Chicago Humanities Festival

Airplane! Behind the Scenes of a Comedy Classic – Chicago Humanities Festival – October 21, 2023

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David Zucker was the only one of the three creative forces behind Airplane! to be there is person, his brother Jerry and Jim Abrahams appearing briefly via previously recorded segments. Zucker’s remembrances about the writing and making of the movie were interesting and funny.

I never knew that it was a parody of the 1957 drama Zero Hour! (including the exclamation point in the title). Apparently, though, the Zuckers and Abrahams were told that it was closer to plagiarism than parody and had to get permission from Paramount, the studio for the original, to proceed. Now I need to find Zero Hour! and watch it.

As for funny, the biggest laugh of the program was produced by a clip of Leslie Nielsen from the movie:

Striker: “Surely you can’t be serious.”
Rumack: “I am serious … and don’t call me Shirley.”

In 2005, the American Film Institute ranked this as 79th in all-time movie quotes. Given that one of the criteria was “Cultural impact: Movie quotations that viewers use in their own lives and situations; circulating through popular culture, they become part of the national lexicon” I would have rated it higher, around 50th on the impressive list.

Nowhere on the list, although shown to attendees, was Peter Graves saying “Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?” According to Zucker, Graves originally turned down the part and had to be convinced by his wife and daughter to do it, in part because he was leery about playing what seemed to him like a leering part on the page.

Keegan-Michael Key and Elle Key – Chicago Humanities Festival – October 5, 2023

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Before Keegan-Michael and Elle Key even stepped out on stage, we were reminded by a member of the host committee that there was still an actors strike going on, so the guests wouldn’t be able to discuss any of the TV shows or movies they had worked on.

This could have been deflating, but I looked upon it as an opportunity, given that the topic of the presentation related to their new book, The History of Sketch Comedy, and they had the chance, unfortunately not taken, to create a sketch right before our eyes wherein they portrayed two people dancing around mention of their work.

She did most of the talking at the event, and I believe, most of the writing in the book, which made me wonder whether Danny Kaye was mentioned in the book. Huh? In fact, there is the briefest of references to him as being in White Christmas. My connection is that Kaye’s wife, Sylvia Fine, wrote songs for him for at least five of his movies, the writing spouse behind the comic.

Upon request from his wife, Keegan did a mean impression of Tracy Morgan, but otherwise pretty much just sat back, smiled and enjoyed her storytelling. Clearly, the key to a happy marriage.

An Evening with Molly Shannon – Chicago Humanities Festival – Harris Theater – April 13, 2022

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As with Bob Odenkirk’s book-promoting appearance at the festival, Tim Meadows played the role of interviewer, unfortunately, as I would have liked more of Shannon, and less of Meadows asking the audience if anyone had any marijuana they could give him.

On the positive side, compared to the Odenkirk interview, there was a lot less profanity, a better venue, and a readable book as part of the package.

One similarity between the programs was the guest saying that it was really hard to write the book. Shannon said it about ten times., which was nothing compared to how many times she said “yeah” in response to Meadows.

Appropriately, given the requests for marijuana, I haven’t heard someone say “yeah” as much since I walked into the wrong party senior year of college, where every other sentence was “yeah man.”

Shannon’s other most frequent responses to Meadows, when she could get a word in edgewise, were “that’s funny” (even if it wasn’t), that’s great (even if it wasn’t), and I don’t know (even if she did?).

Then, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, when Meadows said they were out of time, Shannon stood up and started riffing, taking over the stage and disregarding the fact that they had to clear the space for the next presentation.

If only Meadows had told her time was up an hour earlier, and then sat back and enjoyed her energy with the rest of us.

Bob Odenkirk with Tim Meadows – Chicago Humanities Festival – Music Box Theatre – March 2, 2022

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Meadows interviewed Odenkirk in association with the latter’s release of a new book – Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama: A Memoir by Bob Odenkirk.

I love Better Call Saul, so I’m not anti Odenkirk. But . . . .

Odenkirk drops a lot of F-bombs. I’m not impressed.

Odenkirk thinks Sullivan’s Travels isn’t a very good movie. Not only is he wrong about that, but he also should know that it’s a much better movie than his new movie, Nobody, which nobody should bother seeing, except to enjoy Christopher Lloyd.

There were some high points to the program. Tim Meadows was very engaging. Giving several audience members stupid questions to ask Odenkirk worked. And Odenkirk’s closing by reading a “poem” about ice cream from his book put everyone in a good mood as they departed, and made me think about stopping at the Dairy Queen on the corner before heading for the car.

The ticket to the program included a copy of the book, which I’ll read, knowing that he has had an interesting journey and confident in the assumption that a good editor will have made it a better read than one might otherwise expect listening to Odenkirk’s articulation, or lack thereof, on stage.

