As open enrollment for Affordable Care Act plans continues through Jan. 15, you’re likely seeing fewer social media ads promising monthly cash cards worth hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars that you can use for groceries, medical bills, rent and other expenses. But don’t worry. You haven’t missed out on any windfalls. Clicking on one of those ads would not have provided you with a cash card — at least not worth hundreds or thousands. But you might have found yourself switched to a health insurance plan you did not authorize, unable to afford treatment for an unforeseen medical emergency, and owing thousands of dollars to the IRS, according to an ongoing lawsuit against companies and individuals who plaintiffs say masterminded the ads and alleged scams committed against millions of people who responded to them. The absence of those once-ubiquitous ads are likely a result of the federal government suspending access to the ACA marketplace for two companies that market health insurance out of South Florida offices, amid accusations they used “fraudulent” ads to lure customers and then switched their insurance plans and agents without their knowledge. In its suspension letter, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) cited “credible allegations of misconduct” in the agency’s decision to suspend the abilities of two companies — TrueCoverage (doing business as Inshura) and BenefitAlign — to transact information with the marketplace. CMS licenses and monitors agencies that use their own websites and information technology platforms to enroll health insurance customers in ACA plans offered in the federal marketplace. Suit names long list of defendants The alleged scheme affected millions of consumers, according to a lawsuit winding its way through U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale that seeks class-action status. An amended version of the suit, filed in August, increased the number of defendants from six to 12: — TrueCoverage LLC, an Albuquerque, New Mexico-based health insurance agency with large offices in Miami, Miramar and Deerfield Beach. TrueCoverage is a sub-tenant of the South Florida Sun Sentinel in a building leased by the newspaper in Deerfield Beach. — Enhance Health LLC, a Sunrise-based health insurance agency that the lawsuit says was founded by Matthew Herman, also named as a defendant, with a $150 million investment from hedge fund Bain Capital’s insurance division. Bain Capital Insurance Fund LP is also a defendant. — Speridian Technologies LLC, accused in the lawsuit of establishing two direct enrollment platforms that provided TrueCoverage and other agencies access to the ACA marketplace. — Benefitalign LLC, identified in the suit as one of the direct enrollment platforms created by Speridian. Like Speridian and TrueCoverage, the company is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. — Number One Prospecting LLC, doing business as Minerva Marketing, based in Fort Lauderdale, and its founder, Brandon Bowsky, accused of developing the social media ads that drove customers — or “leads” — to the health insurance agencies. — Digital Media Solutions LLC, doing business as Protect Health, a Miami-based agency that the suit says bought Minerva’s “fraudulent” ads. In September, the company filed for Chapter 11 protection from creditors in United States Bankruptcy Court in Texas, which automatically suspended claims filed against the company. — Net Health Affiliates Inc., an Aventura-based agency the lawsuit says was associated with Enhance Health and like it, bought leads from Minerva. — Garish Panicker, identified in the lawsuit as half-owner of Speridian Global Holdings and day-to-day controller of companies under its umbrella, including TrueCoverage, Benefitalign and Speridian Technologies. — Matthew Goldfuss, accused by the suit of overseeing and directing TrueCoverage’s ACA enrollment efforts. All of the defendants have filed motions to dismiss the lawsuit. The motions deny the allegations and argue that the plaintiffs failed to properly state their claims and lack the standing to file the complaints. Defendants respond to requests for comment The Sun Sentinel sent requests for comment and lists of questions about the cases to four separate law firms representing separate groups of defendants. Three of the law firms — one representing Brandon Bowsky and Number One Prospecting LLC d/b/a Minerva Marketing, and two others representing Net Health Affiliates Inc. and Bain Capital Insurance Fund — did not respond to the requests. A representative of Enhance Health LLC and Matthew Herman, Olga M. Vieira of the Miami-based firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP, responded with a short message saying she was glad the newspaper knew a motion to dismiss the charges had been filed by the defendants. She also said that, “Enhance has denied all the allegations as reported previously in the media.” Catherine Riedel, a communications specialist representing TrueCoverage LLC, Benefitalign LLC, Speridian Technologies LLC, Girish Panicker and Matthew Goldfuss, issued the following statement: “TrueCoverage takes these allegations very seriously and is responding appropriately. While we cannot comment on ongoing litigation, we strongly believe that the allegations are baseless and without merit. “Compliance is our business. The TrueCoverage team records and reviews every call with a customer, including during Open Enrollment when roughly 500 agents handle nearly 30,000 calls a day. No customer is enrolled into any policy without a formal verbal consent given by the customer. If any customer calls in as a result of misleading content presented by third-party marketing vendors, agents are trained to correct such misinformation and action is taken against such third-party vendors.” Through Riedel, the defendants declined to answer follow-up questions, including whether the company remains in business, whether it continues to enroll Affordable Care Act clients, and whether it is still operating its New Mexico call center using another affiliated technology platform. Lawsuit: COVID relief package made ‘scheme’ possible The suspension notification from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services letter cites several factors, including the histories of noncompliance and previous suspensions. The letter noted suspicion that TrueCoverage and Benefitalign were storing consumers’ personally identifiable information in databases located in India and possibly other overseas locations in violation of the centers’ rules. The letter also notes allegations against the companies in the pending lawsuit that “they engaged in a variety of illegal practices, including violations of the (Racketeer Influenced & Corrupt Organizations, or RICO Act), misuse of consumer (personal identifiable information) and insurance fraud.” The amended lawsuit filed in August names as plaintiffs five individuals who say their insurance plans were changed and two agencies who say they lost money when they were replaced as agents. The lawsuit accuses the defendants of 55 counts of wrongdoing, ranging from running ads offering thousands of dollars in cash that they knew would never be provided directly to consumers, switching millions of consumers into different insurance policies without their authorization, misstating their household incomes to make them eligible for $0 premium coverage, and “stealing” commissions by switching the agents listed in their accounts. TrueCoverage, Enhance Health, Protect Health, and some of their associates “engaged in hundreds of thousands of agent-of-record swaps to steal other agents’ commissions,” the suit states. “Using the Benefitalign and Inshura platforms, they created large spreadsheet lists of consumer names, dates of birth and zip codes.” They provided those spreadsheets to agents, it says, and instructed them to access platforms linked to the ACA marketplace and change the customers’ agents of record “without telling the client or providing informed consent.” “In doing so, they immediately captured the monthly commissions of agents ... who had originally worked with the consumers directly to sign them up,” the lawsuit asserts. TrueCoverage employees who complained about dealing with prospects who called looking for cash cards were routinely chided by supervisors who told them to be vague and keep making money, the suit says. When the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services began contacting the company in January about customer complaints, the suit says TrueCoverage enrollment supervisor Matthew Goldfuss sent an email instructing agents “do not respond.” How it started The lawsuit