Tag: comedy

Bill Murray is Funny

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“It can’t be that easy for him,” Steve Martin is reported to have said about friend and fellow actor Bill Murray. “It just can’t.”

Some guys are just funny. We hated them in high school, because they could effortlessly do, what the rest of us worked so hard to do: Make people laugh. Was there a super-secret formula to their success? Not that we could see. They could just lift an eyebrow in a particular situation, or smirk in a somewhat sarcastic, somewhat serious way, and put everyone on the floor. It was frustrating to those of us who’ve had to work our way through the dark and mysterious halls of funny to find that which they just had sort of attached to them at birth. Everyone wanted to be around them to hear what they might say next, and they hoped that he liked them half as much as they liked him. Why? Because he was funny, naturally and effortlessly, funny. “Some guys just are,” we might tell our kids facing similar circumstances, “and there’s nothing you can really do about it.”

Bill Murray, I have to imagine, was one of those guys we all hated in high school. He was the fifth of nine kids in the Murray family, and we can imagine that some of his comedy came from striving for some attention in such a crowded home, but we also have to imagine that comedy was a way of life in that Irish, Catholic home. Regardless how it came about, Bill Murray became one of the best comedic actors of his generation, and as his stint on Saturday Night Live shows displayed, he had great improvisational skills too, but I’m sure if we saw him attempt to do standup, we might see through his otherwise bullet-proof veneer. We’ve heard man-on-the-street stories of him engaging in improvisational acts that prove hilarious, but those are based on his good guy graciousness as a well-known celebrity. If we could somehow remove his status, and read through these stories, would he still be funny? Impossible to know, because they’re built on his iconography, as well as adding to it. Bill Murray movies, however, are almost all funny, some hilarious, and others are enshrined in our personal hall of fame of funny. 

What is the super-secret formula to Bill Murray’s success? My guess is that there isn’t one, and that might be his secret. Bill Murray does have an undeniable everyman appeal in that he’s not gorgeous, he doesn’t have great skin or hair, and while he’s not fat, no one would say he’s fit and trim. He is just a funny man. He is the embodiment of the annoying “It is what is” principle. I go to see his movies, because he’s funny. Why is he just as funny, or funnier, than his peers? “I don’t know, he just is.” 

Anytime we discuss the merits of one actor over another, there is always the question of presentation. Everyone from the lighting guy to the director and the editor plays some role in the way Bill Murray is presented to the audience. Murray, as has been reported, can be difficult to work, because he doesn’t feel like certain people know how to do their jobs. Does this have anything to do with the idea that Bill knows how all the players need to work together to form this presentation, because he’s seen quality players do it? If that’s the source of his reported obnoxiousness, then he obviously knows how to cultivate and foster his presentation, which is more effort than that which we accredited to him.

To everyone from the frustrated peer to the casual fan, it appears as though Bill Murray just coasts through his movies, and he isn’t even trying to be funny or dramatic, depending on the role he’s playing in a movie. He’s just Bill Murray in the way Tom Cruise is just Tom Cruise and Clint Eastwood is just Clint Eastwood. Bill Murray is also so consistently Bill Murray that we know what to expect from the productions he participates in, in the same manner we know what to expect in a Starbucks franchise or an AC/DC song. 

Now we have Steve Matin, one of Murray’s peers and colleagues, a man who began around the same time, has attempted to do as almost as many comedic and dramatic movies, and TV shows saying he basically agrees that it doesn’t appear as though Bill Murray is even trying. Regardless the actual number of movies, or the debate over comedic quality, the two can be viewed as colleagues in many ways, and he views Murray’s career as so effortless that it’s almost frustrating to him. 

It’s not our intention to belittle Steve Martin’s brilliant and influential career, as we think it speaks for itself, but he’s obviously worked very hard to achieve everything he has. Bill Murray, on the other hand, has achieved similar heights without seeming to try near as hard. We’re sure that Murray does his due diligence, research, mental preparation, and everything else it takes to make a quality production, but it doesn’t appear that way. In terms of perception alone, it appears as though Bill Murray rolls out of a hammock shortly after someone yells, “Action!” delivers his lines, and goes back to his hammock funnier than the rest of us will ever be no matter how much work and effort we put into it. 