Chicago Humanities Festival – November 3 – 10, 2019

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The nominal theme of this year’s Chicago Humanities Festival was Power. Recent years’ have been Graphic, Belief, Stuff, Speed, Style, Citizens, Journey, Animal, America, Tech-Knowledge, The Body, Laughter, etc. If they insist upon continuing the naming pretense, I would like to suggest, for next year, Apathy. It’s my hope that this would, by power of suggestion, reduce tickets sales, thus making seats more available.

I often select sessions based on their comedic potential, so, not surprisingly, my most hopeful year, despite the frequent disconnect, was 2009’s Laughter. I particularly remember seeing former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who, in addition to being very smart, is downright funny, much funnier than any of the comedians I’ve seen at the Underground Comedy Club.

This year, Ren Weschler talked about his new biography of Oliver Sacks, who himself was a speaker at the 2002 festival. If I’d seen that, I wouldn’t have bothered with Weschler.

John Hodgman pushed his new book Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms. He told some good stories, but the audience’s questions were about his podcast Judge John Hodgman, which I’ve never heard. So I was surprised that many of the questions seemed serious, with people looking for actual advice from a comedian, and not one named Larry David.

Mo Rocca’s new book is Mobituaries, Great Lives Worth Reliving, but it was more interesting to hear him talk about his own career, which has included a job as an editor at a soft porn magazine.

Sarah Vowell, when asked why she became an historian, said that she doesn’t like to pry, which she acknowledged was a problem for her as a journalist, so she finds it easier to write about dead people, as she doesn’t have to talk to them, or, I suppose, see them.

Upcoming Events

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Normally I don’t take up my extremely valuable time, which could be better spent working on my hip flexors, publishing information about upcoming events, but the website has been acting up lately, causing several problems, like no one receiving newly published posts.  So, after two days of chatting with my new best friends in two different tech departments in two different countries, I feel the need to test the system to see if it’s working properly again, and what better way than to annoy my subscribers with unnecessary, verbose emails.

So, without revealing too much information about my clandestine movements, here’s some things you might consider attending.

Arts in the Dark Parade at 6:00 pm on October 19 on State Street.  You can dress up like your favorite movie character or just watch from the sidelines and admire the total lack of shame of the participants.

Sunset Boulevard just opened at the Porchlight Music Theatre, featuring Chicago legend Hollis Resnik as Norma Desmond.   Having attended an invitational rehearsal, I can tell you that the cast is great and the music is wonderful, but I did catch Resnik smoking in the parking lot during a break, which calls for detention.

The Art Institute is opening its Andy Warhol exhibit for member previews this week, which makes me want to look for clues as to whether he was really an undercover agent spying on extraterrestrial aliens as depicted in Men in Black III.

The Chicago Humanities Festival presents dozens of programs the last week of October.  Just like your insurance company, the festival has been furtively raising prices the last few years, but, unlike your insurer, there’s no competition, so suck it up and treat yourself.

And though I receive no commission for my continuing promotion of her (but should I?), don’t miss Meghan Murphy in Spamalot at the Mercury Theater.

 

 

 

 

 

Chicago Humanities Festival – David Brooks, David Wooten, and Maude Maggart – May 4, 2019

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Commentator David Brooks was very funny for the first part of his appearance at the packed Harris Theater. Then he got to the topic of his new book The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life and receded into preachiness reminiscent of a Sunday morning TV sermon, citing examples of others’, but not his own, humane behavior, discussing how his discovery of the moral life had led him out of a dark place, while failing to mention  that during that time period he got divorced from his wife of 27 years and married his former research assistant, 23 years his junior, and without making a case for there being anything in his book that hasn’t been said before in a basic psychology class in regard to character development.

Professor David Wooten, speaking on virtue at the SAIC Ballroom of the School of the Art Institute, was even more disappointing to his much more meager audience, because he wasn’t even funny, just droningly pompous, as evidenced by the sleep-inducing effect he had on several audience members. He basically gave a short shrift overview of philosophies of Aristotle, Hume, Hobbes, Machiavelli and a few others, all as background leading up to his criticism of a modern day philosopher, whose name, unfortunately, escapes me (as I’d like to create my own objective view of her thoughts), who wrote about the fragility of courage.

Fortunately the day was saved by Maude Maggart, a wonderful cabaret singer from New York who presented material from the Great American Songbook, demonstrating a silvery voice with an engaging personality to a full house at Venue Six10. At the end of the hour, the crowd applauded on and on, hoping to encourage her to come back for an encore, but, alas, the Humanities Festival runs on a tight schedule and she did not reappear, the only disappointing part of her performance.

