"Now a team of scientists in New York say they have pinpointed the genetic mutation that may have erased our tails."

"When the scientists made this genetic tweak in mice, the animals didn’t grow tails, according to a new study that was posted online last week... Darwin shocked his Victorian audiences by claiming that we descended from primates with tails..... 'This question — where’s my tail? — has been in my head since I was a kid,' said Bo Xia, a graduate student in stem cell biology at N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine. A bad Uber ride in 2019, in which Mr. Xia injured his coccyx, brought it back to his mind with fresh urgency. 'It took me a year to recover, and that really stimulated me to think about the tailbone,' he said.... [H]e compared the DNA of six species of tail-less apes to nine species of tailed monkeys. Eventually, he discovered a mutation shared by apes and humans — but missing in monkeys — in a gene called TBXT.... The mutation that Mr. Xia discovered had not been observed before. It consisted of 300 genetic letters in the middle of the TBXT gene.... Even if geneticists are beginning to explain how our tail disappeared, the question of why still baffles scientists. The first apes were bigger than monkeys, and their increased size would have made it easier for them to fall off branches... It’s hard to explain why apes without tails to help them balance wouldn’t have suffered a significant evolutionary disadvantage.... 'That’s the next outstanding question: What on earth would the advantage be?'"

From "How Humans Lost Their Tails/A new study suggests that a single genetic mutation helps explain why monkeys have tails, while apes and people do not" (NYT).

ADDED: I continued reading the article blogged in the previous post and I ran into this, which I want to put here:

I thought, early on, I would’ve loved to have been a singer. But I realized that, at a certain point, the audience makes a pact. I remember this guy, his name was George Kirby, I saw him on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” He did the greatest impersonations of everybody. And one week, on “Ed Sullivan,” he just was going legit. He was just going to sincerely sing. And I’m going, “Is there a sandbag that drops on him at one point? You’re breaking your contract with us.” Lorne Michaels has this thing where he says, “You go to the zoo and you see the monkeys and they have a right to be reflective, but if they’re not swinging by their tails and jumping around, we go, ‘I’ll come back later.’ Marty, you’re one of the monkeys.”

"During the fight—which Short notes was about nothing at all, as most relationship squabbles are—Nancy did something unexpected."

"She asked to speak with Ed [Grimley] rather than with Martin. Short immediately transformed into his alter ego. When Nancy asked 'Ed' what her boyfriend’s problem was, he suggested that Martin was 'jealous of your beauty and wisdom and saddened by his own tragic limitations.' He then added, 'Although his endowment has certainly been blessed by the Lord.' Nancy thanked Ed and told him to go away. Argument over."

Description of a fight that took place in 1977, found in "Martin Short Plays Bit by Bit/The seventy-one-year-old comedian on his early ambitions to be a singer, his circle of funny people, and the wisdom he’s gleaned from the likes of Joni Mitchell and Neil Simon" (The New Yorker).

ADDED: Something I learned reading that interview: This is the first appearance of Ed Grimley:

"Is a snake the Devil?"

"I always thought of my career that you could reflect on it through the decades by who comes up to you and says what. If it’s a 40-year-old woman, she’s gonna talk about Father of the Bride."

"If it’s a 40-year-old guy, he’s gonna talk about Three Amigos. If it’s a 55-year-old guy, he might talk about Ed Grimley. But definitely, if it was a 29-year-old stoner, he would mention Clifford. Because he’d seen it 18 times in a row high in his dorm room. I use the word 'stoner,' and it probably is not fair. I don’t think that you had to be stoned in your dorm to like Clifford, but I do think it’s like what Conan O’Brien once said about       — that it was on from 12:30 until 2, and he and his brothers thought they were the only people in the world that had discovered it and that it was for them. And I think when a film is obscure enough, you feel it’s now yours. Your parents don’t know this film, but you do. So it’s your film. And then you get into the pace of it and the oddness of it. Especially if you’re high. And it becomes more like it’s talking to you."

Said Martin Short, in a truly amazing, very long dialogue in New York Magazine, "'Look at Me Like a Human Boy! An oral history of Clifford, the 1994 cult comedy about a deranged little boy played by Martin Short." 

Maybe you can't read it, because maybe you need a subscription to New York Magazine, and you don't have one, but I have one, and I'm telling you this one piece is worth the price of an annual subscription. 

Here's one scene from the movie, with Short and Charles Grodin:

Donald Trump's "Saturday Night Live" stint.

1. This was the best part:



That's very funny even without knowing the original video that it spoofs, but you can watch that here. Spoofing that isn't original. It's already much spoofed.

2. For the commenter who asked at 11:05 PM last night, "Why aren't you live blogging SNL?" You have no idea how early I go to bed! I was up at 5, however, and I watched the DVR of the show over breakfast.

3. We loved seeing Ed Grimley! Too bad they had to put "Ed Grimley" in big letters on screen... presumably to help the kids out there whom they must have imagined all saying "Who's that guy?" Here at Meadhouse, Ed Grimley is imitated approximately every other day.