states the “scheme” was made possible in 2021 when Congress passed the American Rescue Plan Act in the wake of the COVID pandemic. The act made it possible for Americans with household incomes between 100% and 150% of the federal poverty level to pay zero in premiums and it enabled those consumers to enroll in ACA plans all year round, instead of during the three-month open enrollment period from November to January. Experienced health insurance brokers recognized the opportunity presented by the changes, the lawsuit says. More than 40 million Americans live within 100% and 150% of the federal poverty level, while only 15 million had ACA insurance at the time. The defendants developed or benefited from online ads, the lawsuit says, which falsely promised “hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars per month in cash benefits such as subsidy cards to pay for common expenses like rent, groceries, and gas.” Consumers who clicked on the ads were brought to a landing page that asked a few qualifying questions, and if their answers suggested that they might qualify for a low-cost or no-cost plan, they were provided a phone number to a health insurance agency. There was a major problem with the plan, according to the lawsuit. “Customers believe they are being routed to someone who will send them a free cash card, not enroll them in health insurance.” By law, the federal government sends subsidies for ACA plans to insurance companies, and not to individual consumers. Scripts were developed requiring agents not to mention a cash card, and if a customer mentions a cash card, “be vague” and tell the caller that only the insurance carrier can provide that information, the lawsuit alleges. In September, the defendants filed a motion to dismiss the claims. In addition to denying the charges, they argued that the class plaintiffs lacked the standing to make the accusations and failed to demonstrate that they suffered harm. The motion also argued that the lawsuit’s accusations failed to meet requirements necessary to claim civil violations of the RICO Act. Miami-based attorney Jason Kellogg, representing the plaintiffs, said he doesn’t expect a ruling on the motion to dismiss the case for several months. The complaint also lists nearly 50 companies, not named as defendants, that it says fed business to TrueCoverage and Enhance Health. Known in the industry as “downlines,” most operate in office parks throughout South Florida, the lawsuit says. Complaints from former employees and clients The lawsuit quotes former TrueCoverage employees complaining about having to work with customers lured by false cash promises in the online ads. A former employee who worked in the company’s Deerfield Beach office was quoted in the lawsuit as saying that senior TrueCoverage and Speridian executives “knew that consumers were calling in response to the false advertisements promising cash cards and they pressured agents to use them to enroll consumers into ACA plans.” A former human resources manager for TrueCoverage said sales agents frequently complained “that they did not feel comfortable having to mislead consumers,” the lawsuit said. Over two dozen agents “came to me with these complaints and showed me the false advertisements that consumers who called in were showing them,” the lawsuit quoted the former manager as saying. For much of the time the companies operated, the ACA marketplace enabled agents to easily access customer accounts using their names and Social Security numbers, change their insurance plans and switch their agents of record without their knowledge or authorization, the lawsuit says. This resulted in customers’ original agents losing their commissions and many of the policyholders finding out they suddenly owed far more for health care services than their original plans had required, the suit states. It says that one of the co-plaintiffs’ health plans was changed at least 22 times without her consent. She first discovered that she had lost her original plan when she sought to renew a prescription for her heart condition and her doctor told her she did not have health insurance, the suit states. Another co-plaintiff’s policy was switched after her husband responded to one of the cash card advertisements, the lawsuit says. That couple’s insurance plan was switched multiple times after a TrueCoverage agent excluded the wife’s income from an application so the couple would qualify. Later, they received bills from the IRS for $4,300 to cover tax credits issued to pay for the plans. CMS barred TrueCoverage and BenefitAlign from accessing the ACA marketplace. It said it received more than 90,000 complaints about unauthorized plan switches and more than 183,500 complaints about unauthorized enrollments, but the agency did not attribute all of the complaints to activities by the two companies. In addition, CMS restricted all agents’ abilities to alter policyholders’ enrollment information, the lawsuit says. Now access is allowed only for agents that already represent policyholders or if the policyholder participates in a three-way call with an agent and a marketplace employee. Between June and October, the agency barred 850 agents and brokers from accessing the marketplace “for reasonable suspicion of fraudulent or abusive conduct related to unauthorized enrollments or unauthorized plan switches,” according to an October CMS news release . The changes resulted in a “dramatic and sustained drop” in unauthorized activity, including a nearly 70% decrease in plan changes associated with an agent or broker and a nearly 90% decrease in changes to agent or broker commission information, the release said. It added that while consumers were often unaware of such changes, the opportunity to make them provided “significant financial incentive for non-compliant agents and brokers.” But CMS’ restrictions might be having unintended consequences for law-abiding agents and brokers. A story published by Insurance News Net on Nov. 11 quoted the president of the Health Agents for America (HAFA) trade group as saying agents are being suspended by CMS after being flagged by a mysterious algorithm that no one can figure out. The story quotes HAFA president Ronnell Nolan as surmising, “maybe they wrote too many policies on the same day for people who have the same income or they’re writing too many policies on people of a certain occupation.” Nolan continued, “We have members who have thousands of ACA clients. They can’t update or renew their clients. So those consumers have lost access to their professional agent, which is simply unfair.” Ron Hurtibise covers business and consumer issues for the South Florida Sun Sentinel. He can be reached by phone at 954-356-4071, on Twitter @ronhurtibise or by email at rhurtibise@sunsentinel.com.Feds suspend ACA marketplace access to companies accused of falsely promising ‘cash cards’AP News Summary at 5:36 p.m. ESTA Cook Islands-registered ship being seized by Finnish authorities over a suspected incident of sabotage "creates a bad look" for New Zealand, an international law professor says. Reuters reported that Finnish authorities seized a Cook Islands-registered ship carrying Russian oil in the Baltic Sea , suspecting it caused a power cable outage and damaged or broke four internet lines. A Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokesperson said they were aware of the incident, but New Zealand was not responsible for the management of the Cook Islands shipping registry . MFAT said New Zealand was concerned about Russia's use of a "shadow fleet" of vessels to circumvent sanctions. The Cook Islands self-governs in free association with New Zealand . It conducts its own affairs, but Aotearoa needs to assist when it comes to foreign affairs, disasters and defence. The situation would not help New Zealand's relationship with the Cook Islands, University of Waikato law professor Al Gillespie said. "It creates a bad look when everyone associates the Cook Islands with New Zealand and a Cook Islands vessel gets caught in what may or may not be an act of sabotage in the Baltic," he said. "I think New Zealand has got an admirable and a good position on the war in the Ukraine and our sanctions against Russia. We are not neutral we are giving a lot of support to the Ukraine and I believe that's the right thing to do. "But it does create an anomaly when a Cook Islands-flagged vessel is engaged or connected to an act which may be an accident or may be sabotage. We've got to wait to see how that plays out." MFAT said New Zealand shared concerns with the Cook Islands government over its shipping registry being used to aid Russia's shadow fleet, and the impact this could have on