1968: Song by Song – Chicago Humanities Festival – November 5, 2018

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The good news – the program featured great performances by the singers and musicians and, for those of us who were of a certain age in 1968, was a very nostalgic evening, complete with covers and quotes from The Chicago Seed, the underground newspaper of the day, which was edited by Abe Peck (who was in attendance), the father of Doug Peck, the musical director of the program. They even added an Aretha Franklin tribute at the end that extended the program well past its scheduled finish time, to the delight of the audience.

The bad news – what the hell were they thinking by including MacArthur Park as the song representing August, 1968?! Miami Herald readers polled by Dave Barry in 1992 voted the 1968 recording as the worst song of all time. The only redeeming thing about it is the instrumental interlude. If not for all the horrible things that happened in 1968, Richard Harris’s singing and the nonsensical lyrics of this song would take the cake, whether or not it was left out in the rain.

A much better choice would have been People Got to be Free by The Rascals, which was a chart topper that August and was a far more representative song of the feeling of the times that this program was trying to convey.

But if MacArthur Park it had to be in some fashion, why not Al Yankovic’s 1983 parody of it, with his far better lyrics, which included, “Jurassic Park is frightening in the dark/All the dinosaurs are running wild/Someone shut the fence off in the rain/I admit it’s kind of eerie/But this proves my chaos theory.”

After all, chaos abounded in 1968.

 

Tom Hanks – Uncommon Type – Chicago Humanities Festival – November 2, 2018

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My guess is that a majority of the audience at the Harris Theater came not to hear about Hanks’ book, Uncommon Type, which includes, often very minimally, mention of a typewriter in each short story, but rather because Hanks is their type of guy.

He didn’t disappoint. When asked by interviewer Peter Sagal about all the real life people he’s played, many of them heroes, Hanks told of how, when meeting Chesley Sullenberger, James Lovell, and Richard Phillips, he said to each of them in regard to his portrayal: “I’m going to say things you didn’t say, go places you’ve never been, and do things you’ve never done – live with it.”

In particular, he recounted Sullenberger telling him that his instrument panel went dead before landing his plane on the Hudson River and Hanks replying that a blank panel wasn’t dramatic enough, so in the movie it would instead act “like this”, which Hanks then demonstrated by flailing his hands to simulate the needles out of control. Sagal suggested that using those hand gestures in the movie would have been a crowd pleaser, as it was to this audience.

After Hanks mentioned a new movie coming out, Greyhound, where he plays the captain of a ship in World War II, Sagal noted that Sullenberger, Lovell, Phillips and John Miller in Saving Private Ryan all were captains, and suggested that Hanks couldn’t seem to get a promotion. Hanks added that Greyhound would forever be known as the movie where he doesn’t play Mr. Rogers (given the great anticipation of the release of that movie).

Hanks then responded to several questions submitted by the audience prior to the program, the final one of which inexplicably asked Hanks what his favorite sandwich is. Hanks went into a long, amusing explanation of his dietary restrictions, though clearly the perfect answer to close the program would have been “a hero.”

Doris Kearns Goodwin – Leadership in Turbulent Times – Chicago Humanities Festival – October 30, 2018

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When they came around with index cards for submitting questions before the program started, I thought about asking Goodwin something about her beloved Red Sox, for whose games she has held season tickets for 35 years.

I hesitated and lost my opportunity, but it didn’t matter because the interviewer read my mind and led with that topic, right after she introduced Goodwin as a Pulitzer Prize winner, which the transcription on the overhead monitor interpreted as a pug prize winner. They must have been using the same app that my iPhone voice mail uses.

Goodwin said her love of history came from her father teaching her how to keep score while listening to Brooklyn Dodger games on the radio, so that she could record and recount the history for him when he came home from work.

Moving from her own motivation to become an historian to that of the subjects of her new book, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Lincoln, and Lyndon Johnson to become politicians, she suggested that Lincoln was searching for esteem, Teddy Roosevelt for adventure, and Lyndon Johnson for power. Like with everything else, my motivation would be for the story value.

In discussing the Presidents’ leadership styles, Goodwin emphasized the importance of FDR’s fireside chats on the radio. The story goes, “you could walk along a line of parked cars in Chicago and keep hearing his voice because everybody was listening.” Much the same was true of Firesign Theater broadcasts in my college dorm.

Goodwin also mentioned Harry Hopkins, FDR’s most-trusted advisor, who was summoned by Roosevelt to the White House in 1939, and who then wound up living there for three and a half years. Interestingly, the Kaufman and Hart play, The Man Who Came to Dinner, also premiered in 1939, though it only ran a little over two years, truth being stranger than fiction, as further evidenced by the fact that in the movie Man of the Year, the Robin Williams character, TV host Tom Dobbs, does not wind up being President.