lot of people going to come out a winner. As a result, I don’t come out a winner. I just come out a bully.”What’s characteristic here is the mix of swagger and self-awareness, and also how quickly he shifted angles when making a point. Jones did it again with his final thought: “You can make an argument that I should let them win now and again,” he said, before another one of those punchy setups: “I’ll be honest.” Pause. “I’m not that good at that.”Bomani Jones has been arguing with sports journalists on ESPN shows like “Around the Horn” and “Highly Questionable” for nearly two decades. “Game Theory With Bomani Jones,” entering its second season on HBO on Friday, is the first time he is sitting at his own desk alone. And while he’s got more than enough charisma and dynamism for the job, the real challenge is pulling off something that, he will be the first to tell you, almost never works: a comic show about sports.“This is something that no one has really figured out,” Jones said, adding that he included himself. Television is full of shows starring clever comedians doing topical jokes and sports journalists making smart points, but a happy marriage of these popular forms is rare.Comedy is hard, smart comedy even harder. But with sports, Jones explained, real fans won’t easily accept a comic with no credentials. “Bill Maher can be a comedian who happened to go to Cornell and be treated with the intellectual gravitas to do the show he does. Sports doesn’t work like that.”He continued, “Comedians love sports, but the ideas they have are typically the same as everybody else’s.” With “Game Theory,” his goal is to use sports to say something deeper, more probing and political. “We’re trying to make a funny show,” Jones said, “but that still has the weight and make points that advance things.”Jones in Season 1 of his HBO show “Game Theory.” The second season won’t be as scripted.HBOThis intellectual ambition distinguished the first season, particularly in his virtuosic desk pieces that were unlike anything else on television. They can remind you of the work of John Oliver, mixing long, intricate, forceful arguments with knowing jokes, and while Jones speaks gushingly about that host (whose offices are right across the hall), it’s a comparison he balks at. Jones is harder to pin down ideologically, and as he pointed out, unlike Oliver, he doesn’t do explainers. Jones aims to jump right into the issue, one his viewers already know, and make them look at it a new way.What Oliver and Jones share though is fierce intelligence and high standards on coming up with a novel perspective. “What I tell my writers is I’m always looking for the zag,” he explained to me, before clarifying that he did not mean a cheap contrarian take.This paid off at the height of crypto mania last year, when everyone from Steph Curry to Tom Brady were spokesmen for digital currency. Jones not only bluntly called it a grift, but also explained how crypto’s popularity in the sports world was tied to the decline in trust in institutions and how normalized gambling on games had become. It was an unusually assured and complicated take that appears prescient.Asked for his favorite segment, Jones pointed to the very first episode, when he commemorated the retirement of Duke’s legendary coach Mike Krzyzewski with a historical deep dive into how and why Black fans hate his teams, quipping that if they played the Ku Klux Klan, “we would have rooted for a zero-zero tie.”Jones, who went to Clark Atlanta University, a historically Black college, said that while he wanted to appeal to all viewers, he paid particular attention to, as he put it, “never boxing Black people out.” If only the white writers in his room laugh at a joke, he won’t use it. But if only the Black ones do, he’ll think about it. “What I mean for that segment of the audience is different,” he said. “When I walk down the street and am stopped, it’s ‘thank you for what you do.’ It’s far more essential there.”Jones, who called this show his dream job, talks as if he’s only now getting the hang of it. He’s supremely confident in his voice, but fitting it into a talk show is tricky. This is the first time he’s used a writing staff that includes veteran joke writers along with a small news department. But he is convinced that he’s at his best and funniest when he sounds as if he’s speaking off the top of his head. “One thing Season 1 didn’t have enough of is just me cooking,” he said.You hear this most clearly on his podcast, “The Right Time,” in which he can find all kinds of unexpected laughs just thinking aloud. Jones has the cadence of a natural comic even when the subject is serious. That’s why in Season 2, “Game Theory” tweaked the format of its topical segment, changing it from a script to bullet points to allow him to riff. “That’s his superpower,” said Stuart Miller, an executive producer of the series who worked on “The Daily Show” for 13 years.Jones’s background in economics means “he doesn’t do pure hot takes,” said Spencer Hall, a former colleague. Brian Karlsson for The New York TimesOn a recent morning in the writers’ room, Miller, home with Covid, stared at a table of staff members from a laptop. On the wall were cards mapping out the season. In the premiere, Jones commemorates LeBron James’s 20th anniversary in the N.B.A. with an argument that the player empowerment movement, which James is widely credited with leading, is a myth. A later episode will make another zag when he makes the case that the N.F.L. is more woke than you think.Jones had a firm command of the room as he ran through a segment with bullet points of big stories that week, testing out the new format. At one point, he reflected on a riff about how a kid who got into a fight with basketball star Ja Morant needed better fathering, saying, “ESPN wouldn’t let me do that. Now I’m on HBO.”In a segment on a video of Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, slapping his wife, Jones adopted a skeptical voice about whether he would face any repercussions. After he finished, one of the writers suggested that the White joke needed to be set up better and offered a tweaked phrase.When he ran through it again, Jones didn’t take this specific advice but found a third way. First, he added a new joke. “Do you realize how insulting it is to get caught slapping your wife and no one is disappointed?” It got a big laugh from the writers. Then with a head of steam, he pulled the brakes. “If you want to hurt the brand,” he said very slowly, pausing after each word, “then he would have to say something bad about incels.”The day before, he met with a performance coach who mentioned the value of adjusting his pace. That informed his shift, but what mattered more was just working without a script. “Part of going to this format is that intuitively I know when to slow up and go faster,” he said. “It’s a feel thing. Once things get written, I struggle a little bit more.”Jones has two master’s degrees, including in economics, which inform his thinking (look at the title of his show). “He doesn’t do pure hot takes,” said Spencer Hall, a sportswriter, podcaster and former colleague. “That’s the economics training: He’ll say, ‘This is bad, but here’s an unexpected upside.’”When it comes to his comedic sensibility, Jones said, nothing was more influential than “Chappelle’s Show,” and explained that what he admired most was how a sketch like “Black Bush” used a simple premise (what if George W. Bush were Black?) to make layered jokes. “Dave is always coding it on many levels,” Jones said. “The joke is landing is so many different ways.”The simplicity is as important as the complexity. “If I find a basic idea that people aren’t thinking about it, that’s it,” he said. “If I need to go a long way to get there, it probably won’t work.”What makes doing political commentary about sports a balancing act is that fans watch games to escape. Jones understands this well, carefully managing the amount of humor in his arguments while trying to avoid dogmatism. “I don’t know how many interesting screeds are left,” he said, making a subtle point about how television has evolved in the last two decades. “Think of how impactful Olbermann’s screeds were in 2006,” he said of the sports broadcaster who shifted into politics. “Do it now and it doesn’t hit the same. You have to be more sophisticated.”That sophistication should not be mistaken for snobbery. Jones’s focus is not on who wins or loses games, but he doesn’t look down on anyone who cares deeply about that. “The place sports exist in people’s lives is important, and we get ourselves in trouble as high-minded commentators when we trivialize that,” he said. “No one would say music isn’t important. It’s a big part of the fabric of our lives. It matters. Sports is the same.” More