If you have to try that hard, you’re probably not very funny, you might counter, and you’d be right, but we have all had to learn how to be funny. Learning the beats, rhythms, and everything else it takes to be funny is often done by osmosis. We don’t learn how to be funny in the same way we learn math, how to play baseball, or how to be an electrician. We pick up various elements of our presentation from our peers, that crazy-funny uncle, and our TV shows and movies. If you were around during the Seinfeld/Friends era, you saw how they influenced what it takes to be funny, and you picked up some tips and copied the actors’ mannerisms, their tones, and sometimes we stole the lines their writers wrote for them. They, and numerous others of course, defined funny in our era. Other eras had Abbot and Costello, The Honeymooners, and The Lucille Ball Show define funny. We’ve also had others tell us “That’s not funny!” and we adapted and adjusted to the current cultural norms of funny, and in some ways, it took some definition of work to do so. Others, it seemed, didn’t have to go through all those trials and errors. They just seemed to fall into funny, because that’s who they were.     

These funny people weren’t great looking either. Bill Murray, for example, does not have what we consider “leading man” looks. I’m not trying to diss the man, as he’s probably better looking than I am, but if we were to take headshots and show them to citizens of another culture, with the headshots of a couple of great looking character actors and ask them to, “Pick out the leading man in movies in our country,” Bill Murray might be the last chosen. I don’t know if he’s ugly, but he has an unmade bed look about him. He doesn’t have great skin, and he barely has any hair left, and he rarely changes facial expressions in the course of his movies, but movie directors flood his 1-800 number to try to get him to lead, or at least appear, in their movie.   

Most of us worked hard to be funny, shortly after we realized we didn’t have anything else going for us, and it was so frustrating for us to see someone roll out of bed funny. We can all identify with Steve Martin’s complaints, because we all know someone who achieves what we worked so hard for with such apparent effortlessness. If you’ve ever watched camp counselors, teenagers, try to MC an event, you’ve seen them try to work the audience (of camp goers and their parents), you’ve seen them try to act crazy, nuts, and fun, and you’ve walked away thinking, they could really use a natural speaker with some unusual levels of charisma, a Tripper (Bill Murray’s character in Meatballs). If you’ve ever seen a grown man sing with a full stage show, with dancers, pyrotechnics, and anything and everything to entertain an audience, you know that there are just some men and women who, armed with nothing but a microphone, can sing a song called Star Wars, and produce one of the funniest things ever seen. How does he do it? No one, not even one of the other funniest men of his generation, knows. He just does. When we watch it, we send out Steve Martin’s “It can’t be that easy!” complaint sent out to the unfairness of the universe.   

Seinfeld’s Unfrosted was … Not Bad

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Jerry Seinfeld’s Unfrosted was … not bad. Screech! Spit coffee! Swear word! Screams! Car Crash! It is shocking, I know, to hear that coming from a Jerry Seinfeld fanatic. If you’ve read any of the articles on this site, you know how often I source him as one of the greatest comedic minds alive today. I consider him one of the best standup comedians of his generation, and his observations on what makes us weird have had a huge influence on this site. The show Seinfeld was my favorite sitcom of all time, I loved Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, and I even enjoyed his Bee Movie. I didn’t love it, but I really liked it for what it was. Oh, and I laughed so hard during one of his standup shows that Jerry Seinfeld looked over at me with a look that suggested he was comedically concerned about my health. If the difference between fanatic and fan is excessive and intense, uncritical devotion, I am a fanatic. I never wrote to him, collected dolls, scripts, or took tours, but if there’s a hip term I don’t know for a passive fanatic, that’s me. I’m probably his idea of the perfect fan, a guy who quietly buys and watches anything to which he attaches his name. Which is why it pains me to write these five words: “Unfrosted is not as funny as I thought it would be.”

Watching the movie reminded me how we all want more of everything we love. We want more from our favorite artists, athletes, politicians, and plumbers, until they give us so much that we realize it probably would’ve been better if they left us in a state of wanting more. That’s the advice seasoned entertainers often leave young upstarts, “Always leave them wanting more.”  

And Seinfeld warned us, numerous times, that more is not always better. He’s said it in relation to why he decided to prematurely end his show Seinfeld, but he’s applied that principle to his career too. He’s informed us on so many days, and in so many ways, in the numerous interviews he’s done throughout his career, that he’s learned that he’s best when he stays in his lane, his lane being standup. He’s learned what he’s good at, and what he’s not, and he has proven to be the opposite of what makes some comedians so great, in the sense that he’s not daring, risky, or experimental.