its international reputation. It appeared the situation was being taken very seriously, Gillespie said. "To actually seize the vessel is a forthright act which you don't normally see unless you've got very serious grounds for doing that and that will create a lot of tension with the country which has seized the vessel, and the country which holds its flag which is the Cook Islands. "So the Cook Islands has now ended up in the middle of a very large international dispute, but at the same time New Zealand is trying to distance itself form the Cook Islands because we've got a very clear position that we support the Ukraine and sanctions against Russia." In November, Foreign Minister Winston Peters announced new chemical weapons and missiles sanctions against Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine. New Zealand joined Australia in the 'Call to Action' statement on sanctions-evading 'shadow fleet' activities. In attempting to bypass sanctions, shadow fleet vessels had a pattern of ignoring maritime safety and environmental rules, avoiding insurance costs, and engaging in other unlawful actions, the nations said. "The 'shadow fleet' presents significant threats to all countries," a statement issued by MFAT at the time said. Incident under investigation Finnish investigators believe the seized ship may have caused the damage by dragging its anchor along the seabed. Video and photos published on Friday by the Finnish daily Ilta-Sanomat showed the Eagle S with a single anchor chain stretching into the sea from its starboard side, while the hole where the port side anchor chain would normally be was empty. Finnish police told Reuters they were investigating the Eagle S on suspicion of "aggravated criminal mischief", and that crew members had been questioned. On Friday local time, Finland said it had asked the transatlantic military alliance NATO for support. "We have agreed with Estonia, and we have also communicated to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, that our wish is to have a stronger NATO presence," Finnish President Alexander Stubb told a news conference. Rutte posted on the social media platform X that "NATO will enhance its military presence in the Baltic Sea", without elaborating. A NATO official declined to provide further detail. United Arab Emirates-based Caravella LLC FZ, which according to MarineTraffic data owns the Eagle S, did not respond to Reuters' requests for comment. India's Peninsular Maritime, which according to MarineTraffic acts as technical manager for the ship, was not immediately available for comment to Reuters. - RNZ/Reuters
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In February 2007, I met with writer-director-musician Marshall Brickman at his Upper West Side apartment overlooking Central Park to interview him for my book And Here’s the Kicker . After we spoke, Brickman went on to co-write the book for the 2010 Broadway production of The Addams Family , co-starring Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth. The musical, nominated for two Tony Awards and seven Drama Desk Awards (winning for Best Set Design), would run on Broadway for more than 700 performances and continues to tour to this day. On November 29, at the age of 85, Brickman passed away in Manhattan. Below is an excerpted version of our interview. Fans of writer-director-actor Woody Allen like to refer to the mid-to-late 1970s as his career’s high point, his cinematic heyday. But three of his most critically lauded films during that period — Sleeper , Annie Hall , and Manhattan — were co-written by another Jewish kid from New York, the lesser known, but multitalented Marshall Brickman. Brickman may have looked like an overnight success in 1978 when he walked onstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to accept the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Annie Hall (which he shared with Allen), but he was far from a novice to the comedy-writing game. He was already an accomplished television scribe, a former head writer for The Tonight Show (a job he received at the relatively young age of 27), and a staff writer for Candid Camera and The Dick Cavett Show. Brickman was also one of the key writers of a little-seen pilot in 1975 called The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence. It was a risky venture to combine Sesame Street –type Muppets with adult content, but Marshall somehow managed to make it work, with irreverent yet oddly innocent gags such as the “Seven Deadly Sins Pageant” (appropriately, the character of Sloth arrived just as the end credits began to roll and asked, “Am I late?”). Brickman didn’t stick around when The Muppet Show was picked up for its first season, but he did leave a lasting influence. Without him, the world might never have enjoyed a bushy-eyebrowed Swedish Chef howling, “Bort! Bort! Bort!” After helping Woody Allen win his first Oscar, Brickman went on to write and direct many of his own projects, including Simon (1980), Lovesick (1983), and The Manhattan Project (1986). He co-wrote Manhattan Murder Mystery with Allen in 1993, directed a TV adaptation of playwright Christopher Durang’s Catholic satire Sister Mary Explains It All (2001), and co-wrote the Broadway hit Jersey Boys (2005), a musical about the popular early rock-and-roll quartet the Four Seasons. It’s not a coincidence that Brickman would write about a singing group. During the early to mid-’60s, shortly before making a living as a writer, he was a member of the folk trio the Tarriers, then later the New Journeymen, which included a pair of musical visionaries named John Phillips and Michelle Phillips, who would soon go on to form the Mamas and the Papas. Perhaps Brickman’s biggest hidden talent is his bluegrass roots. He played guitar and banjo (along with banjo virtuoso and Juilliard graduate Eric Weissberg) on the 1963 album New Dimensions in Banjo & Bluegrass, which would find a huge mainstream audience nearly ten years later as the soundtrack to the wildly successful John Boorman–directed movie Deliverance. It’s almost impossible to ignore the inherent irony that the banjo picking of Deliverance, which so many people associate with the stereotypical Hollywood-created southern rednecks and “mountain folk,” was at least partly created by a future New Yorker comedy writer and Woody Allen cohort. It’s just another example of how Brickman can be so wonderfully and unexpectedly subversive. What was it about bluegrass that appealed to you growing up? I first heard it when I was about 11. My friend Eric Weissberg had been playing the banjo for a few years, and he was kind of a genius at it. It was a thrilling sound — it just knocked me out. But I’ve never been able to satisfactorily answer why this particular music appealed to guys like us, from Brooklyn, urban Jews. Especially back when the idea of doing this type of southern local music was so associated with things that we had a lot of suspicion about — politically, socially, culturally. It was so alien, in a way. Maybe that was part of its appeal. Or maybe it was the type of percussive, masculine sound that preadolescents enjoy so much. The Deliverance soundtrack has an interesting history. Eric and I made a record called New Dimensions in Banjo & Bluegrass in 1963 and it sold about 5,000 copies. It was a kind of experimental album — we were developing a style of playing that was a combination of traditional Earl Scruggs–style picking and something more fluid and melodic. Other guys like Bill Keith and, later, Béla Fleck, did much more impressive developing of that kind of playing, but we were among the first. Anyhow, now it’s 1971 or so and John Boorman, the director of Deliverance, had this idea for the sequence in Deliverance — or maybe it was James Dickey, the author of the book and the screenplay — when one of the characters plays a duet with a little kid. So Eric and Steve Mandell then recorded the “Dueling Banjos” track. I really had nothing to do with it — I was already working on The Tonight Show as a writer. Warner released it as a single and, for some crazy reason, it became a big hit in Detroit. But Warner needed a whole album, so they remastered our old New Dimensions album. They released the record as the “soundtrack from Deliverance, ” which it certainly is not, but it took off and it’s been a steady seller for 30 years now. How did you get involved with your first folk group, the Tarriers? Was this after college? I graduated from the University of Wisconsin with degrees in music and science. Eric had already been with the Tarriers, but he felt they needed something else. They were a trio at that point. And he asked me, “Why don’t you join the