TVSquad

So Conan O'Brien showed up on Jay Leno's show last night. Late Night is in repeats this week and O'Brien was out on the West Coast for some reason (maybe checking out his new studio?) and he appeared as the first guest. And it was kinda funny, but mostly dull.

I didn't expect some long discussion about O'Brien taking over for Leno when Leno steps down in 2009, but I did think they'd at least bring the topic up at some point. The only thing said about it all night was a one line joke by Leno in the monologue ("Conan O'Brien is on the show...is it 2009 already?"). Instead, O'Brien just rehashed his Good Housekeeping recipe story and told stories about the Emmys and Jerry Lewis. It was odd they didn't address the issue (and it was made even more weird by the fact that Leno did make a joke about it at the start of the show).

Video of the appearance is after the jump.

No, not that F word. The other one. The one that's a derogatory word for a gay person.

Check out the video at Breitbart. In the 18th hour of his annual MDA Telethon, Lewis walks about the stage and the audience making comments on various people, and at one point stops and talks about the cameraman and his family (supposedly). He says "your family has come to see you...you remember Bart, your oldest son...Jesse, the illiterate f****t..." The audience laughs and moans a bit, but I'm trying to figure out exactly what Lewis says here. Does he actually say that word, or does he start to say "fatty" or something similar? You make the call.

Whatever he says, it's an odd piece of video for sure. I guess that what happens when you're up for 18 hours.

UPDATE: Video is embedded after the jump.

UPDATE #2: He admits he did use the word, and has apologized.

I'm too young to have watched the Dick Cavett Show, thought I did enjoy his cameo in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3.

Anyway, thanks to YouTube and other such sites folks like me can finally see clips from some of these old TV shows, and I must say I'm glad I came across the one below with Jerry Lewis.

Lewis talks about his critics, and it's impressive, to me anyway, that he's willing to listen to a critic who doesn't like him if the critic is competent and has a clear love of film. He even claims to have written to critics and thanked them for negative reviews. Now that we have the blogosphere it's hard for me to imagine such an exchange taking place. If anything, I'd imagine an actor would respond to a negative review by posting something nasty about the reviewer on their own blog. And then I would write about that exchange on this blog.

The video is after the jump. After the commercial break is a brief Q&A with the audience, which isn't especially interesting or revealing.

Sixty-one million dollars. That's the amount of money raised during this year's Jerry Lewis Telethon to fight Muscular Dystrophy. The influx of money to the annual telethon, which is held during the Labor Day holiday, was bolstered by a huge donation from a group of firefighters and the lack of a major hurricane so far this season.

This broke the previous record of $60.5 million, which was set back in 2003. The telethon was able to surpass this amount with a $23.5 million dollar contribution from the International Association of Firefighters. Last year only $55 million was raised due to the devastation hurricane Katrina wrought on the Gulf Coast shortly before Labor Day. Bob Mackle, Muscular Dystrophy Association spokesman, expressed great relief that there weren't any storms this season.

The position of "abbot" the leadership role of the (in)famous Friars Club has remained vacant for two years following the death of former abbot Alan King. That changed recently when Jerry Lewis was named the new abbot of the Friars Club at a recent "roast," the 80 year old comedian's third time in the hot seat after being roasted in 1971 and 1986. Comedian and Law and Order actor Richard Belzer served as roast master for the ceremony. I did a quick search but didn't see anything about this particular roast appearing on Comedy Central, though I think it would be fun to see. I always prefer the older, venerable comedians over the young ones.

• Entourage's Jeremy Piven and Stephen Dorff got into a little fight the other night.
• The screenwriters of The Break-Up sign a big deal with Universal.
• Teri Hatcher is going to make a sports movie with Samuel L. Jackson.
• Jerry Lewis is going to direct a stage version of The Nutty Professor.
• Alien vs. Predator 2 has a director.
• They're remaking Terry O'Quinn's The Stepfather?! Why?
• Oh, and have you heard there's some Superman movie coming out this summer?