If I were to pitch him a project, I would say he and Larry David should develop a sketch comedy in the Mr. Show vein, but we can only guess that he’s had hundreds of similar pitches from friends, fellow writers, and corporate execs, and he’s turned them all down. Some of those projects may have proved embarrassing, some may have been so far out of his lane that he didn’t even consider them, but we have to guess that some projects that were so close that he had a tough time turning them down. He did it all, because he knows who he is, what he’s good at and what he’s not, and he’s learned how to stay in his own lane.   

On the greatest sitcom of all time, Jerry Seinfeld surprisingly (to me anyway) credited the three actors (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Michael Richards, and Jason Alexander) for making the show so brilliant. He does not shy away from the idea that the writing on the show, of which he played a huge role, was great, but he admits that the actors brought that writing to the next level.  

“I did get caught in a beautiful, cyclonic weather event,” he said in an interview. “The actors, Larry David, the thirteen phenomenal comedy writers, and everyone on both sides of the camera was a killer. You know when you’re a part of it, but you know it’s not you. You’re a part of it, but if you’re smart, you know it’s not you. It’s not all you.”   

On Seinfeld, Jerry played the Alex Rieger of Taxi, the Sam Malone of Cheers, the center of the storm. He’s always been great at adding that final comment, lifting that eyebrow to exaggerated levels, and saying, “ALL RIGHT!” at the end of another character’s hilarious rant. He knows how to put a cherry atop the pie in other words. As long as that pie, or the acting required to nuance it, was filled in by someone else. He can write funny, he can deliver a short, crisp line deliver as well as anyone, but the nuances in the acting craft required to build to Seinfeld’s punctuation were always best left to others. I heard him say this so many times that I saw it, until I accepted it, but I always thought there was a bit of humility attached to it. Some of us were so blinded by enthusiasm that we never learned how to curb it completely.

When he decided to end Seinfeld after the ninth season, it felt similar to an athlete retiring at the downside of their peak, not the prolonged, sad tail end, just the other side of the peak. There were hints in seasons eight and nine, after Larry David left, that the show was on the downside of its peak, but it was still the best show on TV. Why would an athlete, or a successful showrunner, quit prematurely? I understand not wanting to outstay your welcome, or allowing us to see glaring levels of diminishment and not wanting to go out like that, but if you’re lucky, you might still have forty years on this planet. What are you going to do in the rest of your life to top that? Some of them, I think, are too worried about what we think. They don’t want us to see their downside, or because they love the game so much that they can’t bear playing at anything less than their peak. They can’t bear someone saying, “If you just called it quits after season nine, it would’ve been a great show beginning to end. Season ten was probably one season too many.” They, some of them, don’t want us to remember them as someone who stayed around too long.

When we were kids, we ached for another Star Wars movie, then we got one later, much later, and it ruined the legacy of Star Wars. After the second trilogy was complete, the almost unanimous opinion among those I know is they probably should’ve left us wanting. As Led Zeppelin did. Zeppelin broke up after the untimely death of their drummer John Bonham, in 1980. We spent our teens and early twenties talking about the possibility of a reunion and another Zep album. I understand they said it wouldn’t feel the same without Bonham, but the remaining band members were still in their early-to-mid thirties when they broke up. How do you leave a juggernaut like Led Zeppelin in your early thirties? The Beatles were in their twenties when they broke up. As Theodore Roosevelt said of being president so young, “The worst thing about being president of the United States so young, is that there’s nothing you can do to top that for the rest of your life.” Led Zeppelin left us wanting, and it was probably for the best. What could they have done to top those first six albums? They most likely, and in all probability, would’ve only disappointed.

In a career studded with comedy gold, Gold Jerry! Gold! Unfrosted has the feel of a sequel. It’s not a sequel, but how many of us walked out of a killer comedy, talking about how that movie just screams out for a sequel. We didn’t talk about how great that comedy was, we instantly wanted more. Then, when the sequel came out, it was, “That wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t as good as the first one.” That was the impression Unfrosted left on me. It felt like all the players were trying to recapture something that used to be really funny, and we were all prepared with our preparatory smiles on our faces, until the smiles slowly faded away.  

The characters have this feel of trying to repeat something that worked before, but it just doesn’t for all the mysterious reasons that some movies work and some just don’t. The jokes have a feel about them that suggests to us that they’re brilliant, but they’ve been done so many times before that we no longer need to figure them out. As someone who doesn’t know one-one hundredths of the knowledge Jerry Seinfeld has about comedy, I think the figuring out part is the reward of comedy. 

