Monday, February 25, 2013

Jerry Takes the Heat

So I hear from my friend Ward that he lost his family Oscar pool to HIS DOG. One of Ward's kids put dog food on various pieces of paper representing Oscar nominees, and the dog chose with more accuracy. Ward also reminds me that Robert Shaw (pictured) co-hosted the Oscars in 1976 for some reason. Things were crazy back then! We were all insane and nobody knew what was going on. That reminded me of the Jerry Lewis bio where I read about Jerry hosting the Oscars. The broadcast ended 20 minutes early! The producers asked Jerry to stretch. He tried lots of different things and it went on and on. "Before long he'd picked up a trumpet and started to play off-key. NBC finally broke in with some archive material - a sports film about competitive pistol shooting." An Oscar show that ended early, what do you know. The timing mistake was the producer's fault but the press blamed Jerry, "referring to him as 'an egg-laying comedian' and deriding his 'ghastly evening shirt.'" Or as Jerry says in this video that Ward found for me, "I took all the heat."