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      in Movies

      Eddie Murphy Gets Cecil B. DeMille Award at Golden Globes

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      Eddie Murphy, the actor and comedian, accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes for “outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment.”“I’ve been in show business for 46 years, and I’ve been in the movie business for 41 years so this has been a long time in the making,” Murphy said while accepting the award.He didn’t waste the opportunity for a joke, telling all the young artists in the room that he had a blueprint for succeeding: “Pay your taxes, mind your business and keep Will Smith’s wife’s name out your mouth,” he said, adding the expletive that Smith used after slapping Chris Rock onstage at the Academy Awards last year.Murphy, 61, rose to fame in the 1980s as a cast member on “Saturday Night Live,” becoming a dynamic presence on the show. His stand-up specials from that decade, in which he famously performed in leather suits, cemented him as a singular comic talent. After appearing in a string of blockbuster comedies (“48 Hrs.,” “Trading Places,” “Beverly Hills Cop”), Murphy became one of the biggest movie stars in the world.His star kept rising with the 1996 comedy “​​The Nutty Professor,” after which he played a veterinarian who can converse with his patients in “Doctor Dolittle,” voiced Donkey in “Shrek” and appeared as part of the ensemble cast in the Oscar-winning adaptation “Dreamgirls,” which earned him a Golden Globe in 2007. In 2021, he reprised his role as Prince Akeem in the sequel to “Coming to America,” one of Murphy’s biggest hits.Chosen by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s board of directors, the honor has been given to Jane Fonda, Oprah Winfrey, Audrey Hepburn, Steven Spielberg, Denzel Washington and Robin Williams. More