Unfrosted seeks the opposite tact. It goes for familiarity, and we all love familiarity. Familiarity with actors, themes, concepts, and all that. Unfrosted displays this level of familiarity in the beginning, to establish a through line to the audience, but it never branches out into that unique spin that kind of shocks us into laughter. The setting of the movie is the 60s, and what a foolish time that was, and even though this has been a million times before, we still think it could be great in the minds of geniuses.

It’s a mystery to us why some movies don’t work, because we don’t make movies, but you’ll often hear moviemakers, actors, and all the other players say, in interviews, that they don’t know why either. “We thought it was funny, but we had no idea how huge it would get.” We don’t often hear the players involved say, “We thought it would be huge, but we had no idea people would consider it a little boring.” What works and what doesn’t is a mystery to us, and it’s a mystery to them. Generally speaking, dramas and action movies are probably a lot easier to predict for those involved, especially when the star actor signs on to the vehicle. Comedies and horror have a super secret formula that even those involved in the finer details of the production involved don’t know whether it will hit or not.  

Unfrosted gave us all a be-careful-what-you-wish-for feel, because you just might get it. As much as we cried out for a movie, or any project, from Jerry Seinfeld, we walked away from it thinking that Unfrosted, unfortunately, should never have been made. What could they have done to make you feel better about it? “I don’t know, I don’t make movies, but they probably should’ve left me wanting more instead of giving it to me.”

Watching Unfrosted, reminds us of that elite athlete who retired on the downside of a peak, not the bottom, just the downside, and we clamored for his return. How can he retire at 37? He still had what two-to-three years left? If he lives to eighty, he’ll spend the next 43 years reminiscing and thinking he should’ve played two-to-three more years at least. Then he comes back, and we see how much his skills have declined. He didn’t do it for the money, I can tell you that much. He did it, because he loves the game, and what’s wrong with that?

The point some people make on various websites is that athletes and entertainers run the risk of ruining their legacy by staying too long. This line right here makes me almost fighting mad. So, you’re telling me that the athlete who made so much money for the league, the city, and the franchise shouldn’t be able to sell his wares to anyone who will take them? He shouldn’t try to get another paycheck for the punishment he put his body through for your entertainment, because you want to remember him the way you want to remember him? Isn’t that a bit myopic, even selfish? He wanted to get paid for his efforts, of course, but he didn’t necessarily do it for the money? Seinfeld, and most modern athletes, have so much money that that’s not why they’re doing it. They’re doing it for the love the game so much that they want to play at least two more years? What’s wrong with that, and what’s wrong with you for wanting to deny him that?

Did Seinfeld ruin his legacy by doing Unfrosted? No, first of all, it wasn’t that bad, but, then again, I never expected to say that a Seinfeld project “wasn’t that bad”. I don’t remember any of the elite athletes who “stayed one year too long” for those latter years, and I don’t begrudge them for taking as many paychecks as they could before they called it a career. I also don’t begrudge them the idea that they loved the game so much that they couldn’t walk away, until it was obvious to them that they truly couldn’t play the game anymore. I actually respect it, as I say it was for the love of the game. I respect the fact that Seinfeld’s friend pitched him on the idea of Unfrosted, and not only did he like the idea, but he didn’t think he was done yet. He thought he had one more big project in him, because he loves doing the things he does so much that he wanted to try it at least one more time. Good for you, Mr. Seinfeld, I say, and if he feels like doing another project, or projects, I’ll be there on the first day it’s released.  

Jerry Seinfeld has admitted that he doesn’t expect to be remembered after he’s gone, and he’s even gone so far as to say he doesn’t care, or that’s not his driving force. I’ll remember Jerry Seinfeld as a great, almost perfect standup comedian, the cocreator of one of the greatest sitcoms in TV history, and as a gifted natural when it comes to observational humor, but Unfrosted doesn’t do much to either lift or damage his legacy. It was just a marginally entertaining movie that they probably won’t list in his very lengthy resume when that final wave off arrives.

It was the Best of Times … In Entertainment

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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” –Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities 

It’s the human condition to believe we live in the best of times and the worst. Psychologists have terms for various strains of bias that inform our opinions, and Dickens’ famous line encompasses them all. I’m biased, you’re biased, and the whole damned system is biased, but this particular article focuses most on what could be called a recency bias. Our recency bias causes us to believe that recent events are weightier, more relevant, and the only era to consider. The recency bias in this article comes with one asterisk, we welcome anyone to challenge the totality of the information within. 

