Warning: the following range from depressing to disturbing…

1. I just listened to a slice of an old comedy routine from the early 60’s. The comic was Jack Carter (yechh!) and he was appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show, which was considered must-watch Sunday evening family fare for decades. Carter began by riffing on how much traveling stone-faced Ed did, and said, “Ed even did a special show in Africa, but you’ll never see it. They ate the camera man!” And this was in the middle of the civil rights movement, live, coast-to-coast. I think it’s fair to say that there has been quite a bit of progress in racial attitudes in the past 60 years, no matter what the race-hucksters would have America believe.

2. Wait…how did the Left manage to get so completely turned around on women’s rights? That was fast. After the Wisconsin Assembly passed transgender girls high school sports ban—almost certainly headed for a veto by the state’s woke governor—Democratic Assemblyman Dave Considine argued that parents concerned that their daughters could lose scholarships or a place on a sports team in college because of competition from biological males are being “selfish.” His message for the girls: If the transitioning males who are bigger, taller and stronger than you are winning, you just “need to work harder.” Other Democratic colleagues of this idiot compared banning biological males from girls’ sports to racial segregation.

3. On the cultural literacy front: I am working on a musical project for next year, and for reasons irrelevant to the post, suggested including the song, “That’s Entertainment!” One of my collaborators, a thirty-something lawyer, said she never heard of the song, which was the link for a huge hit MGM musical retrospective called “That’s Entertainment!” and three sequels. The number itself is performed twice in “The Bandwagon,” generally regarded as one of the best MGM musicals.

I literally couldn’t believe that being ignorant of that song was anything but an anomaly, but some fellow directors in my age range quickly threw virtual cold water on my face. Among the cultural references they reported getting blank stares in response to were the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, Gene Kelly, Judy Collins, Marie Callas, and George Bernard Shaw. In contrast, my parents made certain that my sister and I knew about and appreciated the cultural figures and works their generation grew up with, like Sophie Tucker, Fanny Brice, Harold Lloyd and Joe E. Brown.

4. But apparently not certain enough. I was made quite familiar with Eddie Cantor, knowing him mostly as a singing comic famous for his big eyes and eccentric dancing style (as you can see above) , as well as the originator of such period hits as “Makin’ Whoopee”, “Ida (Sweet as Apple Cider)”, “If You Knew Susie”, “Ma! He’s Making Eyes at Me,” and “How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?” But inspired by re-watching “Boardwalk Empire,” the HBO bootlegging saga in which a Cantor-based character is a frequent presence, I did some research on him.

Eddie was an Ethics Hero! Cantor publicly denounced the antisemitic, right-wing isolationist radio demagogue Father Coughlin at the peak of his political influence and was dropped by his radio sponsor as a result. In another impressive episode when Cantor showed how a major star could use his popularity to shift the public’s cognitive dissonance scale, Eddie had young Sammy Davis, Jr. as a guest on his live TV variety show in the 50’s. Cantor hugged the black performer and mopped Davis’s sweaty brow with his handkerchief after a typically energetic performance by Sammy. Again sponsors freaked out and pushed NBC to threaten cancellation of the show if Cantor continued to show such unseemly collegiality with black performers. Eddie Cantor responded by booking Davis for two more weeks.

During the polio epidemic, Eddie Canter was instrumental in launching The March of Dimes as the fundraising campaign for the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. True to his comedian instincts, Cantor named it as a deliberate parody of the then-popular “March of Time” series.

5. Re-watching Allen Ball’s superb HBO series “Six Feet Under” after almost 20 years, I was struck by an episode in which Nate, the eldest son of the Fisher family, the multi-generational funeral home operators who are the troubled protagonists of the show (it ran for 5 seasons), has a politically incorrect nightmare. A recovering narcissist who, as they say, “can’t keep it in his pants,” Nate Fisher is visited by four children ranging from a toddler to a teen, all representing the abortions his random sex partners had over the years.

Gutsy.