group? We’ll become a quartet.” What did you bring to the group? I played a bunch of instruments — bass and country fiddle, and guitar and banjo. Since I could tune up pretty fast and had a little background in comedy, it defaulted to me to do the between-song patter — de rigueur for folk groups of that era. I was the guy who stood up in front of the group and told jokes. Do you remember any of the specific patter? Thankfully, no. I would guess that the material, while appropriate for a coffeehouse audience of 1966, might suffer and die from exposure to print — even if I could remember any of it. Who else was in the group besides you and Eric Weissberg? Bob Carey and Clarence Cooper. Two Black guys and two Jews. An integrated group — that must have been a rarity. We couldn’t play south of Washington, D.C. We couldn’t get booking for the same hotels. What year was this? 1964 or so. This was around the time of the British Invasion. Yes, but as folk purists, we never felt we were in the same world as the Brits — or the Roger & Roger groups that were vying with the Brits for space on Billboard’ s Top 10. How did you end up joining forces with John Phillips? “Join forces” — that’s an interesting way of putting it. It was more like John ingested me whole, like a python. John had a group called the Journeymen. In the early ’60s he met a spectacular-looking young woman named Michelle Gilliam and promptly fell in love. We all became friends, and we formed the New Journeymen. A clever name, no? John, Michelle, and me. Were you ever in the running to become a member of the Mamas and the Papas? On the contrary. Leaving the group — which I did after an eight-month wild ride — was, for me, the equivalent of escaping from a burning building. John was into drugs of all kinds; experimental, over- and under-the-counter. John was wonderfully talented and charming, but I was this kid from Brooklyn and really couldn’t tolerate that lifestyle. It was madness. We’d come into some town to perform, and I’d keep saying, “We have to rehearse! We have to do a sound check!” And John would say, “Chill out.” And he and Michelle would take off and do interesting things like buy two motorcycles and ride around town. Whereas I would stay back at the hotel and write bass charts. [ Laughs ] Did you keep in touch with John after you left the music scene? We did remain friends. Later, I quit the music business and went to write for Candid Camera and later for The Tonight Show. By this time, John and Michelle had hit it really big, and they were living in Bel Air in [’30s and ’40s film actress] Jeanette MacDonald’s old house, a spectacular chalet with a giant pool and peacocks strutting around the grounds — like a drugged-out Versailles. It was quite a scene. I used to work all day at NBC in Burbank and then, at the end of the day, I’d switch gears and call John and ask, “Okay, what have you got for me tonight? What’s going on?” One Friday in 1969, I called John to see what the plan was, and he said, “We have a choice. There’s a party over in Malibu. Or we could go over to Benedict Canyon.” You have to understand that as head writer for a daily show like The Tonight Show, one is always looking for material. I used to read every magazine and newspaper I could get my hands on, in a never-ending, desperate attempt to find material for the show. I had read earlier that day, in the science section of the Los Angeles Times, that there was a colony of phosphorescent plankton that had drifted into Malibu from the Pacific, and that every time a wave crashed, it looked like a big neon tube lighting up the entire beach. So I opted to go see the plankton. That’s the kind of fun guy I was. I told John: “Let’s go to Malibu.” We show up at this party — hosted by this Brit director Michael Sarne, who had gotten a little heat from a 1968 film called Joanna and who later directed a train wreck called Myra Breckenridge . Anyhow, we showed up, and it was like Caligula’s Rome. There was a big pile of white powder on a table, which turned out to be mescaline. People would casually stroll by, lick a finger, dip it into the power, and lick it off. Who was I not to do this also? Out on the beach was a huge bonfire, and everyone was singing and playing and doing other things not suitable to mention in a family publication, and at one point my hand started to strobe in front of my face. Understand that up to that time I was, pharmaceutically speaking, pretty much a virgin. Maybe a little grass in the dressing room. So, as a Jewish control freak now out of control, I started to panic. I said to John, “My hand is strobing.” He looked at me for a full 20 seconds, his pupils teeny little black dots, and finally said, “What?” And I yelled, “My hand is strobing in front of my face!” And he said, “God gave you a gift, man. Why don’t you enjoy it?” So I immediately called a friend of mine and told her, “Get me the fuck out of here.” My friend picked me up and deposited me back at the hotel on Sunset Boulevard where The Tonight Show put up their staff, and I put the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door and went to sleep. When I awoke, there were about six dozen messages waiting for me. You’re probably ahead of me, but that was the night of the Manson murders. The horrible events took place at the other party I could have gone to — the one in Benedict Canyon. The first victim they had discovered was a young man about my age who was shot numerous times. All my friends thought it was me. My God, it could have easily been you. Absolutely. Then again, maybe if I had been there, the murders wouldn’t have taken place. But, most likely, I would be dead. And we wouldn’t be having this conversation. What can we learn from this? Perhaps: Stay out of Los Angeles. The music scene was just never for me. There used to be a mirror on 57th Street in New York, a little distorted, like a fun-house mirror. One day, as I was carrying my banjo and my guitar, I looked at this strangely shaped person in the reflection, and I thought, Is this why my father escaped from Poland? So I could become an itinerant musician with a squished head and spindly legs? So I gave up the music scene entirely and eventually got a job as a writer for Candid Camera. This was before writing for The Tonight Show. How did you get the job for Candid Camera ? I auditioned for Allen Funt, the creator of Candid Camera, by writing a couple of pages with ideas for those hostile, hateful little stunts he used to do. I guess you could say that Candid Camera was one of the first reality shows. Compared with what goes on today, those stunts were very sweet. I know. Nobody had to eat tarantulas. What was Allen Funt like to work for? Kind of eccentric, and when he walked into the room there was an aura of tension around him. I was fired after about seven months, which was par for the course. Pretty much every writer was fired from that show at one point or another. What sort of ideas did you come up with for the show? One of the ideas — I think it was mine, but it’s been a long time — concerned a dry-cleaning establishment. A guy would drop off his suit to be dry-cleaned — this took a little planning, of course — and we would manufacture an identical suit but in a tiny size, like for a chimpanzee. When the guy returned for his suit, the clerk would bring out the tiny version and explain that it had shrunk, and he was really sorry, but the customer should have read the warning on the back of the ticket. And some people accepted it and some people became very angry, and so on. I recall one customer didn’t respond very well. It turns out this guy was caught once before by Candid Camera. He was in a city he wasn’t supposed to be in, with someone he wasn’t supposed to be with. So after he was caught for the second time, and after he was told, “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera !,” instead of smiling, he went berserk. He spotted the hidden camera and picked up a glass ashtray weighing about six pounds and hurled it at the camera operator and broke the two-way mirror the camera was hidden behind. Then he decked the clerk, who was, of course, an actor working for the show. Lots of good, wholesome fun. Needless to say, he didn’t sign the release. But the footage was a big hit at the show’s Christmas party. Did this happen often? Not as violently, but the ratio of filmed segments to segments that actually aired was something like 20 to one. It must have been tough to pull off those stunts. The cameras were huge compared with the ones today, and I assume you needed a tremendous amount of lighting. You’re absolutely right. One of the crises on the show was the phasing out of anything that was