A qualifier such as that one satisfies most, but there are always some, who interrupt your little presentation with, “Yeah, but aren’t you biased?” and they say it with one of those grins that suggest they caught you with the accusation that you might be biased. To which I say, “Well, you caught me, but I did say that at the very beginning. Check the minutes of your transcript of our little conversation in this bistro.” So, rather than try to qualify every single nugget of what I’m about to write, go ahead and place a parenthetical “back to top” at the beginning, or the end, of each statement if that’s what you need to do to assure yourself that I admit to having a mean case of recency bias.

If you’re going to challenge my recency bias, however, I ask you to name an era of entertainment that matches the total output from the 1970’s to the 1990’s. We’re talking top-notch, quantity of quality, from the era of your argument to mine. Everyone has their opinion, of course, and some say that some of the artists were overhyped by the marketing teams spending huge dollars to see to it that their artist made it to the A-List. This happened frequently during this thirty-year chunk of time, as the individual eras therein were chock full of money to be spent in all avenues of entertainment, but with the advantage of hindsight, we can weed through the A-List to ferret out the true artists from the pretenders. Even after doing this, the A-List from this thirty-year era is still daunting. 

We all go through this thirty-year era and parse out which was better than the other, but taken together as a whole, I believe the total number of quality-to-great movies, the sheer breadth of music, and comedy from the era between 1970 and 1999, will not only go down as the greatest era of entertainment in the United States, but most future eras won’t even try to compete. They’ll just go retro, and try to buy the catalogs of the artists from the era, from whomever owns it “now”, to pursue ways to use it and re-use it, market it, and merchandise it in the future. Some might include the 1960’s in some of those entertainment venues, and others will include the 2000 to 2010 era, but after watching, reading, and listening to just about everything from those eras, everything in the 60’s now seems to prelude be this thirty-year peak, in retrospect, and just about everything that followed seemed to be trailing off.

There are exceptions to the rule, of course, as there are always going to be exceptions to every rule. There will always be a couple great movies in any given year, a few great albums here and there, and future comedians who deliver exceptional material. If you lived through this era though, you knew to expect that an exceptional artist would deliver something exceptional in any given month. It was, at times, tough to keep up. While reading this, I’m sure you thought of some exceptions, you think your favorite music artists from the 60s was exceptional, and others thought of their favorite movie from the 00s, and you probably think I’m leaving some critical artists off this list. The point is we could asterisk every era with exceptions, but the general point remains.

The 1990’s were the first era in which I had any real disposable income of my own, and I almost went broke numerous times, trying to rent every movie that had ever been made, listen to every album of music ever created, and I stayed up late to listen to every comedian the late-night talk shows invited on. The reader might consider it a bold statement to say I knew everything vital and important to come from this thirty-year peak, or they might consider it a little sad that I devoted so much of my free time and disposable income to this pursuit, but few who know me would challenge my knowledge of the mostly inconsequential information from the field of entertainment that occurred during this era. 

The 1970-1999 era was the best of times for those who wanted free time, disposable income, and free space of the mind to consider artistic endeavors. Depending on their political orientation, some politically biased writers might consider specific eras, in this thirty-year chunk of time, the worst of times, depending on the party in power at the time. In my humble opinion, as one who lived it, lived through it, and now looks back with a wistful eye at the glorious times we all had, that’s a big ball of nonsense. It’s a feeble attempt to rewrite history through a politically biased lens, and I write that asking the reader to consider that when one goes down the list of parties in power, over the course of this thirty-year chunk of time, it’s mostly even.    

Unless you consider The Cold War with Russia an actual war, the 70’s were the first era that was largely free of war. The Vietnam War ended in 1975, and that was preceded by the Korean War, and WWII. Except for a few skirmishes here and there, the era between 1975 and 2001 was largely free of war. Except for a few moments here and there, America experienced such a great era of stability and prosperity for thirty years that we had so much free time that we didn’t know what to do with ourselves, so we invented scandals, controversies, and fears of the future for mostly entertainment purposes. We also had massive amounts of disposable income and free space of the mind to focus on artistic endeavors. As much as we hate to admit it now, in a historical perspective, we lived and still live, in the best of times. 

