Groucho! TCM has been re-running a few of the old Dick Cavett shows. It’s truly amazing to see just how far down the toilet television has gone in the last 30 years. The format of the typical “talk show” these days is one six-minute segment per guest. The conversation is inane babble leading up to a plug for the guest’s book or movie.

But in the 1970s, we had Dick Cavett! In-depth conversations with just a few guests. Last week’s episode was devoted entirely to Groucho Marx. Groucho told this great story:

I had a priest stop me up in Montreal some years ago. He came up to me and said “Aren’t you Groucho Marx?”

I said yes.

He said, “May I shake your hand?”

I said fine. I shook hands with him.

He said, “I want to thank you for all of the joy you’ve put into the world!”

And I said, “I want to thank you for all of the joy you’ve taken out of it!”

(Buy the Dick Cavett Show—Comic Legends DVD now!)

Here are a couple of good Doonesburys (Doonseburies?) I encountered while roaming the web. I’m sure there are a lot of others on these topics. (BTW, the reason these may look narrow on your screen is because the images are 600 pixels wide, but the stylesheet I’m using currently has a width of 500. I’ll try to fix this later or post a link to the originals.)

The first one is from December 18, 2005:

The next one is from March 5, 2006:

I sometimes cross-post articles from this blog over at My Left Wing. It’s fun to occasionally subject a larger audience to my anti-fundie rants.

That last article I wrote was a good one for MLW, so I put it up over there too. I was flattered when they promoted it to the front page, so gobs of post-womb Americans got to read it. It generated a lot of excellent comments. I don’t get much traffic here, so the comments can be thin at times. Over there, they enjoy a lively debate and picking ideas apart. I strongly suggest that you head on over to the MLW version of that article and read the comments. While you’re there, check out some of the fine articles written by others.