in black-and-white. They had to start using color film, which needed about five times the amount of light as black-and-white film. So they had to put these 2,000-watt bulbs in the lamps in the fake offices or other places we used. Most of our “locations” were more like movie sets than offices. The walls didn’t even go up to the ceiling. And there would be some poor person earning $4.10 an hour, hired as a temp, sitting at a desk. The “manager” would tell this temp, “Look, I’m going out for 20 minutes, so just answer the phone and take messages.” And then a man in a gorilla suit would run through. And then the “manager” would return and say, “I’m back from lunch. Did anything happen?” And the temp would often say, “No, nothing.” People don’t notice what they don’t want to notice — either that, or they don’t trust their own senses. More likely, they were afraid that if they were the only one to have seen the gorilla, they might be locked up. It was like that famous experiment conceived by the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, detailed in Obedience to Authority [ Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 1963; HarperCollins, 1974] . If a person in a white lab coat tells someone it’s okay to hurt someone else, then it becomes accepted. Someone in a position of authority can remove all rationality from a person’s responses. That’s especially true when you’re a temp. You don’t want to rock the boat. How did you get the job writing for The Tonight Show ? My friend Dick Cavett, who was a writer on the show at this time, the early ’60s, was leaving to try his hand at stand-up. And I was bouncing around after Candid Camera . So I said to Dick, “Let me see what your stuff looks like when you hand it in to Johnny.” I had this idea that if Carson saw material submitted to him in the form that he was used to, he would think I had already worked for him. Or deserved to work for him. Anyhow, he hired me. That’s the key to life, isn’t it? Acting as if you belong where you want to end up. “Assume a virtue if you have it not,” as Shakespeare wrote. How did you become the head writer for the show? I didn’t have an office when I started, just a rolling typewriter stand with an old Royal on it. And I would push my stand to an empty part of the office and write my jokes. Walter Kempley, who later wrote for Happy Days , was then the head writer. He had a disagreement with the producer over a raise, and he left. Walter called me into his office and said, “Congratulations, kid. You’re the head writer.” He gave me half a box of cigars and his joke file. I got his office — a nice office with a window — and a backlog of four or five years of jokes. How long had you been on the show? A month or two. You skipped over all the other writers to become head writer? The other writers didn’t want the job. They were smart. The monologue writers, like David Lloyd, who later wrote for The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Cheers and Frasier , merely had to deliver a monologue to Carson every day by three o’clock. I shouldn’t say “merely,” because writing a daily monologue can be a terrifying task. But the head writer, in addition to running the writing department, had to write all the sketches, the little interview pieces, the comedy spots. Such as Carnac the Magnificent, Aunt Blabby, and “The Tea Time Movie”? All that shit. I have piles of it, cubic feet of it, stored somewhere. They were very vaudevillian, those sketches. Johnny loved to do characters. And the advantage we had was, as a nightly show, the material didn’t have to be timeless — or even very funny. But if you had timely references, it usually worked. And Johnny was quite skillful. The audiences loved him. TV’s a monster. It just eats up material. It’s impossible to be continuously good. That’s why I’m amazed when I see a TV show that’s good consistently, night after night, week after week. One of the things that I’ll go to my grave having to apologize for is having invented the “Carnac Saver.” Which was what? Every time Johnny’s character Carnac the Magnificent told a joke that bombed, he would have a line that would save him. Like a “hecklerstopper.” And we would give Johnny a page of these jokes: “May the Great Camel of Giza leave you a present in your undershorts.” I can’t believe we were paid for this. Was there a lot of pressure for you on The Tonight Show ? I didn’t experience it as pressure. It was a good stress. I was young, had a lot of energy. I was what — 26, 27? What are your feelings about Carson? What was he like to work with? He was an avuncular figure to me, even though he was probably only 40 when I started on the show. He had a reputation for being difficult to write for, very aloof. Aloof, I guess. He wasn’t a touchy-feely type of guy. But appreciative and loyal. And a good boss. What were his strengths, from a writer’s standpoint? He knew how to deliver a joke. He was a good reactor. He was perfect for television. He never gave a whole lot away. But in terms of delivering comic material, he had that glint. He knew exactly what would work for him. He had a good arena instinct, a solid sense of what the audience would accept from him. Not only in terms of the kinds of jokes, but how far he was willing to push it politically. He was a kind of barometer. When he finally did a joke about Johnson or Nixon or whomever, then it became okay to think about those things in a different way. I’ve always thought that television exists for the audience as a kind of parental entity. If it’s on TV, then it’s been certified by someone, somewhere. And if Johnny did a joke about Nixon or the mayor or whomever — then it became okay to do jokes about that person. We were constantly trying to push Johnny — by we, I mean Jewish, liberal-left-wing writers. We would always try to have him do jokes that were a little stronger than what he wanted to do. But every once in a while he’d sense when the time was right. That was his strength, really. He was like a tuning fork. He would vibrate with what he perceived was the mood of the country. So he could sense when the time was right to tell a certain joke? Yes. Without losing his constituency. I think of Carson as representing this gentile, Middle America persona. Did you have trouble tailoring your humor to that world, being a Jewish writer from Brooklyn? No, it’s easy to write for someone who’s already established a persona. It’s easy to write for a Bob Hope or a Jack Benny or a Groucho Marx. Those characters have already been developed. It’s the hardest thing to develop a persona. That’s why movies and plays about fictional comedians are almost never truly convincing. Because it takes years for the audience to help a comedian shape a comedic persona. A case in point: Woody Allen’s act was all over the map at first. I remember, early on, he had one of those “What if?” premises. For instance: “What if Russia launched a missile and it was going to hit New York? And Khrushchev had to call Mayor Lindsay and warn him about it?” And then Woody would get on the phone like Bob Newhart and be Mayor Lindsay’s half of the phone conversation. It was funny, of course — because he can make anything he touches funny. But then he eventually started to explore more personal things — subjects about his psychiatrist or his marriage. Initially, people were kind of shocked that he was willing to be so intimate onstage — it’s hard to believe this now in the current environment of public confessionals — but they didn’t know what to think. And a lot of times they didn’t laugh. Woody would say his jokes for 20 minutes, and the audience would just stare at him, as if he were an oil painting. When did you first meet Woody? He opened for the Tarriers at the Bitter End in the early 1960s, and we were represented by the same manager, Charles Joffe. He thought Woody and I might be able to write together, and as I said, I was the one in the Tarriers who was the front man and told jokes. It turned out Mr. Joffe was right. You once said that Woody is very intuitive, while you’re much more analytical and logical. I would always try to back into something logically. And he would always make an intuitive leap. How would you write together? Just like you and I are doing now. A dialogue. Then he’d go off and write a scene and give it to me, and we’d trade it back and forth. Or we would play “What if this?” or “What if that?” like Woody used to do when he first started in stand-up. One of us would say something and someone would say something else. You know, if you’re loose enough, you can make it work. That’s the trick. It’s hard to do. It’s like an actor who’s in the part but who’s also looking at his own