 

There were so many factions and fractions in movies, music, TV, and books for the average consumer to consider, and yet we all agreed on most topics. A walk through the A-List contributors in the early 70’s, in music and the movies, is so daunting that I won’t even try to list them. The list in the 80’s and 90’s not only continued this legacy, but these eras may have topped the 70’s by sheer volume. Before we move on, think about that A-List for just a second. How many different, varied, and talented artists littered that A-List compendium. We usually try to shorten that list a little, just for sake of conversation, but the A-List of that era is so long that we feel a need to limit entrants just so we can have a decent conversation on that topic just to avoid putting our listeners to sleep. Think about the great directors, and how many movies they released during this thirty-year chunk of time. Think about all of the various musicians, and all of their various templates. We could devote this entire article to the Billboard Top 100, the Top of the Pops, or any of the other publications and venues that tried to top one another with the A-list artists they featured. Now, think of the magazines, both mass market and more niche ones, that tried to cover the A-Lists of music, the movies, books, and entertainment in general.

As one who wasn’t exclusively ensnared by A-list celebrities, and rock stars, I often found myself enjoying the entertainment put out by those others might call the B-List artists, C-Lists, and D-lists, and in that endeavor, I found an exciting new release almost weekly. As I wrote, I almost went broke numerous times trying to keep up, stay hip, and know every reference point, joke, and conversation topic people were having. Some call these conversations “water cooler” conversations, the coffee shop, or the break area. Whatever the case was, I was one of those who had to know, and there were so many movies, so much music, and so many great books and comedians to know about, for someone who had to know, that no past era compares when it comes to pure output and I dare say no future era will even try to compete. If you love music, movies, books, and comedy it was the greatest era in human existence to be alive.  

My nephews, some thirty years my junior, insist that the 80s were greatest musical era ever created, and they don’t even bother trying to defend “their” era. They have no allegiance to it in anyway. They state that the 80s were the greatest era of music as if it’s not only a fact, but a fait accompli that’s not even worth arguing. They don’t list one particular artist as the game-changing artist, as many of us will, but they do try to compile a list of influential artists that I considered quite daunting, and they insist no other era can compete. Even though I had nothing to do with the music in this era in anyway, I took some pride looking back and hearing an outsider consider this era I lived through the greatest era ever. Due probably to my age, more than anything else, I’m more of a 90s guy, and being a 90s guy, I always considered the 80s a silly era of music, until my nephews put their  spin on it. I also write all of this with the asterisk pointed to the notion that proponents of any era between the 60s and the 00s have valid arguments for “their” era.

My rhetorical question, sent out to the ether, is will future inhabitants in the United States be having arguments over the specific eras of this thirty-year chunk of time for the next 60 to 70 years? Will there be a “rock revival” in 2050 that puts the 80s music to shame? Will there be a return-to-roots revival in the movie industry that puts the sheer output of the movies from the 70s in the dustbin? Some argue that with the proliferation of streaming services and the various outlets on the internet, Americans will never collectively agree on great artistic outputs ever again. They argue that there’s just so much to choose from that it inhibits the idea of a Michael Jackson, a Star Wars, or even a more recent release like the book The Da Vinci Code from ever rocking our world in quite the same manner. These arguments discount the genius effect, of course, as every era has their own geniuses. The question I have, and it seeks to be as objective as possible for someone obviously imbued with a whole bunch of biases, is will those future geniuses ever be able to take future generations to the point that they can finally put 1970 to 1999 to rest, or will 2070 America still be arguing the relative merits of Michael Jackson vs. Madonna; Spielberg vs. Lucas vs. Coppola; Seinfeld vs. Leno; and Chevy Chase vs. Steve Martin vs. Bill Murray?   

One of the primary reasons there might never be an era that tops these eras is the topic no common fan wants to talk about but they are know: money. There was so much money to be had in movies and music that the executives and their boardrooms didn’t mind pouring money into their marketing department, because they knew they’d get it back. They didn’t always get it back, of course, but how many guys with nothing but a guitar strapped to their back receive the kind of funding and support they may have made twenty years ago? How many “good looking waiters who can act” is a movie studio going to bank on if a majority of the money they see is from the comparatively flat streaming services? The amount of money that man may have made for himself and those who supported his rise, just isn’t there anymore, not like it was between 1970 and 1999.    

There will always be exceptions to the rule, as I wrote, and there will always be exceptional exceptions, but the sheer output from so many different, varied artists, from so many different corners of the country, that occurred in those thirty years, will probably never be matched in my humble opinion, an opinion obviously derived from a recency bias.