performance at the same time. Then you can come up with the right material. A lot of it is intuitive, and it’s hard to get your internal editor out of the way. The editor is always sitting there and editing before you say it. Collaborations can often be tricky, though. In the end, who ultimately decides what’s funny and what’s not? I don’t think there’s ever a totally equal collaboration. There has to be one dominant intelligence or creative force that informs the process. You have to have one person who is making those decisions, so that you wind up with something that has a little consistency and integrity. Can you give me a specific example of your creative process with Woody? Our first movie was Sleeper . We first wanted to do the movie with an intermission. Talk about arrogance! We wanted the beginning of the film to take place in contemporary New York, where a guy who owns a health-food store goes in for an operation. And then there would be an intermission, and you would come back and this character would be defrosted and in the future. We thought there would be no speaking whatsoever in our version of the future. We wanted to do a purely visual comedy. And we tried to figure out why in the future there would be no speaking. We decided that in the future it was a privilege to speak, that only certain classes of society had the right to speak, that everyone else had to be quiet. So we wrote a whole scenario in which none of the things that we were good at as writers, like dialogue and jokes, were in the second half of the movie. Fortunately, we soon came to the conclusion that this was a bad idea. It eventually became what it became, the movie that everyone knows, but it had to go through that exploratory process first. What are some specific jokes that didn’t make the final cut of Sleeper ? One early joke was that the president of the future exploded and Woody had to reconstruct him. But the only thing left was his penis. That was later changed to a nose. When you’re loose and intuitive, you’re vulnerable to a variety of peripheral influences. We were working on the screenplay during the 1972 Fischer- Spassky chess match, in Reykjavík. We were both chess fans, and we were watching a lot of it on TV. So we wrote a chess sequence in which the pieces were played by actual human beings — knights on horses, the whole deal. Woody filmed the scene out in the desert on a giant chessboard. He was a white pawn, and he was trembling. One of the other players, who was the voice of God, muses, “Hmmm ... should I sacrifice that pawn?” Woody starts to argue with God and then finally breaks all the rules of chess by running off the board, with the other chess pieces chasing after him. That scene never made the final cut. It was like what later happened with Annie Hall . A lot of material was taken out because the audience just doesn’t care how clever the authors are. They only want a good story. And they’re right. Are there jokes in Sleeper that you now regret? Any that you feel are too dated? I try never to regret anything. But the Albert Shanker joke is one that might need some explanation to current viewers. At the time of the movie’s release in 1973, Albert Shanker was the very powerful president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York. The joke was that Shanker had somehow gotten his hands on a nuclear bomb and destroyed civilization. How do you feel about that joke now? I love that type of stuff. I think it really grounds it in its time and place. If people don’t get it now, too bad. I think you always have to be as specific as possible; that’s the only way you can achieve the universal. But that’s the problem with TV — it tries for the universal and gets nothing. It’s like E.B. White’s advice about writing: Don’t write about Man, write about a man. Exactly. Let’s talk about Annie Hall . From what I understand, it started as a book. Woody might have started it as a book. I’m not sure. After Sleeper , we decided to do something else. We were working on two ideas for movies simultaneously: One was this kind of weird literary piece, which turned out to be Annie Hall. The other was a more conventional period comedy. For me, trying to decide which one to finally do was like being in a desert between two mirages. As you got closer to one idea, it would start to break up, and you’d turn around, and the other idea would look very nice from a distance, and you’d approach that one, but then that one would start to disintegrate. We went back and forth for a while, until, one morning, Woody said, “You know what? The movie that could really be a breakthrough hit is the kind that nobody’s tried before. So let’s do the crazy one, the literary one.” Which was Annie Hall. The French had tried it a little bit, talking to the camera, breaking the frame. Very Brechtian, always reminding the audience that they were watching a movie, with split screens and cartoons. Nobody had really tried anything like that in American cinema, however, and we really couldn’t have done it anywhere but at United Artists. They were enthralled with Woody, and they gave him carte blanche. What was the first version of Annie Hall like? Was it different from what eventually ended up onscreen? It was full of brilliance. It was very long — about two hours and 40 minutes — and it really didn’t have Annie as a significant character. She was just one of the women in his life, among the others. If I remember correctly, she didn’t come from Wisconsin; she came from New York. But that was just in the first draft of the screenplay. By the time the movie was shot, she was from Wisconsin. When we saw the initial screening, we thought, There’s no story here . In the first scene of the original version, Woody came out and looked at the camera and said something to the effect of, “Well, I just turned 40 and I’ve been examining my life. How did I become who I am?” And it went on from there, in a ruminative and associative fashion. After watching it, we thought, Where’s the relationship? When people come to me with ideas, sometimes they say, “I want to do a story about a war” or “I want to do a story about a hospital.” And I’ll always say, “Tell me the story in terms of a relationship.” So, with Annie Hall , we knew what was missing. It didn’t focus on a relationship. Audiences don’t really care how bright you are as writers and how many literary associations you make and how brilliant you come off. When you’re showing off, it becomes a little exclusionary to the audience. You’re just being precocious. That’s why the movie was called Annie Hall and not Anhedonia or The Second Lobster Scene , which were two working titles. Didn’t the movie have a few working titles, such as Roller Coaster Named Desire , Me and My Goy , and Me and My Jew ? Not to my recollection. Those sound like jokes, not titles. What were your thoughts upon first seeing that two-hour-and-40-minute cut? I was very inexperienced. I didn’t realize that a rough cut is exactly that — rough. There’s a Yiddish phrase: “Never show a fool something half-finished.” Well, I was the fool in that situation. And I don’t even know why they bothered to show it to me. I thought, Uh-oh . It was like a nightclub act, like a riff. Later, after the drastic edit, were you upset that a lot of the brilliant material never made it to the screen? Oh, no, no, no. Because when I saw the final cut, I thought, That’s it. It went through a lot of reshoots, didn’t it? A few. The ending took a while to get right. But who knows why that film works? I have no idea. It’s a film where you can learn nothing as a screen-writer or as a director, because it’s so eccentric. It’s such an odd, idiosyncratic, personal thing, and that’s probably part of its appeal. And, not to take anything away from Woody’s performance, which is very skillful, but I think that a lot of the success and charm of the film is due to Diane Keaton, with her endearing eccentricity and the way she appreciates Woody and grows as a character. She was — and is — a delight. She sort of inhabits the whole movie. And I think that’s what you leave with, that glow from her performance. But again, who knows, really, why it works? It’s a mistake to think that what you’re seeing up on the stage or on the screen is what the author intended. It isn’t. It’s always the result of a hundred compromises and accidents, both good and bad, and if you’re lucky, you get lucky. People feel such a strong attachment to Annie Hall. It was, among other things, a reasonably accurate record of what it might have been like to live in New York at that time. In a way, it’s an anthropological document. It was sort of at the tail end of the new Hollywood, the revolution that started, I guess, with Easy Rider , when the Young Turks from USC film school took over Old Hollywood — those years when Elliott Gould was in every other movie. There was an air of promise, an aura of possibility. It was sort of like the cultural equivalent of what happened socially in the ’60s, when you felt that there was a possibility for something new and exciting. And I’m not sure that exists anymore. I think there’s a kind of nostalgia for that now, when everything’s become so corporate, so homogenized and controlled. That generation in the ’70s used movies as their way of defining themselves culturally, the way kids now use music. Film for us was really a very important cultural experience. We loved foreign films by Bergman, Truffaut, Resnais, Fellini. What were your thoughts when you saw the first cut of Manhattan ? The same as Annie Hall ? I never saw the first cut. I just saw the final film. I thought it was fine. And it looked wonderful. I did have one discussion with Woody about a scene. It was the only time we ever had a real disagreement. In this particular scene, Woody lists Groucho Marx, Louis Armstrong’s “Potato Head Blues,” Flaubert’s Sentimental Education , Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony, and a few other things that make life worth living. And I thought, Why Sentimental Education? Why not Madame Bovary? And how do you pick the “Jupiter” Symphony over another Mozart symphony? Woody was doing the same thing he accuses Diane’s character of doing in the movie — ranking works of art. Plus, isn’t that a tad myopic? How about things that really make life worth living? Kids. Family. Love. Sacrifice. Yes, it can be argued that this is the character’s view of the world, but I thought it was dangerous — the line between who Woody was in life and the characters he was playing in his movies was pretty fuzzy. And I said, “The critics are going to kill us! It’s a pretentious, narcissistic, solipsistic view of the world that you’re offering up.” And he said, “Nah, you’re crazy, nobody’s going to say anything, it’s going to be fine.” And he was right. The only person who criticized us was Joan Didion in The New York Review of Books . She said something to the effect of: “Who in the hell do they think they are with their things worth living for?” I’ve always felt that that particular speech was essential to the broader theme of the movie — that an obsession with minutiae takes our minds off the bigger issues. Maybe you can extract a theme from that dialogue, but, honestly, we were not writing to proselytize a point of view like that, although I guess it’s sort of inherent in the movie. None of that was really in the air when we were writing the screenplay. Most of what we talked about was conversation and plot. When you look at Manhattan , can you tell who wrote what? What scene or joke you came up with and what Woody came up with? Sometimes, but the great rule I learned from Woody is that when you get in a room with another person, you’re both responsible for the result — assuming that there’s a reasonably equal level of talent. This is not as coy an answer as it might appear. Even though a great line or idea might be uttered by one person, it may have been triggered or stimulated by what the other party said. This happens all the time in collaborations, so the safest and fairest way of attributing ownership — though probably less satisfying to the curious — is to attribute everything to both parties. How did you eventually write for the Muppets? I was an enormous fan of Jim Henson’s; I really thought he was a genius. I was finally introduced to him by a mutual friend, and when Jim was given the green light to develop a pilot for ABC, he asked me to work with him. This was the 1975 TV special called The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence. The Muppets were making fun of sex and violence on television, complete with a beauty pageant featuring the Seven Deadly Sins. The humor was somewhat mature for a show featuring puppets. As evidenced by the following two jokes: “What’s black and white and red all over? The Federalist Papers!” Also: “Knock knock. Who’s there? Roosevelt. Roosevelt who? Roosevelt nice, but Gladys felt nicer.” Did you write either of those jokes? I don’t remember, truthfully. But I did create, or help to create, a few of the Muppet characters, like the two old men in the balcony, Statler and Waldorf, and the Swedish Chef. Somewhere out there, there’s a cassette of me speaking in a mock Swedish accent that Jim Henson listened to in order to capture the mood for that character. Maybe it’ll show up one day on eBay. You wrote and directed a movie called Simon , released in 1980. The plot involved a think tank that performed a social experiment on a character played by Alan Arkin. The purpose of this experiment was to convince Arkin’s character that he was an alien. I always looked at Simon as being a film for the ’70s. It was satirical of the culture at the time — especially TV and faith in science. All of that seemed to be in the air then. In one scene, a group of believers pray before a giant TV set. I take it you’re not such a fan of television? TV is just a medium. What I’m not a fan of is how TV has replaced more meaningful cultural values and experiences — like reading and group activities. Watching TV is an isolating, rather than a socializing, experience. It creates passivity in the viewer. Most of TV is a sales tool; the culture and entertainment aspects are just a means of delivering markets to merchandisers. Do you have any interest in writing more humor for the page? You’ve written a few pieces for The New Yorker but not in a long while. It’s been more than 30 years. I’d love to. In college I was introduced to the writings of S.J. Perelman, Robert Benchley, and the whole New Yorker bunch. What they were able to do with the written word had an effect on me similar to when, at the age of 11, I first heard Eric Weissberg play Scruggs-style five-string banjo. It was like watching someone levitate. The first thing I ever wrote for The New Yorker was actually published. It was called “What, Another Legend?” It involved a fake press release for a fictitious, 112-year-old Black clarinet player. But those pieces are not so easy. They take some time to get right. I am forever indebted to my editor at The New Yorker , Roger Angell, who led me through my overwritten stuff and edited it down to what finally appeared in print. At one point, many years ago, someone from the New York Times took me to lunch and asked me if I would be interested in taking over for the columnist Russell Baker. And I said, “You’re crazy. I could never do that each week!” Baker, as I recall, did two columns a week. I couldn’t imagine doing that. Besides, I didn’t really have a voice then. How would you describe your voice now? I don’t know. If it’s anything, I suppose, it’s anti-sentimental. Can you give me a specific example? In Jersey Boys , there’s a scene in the second act when the two members of the Four Seasons who are left, Frankie and Bob, are sitting and having a cup of coffee. And Bob says, “Look, I think you need to go out on the road.” And Frankie replies, “You want me to go out by myself? What if they don’t like me as a solo singer?” Originally, the next line was: “Frankie, this is your time.” And it never sat right for me. So I changed it to: “Frankie, what makes you think they liked you before ?” It’s a nice little change, because it defines the relationship between these characters very quickly, that they’re able to deal with each other like that. Also, it’s funny and it’s not sentimental. What I like to do is to turn 90 degrees from something that’s headed towards sentimental and undercut it. That’s a very Jewish sensibility. The Jews have always had something amusing to say while they’re getting the shit kicked out of them. I can attest to that. Right. So it’s the abhorrence of unearned sentiment, I guess. Which is defined as asking the audience to feel more for the characters than God does. By the way, I still can’t believe I wrote Jersey Boys . Why did you? What was it about the story that appealed to you? When I heard that the Four Seasons had sold about 175 million records here and abroad, I blinked. And then, when I finally met with Bob Gaudio and Frankie Valli and they told me the story of their rise from blue-collar New Jersey — with their involvement with the mob, with being poor, to finally making it, the whole arc of success and failure — I realized that this was not only a true story but it was a very good story. Are you a fan of musicals in general? Some, like Guys and Dolls. But not a fervent aficionado. I’m more of a movie guy. That’s where I was for 20 years. But when musical theater works, there’s really nothing like it. You almost never get a movie audience to stand up and cheer, because they realize on some level — not a very deep level, actually — that what they’re seeing onscreen has already happened . In a very real sense, movies are dead. In live theater, the audience gets to bond through the live event with live actors and singers. It’s all happening in real time in front of their eyes, and it can be a deeply moving and socializing experience. How is writing for the stage different than writing for the screen? It follows the same general rules about character and action, of course, but in many ways writing for the stage is a totally different animal. For instance, initially, I’d write a scene and then end it with, “Then we cut to ...” And I would have to be reminded that in live theater you don’t “cut” to anything. So it’s a different set of rules — how to get people on and off the stage, how to make smooth transitions, remembering that there are no close-ups or reaction shots. The audience looks where it wants to look, and it’s the job of the author and director to make you, in the audience, look where you need to look. Because of the fluidity and freedom of theater, you can do many things without apology — and without being necessarily naturalistic. Great productions of the classics have been done with minimal sets and props — a table, a drop, some lighting. You couldn’t get away with that in a movie, in which the “contract” with the audience is different. Movies are, on a certain level, documentary. It’s time to end the interview, so I’m going to pull out one of my stock, yet extremely popular, questions. Do you have any advice to the aspiring comedy writer on how to discover their voice? Search your roots and your heritage, your ethnic background, the way people speak. Most great comedy comes from minorities — ethnic, social, economic. If you think about it, most comedy ought to function as a corrective — against one or another social or cultural or economic inequity. Perhaps I should modify that to read “real or imagined” social or cultural or economic inequity. Then there’s the issue of language and style, which gets into the equation somehow. But even that definition doesn’t cover the entire waterfront, as it doesn’t exactly include parody or other literary forms, such as with Benchley and Perelman and others. And yet, it’s a good start. So, by searching your own roots and using what you have at your disposal, does this make the comedy more authentic and true, and thus more real and funny? I really have no idea as to why something is funny. I know it has something to do with the correct matching of performer and material, or some set of commonly held assumptions about the world, or an attitude. I get dizzy trying to deconstruct it. I do know that when I can match a comic performer or writer with some sociological turf, then the comedy has, for me, a better chance of landing: Jonathan Winters and his characters from the Midwest. Or Woody Allen, from a Jewish-urban landscape. Or Chris Rock, from the upwardly mobile, urban-Black perspective. And so on. I do know that those performers who seem to come from the Land of Media have a more difficult time making me laugh — the exception is David Letterman, much of whose humor is deconstructionist and exhibits, or tries to conceal, a hilarious rage against the various forms of media, like advertising, political doublespeak, and so on. So there are exceptions. Any advice for the comedy writer on how to succeed in the movie or TV business? My feeling is that there are already too many comedy writers. What we need is people in health care. Learn CPR and how to fill out a certificate of death. And if you’re not into CPR and still want to pursue humor writing? Have an uncle who runs the New York office of the William Morris Agency. And if you’re not lucky enough to have an uncle who runs the New York office of William Morris? Then you must go into health care.
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. (AP) — Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa led the NFL in passing yards in 2023, and he has been just as sharp for much of this season. But on Wednesday, Tagovailoa shouldered a share of the blame for what he called a surprising 5-7 start, saying his month-long stint on injured reserve with a concussion played a huge part in the way this season has unfolded. “I don’t think that (record) shows the character of who we are as a team,” Tagovailoa said. "It doesn’t show the work that we’ve put in this offseason together. “Nobody else will say it but me, and I feel like this has a lot to do with myself, obviously putting myself in harm’s way in the second game, going down and basically leaving my guys out to dry ... I do take heart to that as well and don’t want to do that to my guys again.” The Dolphins looked like they were returning to last season's form during a recent three-game winning streak, but questions about Miami's toughness resurfaced after a poor performance at frigid Lambeau Field last Thursday, when the temperature at kickoff was around 27 degrees. Miami missed 20 tackles, per Next Gen Stats, and allowed 114 yards on the ground while only rushing for 39 yards. Tagovailoa was sacked five times. The Dolphins have lost their past 12 regular-season or postseason games in which the temperature at kickoff was 40 degrees or lower, with more potential cold weather games coming up at Houston, Cleveland and the New York Jets later this season. Miami was 4-10 in games played in December or later in the past two seasons. “Collectively you’ve got to all have that same mindset,” Tagovailoa said of Miami's toughness. “That’s why we have team football, that’s why you’re in team sports. I think you’ve got to look at it as, are you mentally tough and are you physically tough? They have to go hand in hand. If one of those things has a kink in it, it could go one way or the other.” A few weeks after former Dolphins safety DeShon Elliott said the Dolphins were “soft” when he played there, linebacker Jordyn Brooks criticized his team's toughness after losing to Green Bay. “I feel like we let the elements control the way we played,” Brooks said after the 30-17 loss. “As a group, I thought we were soft. Simple as that.” Coach Mike McDaniel said he expects all kinds of criticisms to come when the team fails to reach expectations, but added that he uses the game tape to measure toughness. “If I have an example of weak-mindedness or situations where a guy is turning something down or how he’s loafing because of a result, those are things I can coach,” McDaniel said. McDaniel added he didn't see anything on the tape to suggest players weren't giving full effort, but he did see many instances of missed tackles because of straining and poor technique — not bringing their feet through the tackle — which got worse as the game went on. He also said players would have insisted he bench teammates if they were “loafing” or turning down assignments, which he indicated didn't happen. “I'm very aware that the narrative exists," McDaniel said, "and with absolute certainty, I know that the narrative will exist unless it changes. There’s one way to change it. And that’s winning a game against the New York Jets. "And you know what? People still might not call you tough. Cool. I take it very serious as a head coach to be responsible for things that can help to be accountable and to bring forth information that’s actually helpful, not finger pointing." Some Dolphins players disagreed with the notion the team isn't tough enough. “I guess we’ve got to prove it wrong," said defensive tackle Zach Sieler. “If people think that, we’ve got to go out there and beat it. I don’t think that’s the case. I think we play physically up front. I think we play physically all around. I think we’ve got to make sure we’re showing that on Sunday.” Miami placed backup cornerback Cam Smith on injured reserve after he dislocated his shoulder against Green Bay. The Dolphins also signed tackle Jackson Carman off the practice squad and signed cornerback Jason Maitre to the practice squad. ... Edge rushers Bradley Chubb and Cameron Goode practiced Wednesday for the first time this season, and McDaniel didn't rule out the possibility of one or both of them playing on Sunday. Chubb tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee in Week 17 last season, and Goode ruptured a patella tendon in the season finale. AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/NFLStrictly fans furious as they blast judges for ‘under-scoring’ star – saying ‘that should have been four tens’