4. Trump did a nice job. He wasn't just a good sport about getting flanked by 2 Trump impersonators in the opening monologue. He seemed to enjoy it. And he accepted Larry David yelling "You're a racist!" at him. Laughing at the idea of being considered a racist. That's edgy. [ADDED: "A Hispanic advocacy group had offered anyone in the SNL audience a $5,000 reward if they called Trump a 'racist' during his opening monologue."]

5. I skipped over the musical act, but Sia stole my 1965 hairstyle.

6. Lots more Larry David in the cold open. David owns the Bernie Sanders impersonation. I wonder if that was the first time the line "It's Saturday Night!" was skipped. Cranky old Larry/Bernie says "Live from New York, eh, you get it."

7. Late in the show there's a fake ad for Donald Trump done by aging porn actresses. The punch line is Donald Trump walking on and saying "I'm Donald Trump and I in no way, shape, or form approve of this message," but the most interesting thing is the shot at Bill Clinton that comes at about 3:00. One of the messed-up ladies dreams of getting to visit the White House: "I haven't been there since the 90s," and the other says, "Oh, yeah, I hit my head on the desk." For a show that's seemed so in-the-tank for Hillary, that's some serious balance.

"He did not commit suicide because of the show. The show didn’t help. It was mean. He felt bullied."

"It was mean-spirited picking at the way he looked for no reason at all. But he suffered from depression before that."

Dr. Fredric Brandt apparently recognized himself in Dr. Grant [pronounced "Franff"], a fictional character [played by Martin Short] on the popular Netflix TV comedy show “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” And the parody helped drive him to despair.

On Sunday morning, Brandt hanged himself in his Miami mansion. The pioneering dermatologist, who kept celebrities like Madonna looking forever young, was 65.

"Did the show upset him? Yes. It was a mean characterization. He was a human being, no one would like that. It was making fun of him for the way he looked and it was mean and it was bullying."

Here's what Martin Short was doing. Is this "mean" and "bullying"?



How will this incident affect Short? Here's an article from last November showing his sensitivity about the death of his wife. She died of ovarian cancer in 2010, and he says "I’m still very much married to Nancy."

"In our thirty-six years together we became so intimately familiar with the workings of each other’s minds that I can convincingly play out the conversations we would be having today, about things that postdate Nancy’s death, -- the continued adventures of our three kids, the arrival of HRH Prince George of Cambridge, the Chris Christie ‘Bridgegate’ scandal, and such curiosities as twerking, Ted Cruz....

"Nancy has only slipped away into the next room. So some night, when I’m really missing her, I’ll grab a rum and Coke at twilight and sit on the couch on our front porch, or perhaps upstairs, on the balcony off of our bedroom, with the Pacific Ocean in view. I’ll call out, 'Hey, Nan!' Forming the words just feels good in the throat."

Or he does something they always did in the car when Nancy would say "Hand of a hand," which was a cue for Martin to put his right hand in her left. "Kiss the hand," he’d say and she would lift it to her lips and kiss it. "I still offer my hand to Nancy – it’s how I initiate our conversations."

ADDED: A plastic surgeon to the stars is a perfect target for mockery, whether he has the character to take a joke or not. The bullying and meanness that is occurring here is toward Martin Short. And as CJinPA said in the comments, there's a big difference between mocking someone for their "natural looks" and mocking them for "looks resulting from deliberate facial manipulation prompted by income-producing vanity." The former is mean, the latter is telling the truth:

[P]eople like Brandt profited from cultural messaging that produce needless insecurities in regular people. His profit motives, like his clients' faces, are grotesque.

Martin Short devastates a doctor.

"Cosmetic dermatologist Fredric Brandt - who was recently rumored to be the inspiration behind a character on the Netflix show Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt — died on Sunday, aged 65...."

The Dr Franff character is depicted on the Netflix show with a high-pitched laugh and unable to speak certain words due to his plastic surgery. He is also seen drinking from a surgical bag and reinflates his own face after being punched.

Dancing with the Devil... for Christmas...

... in simpler times:



"I'm not completely convinced that your intentions are honorable."

The origins of Ed Grimley.

From a Vanity Fair article about Martin Short:

Grimley grew out of an existing Second City sketch called “Sexist,” in which a male employer interviewed two candidates for a job, one an accomplished, over-achieving young woman played by the future SCTV star Catherine O’Hara, the other a flagrantly stupid man—“the joke being,” Short said, “that the guy who’s hiring says, ‘You’re both so good, I can’t make up my mind!’ ”

Click "read more" for the part that made me laugh out loud.

"Sit Down Comedy."

That's a new talk show, on TV Land, with David Steinberg:

Mr. Steinberg was a director of the early-80's sitcom "Newhart." And, he recalled, one of the highlights of working on that set was the chance to eat lunch with Mr. Newhart and other funny people - including Mr. Newhart's friend and fellow comedian Don Rickles, who would often drop by - and to sit back and listen to them talk, joke and reminisce about life in the comedy business.

"That was almost my childhood ideal of what show business would be, those lunches," Mr. Steinberg said in a telephone interview from his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. "That kind of experience is so memorable, and so rare."

Nice idea. I'll set the TiVo.

"Casual" is the watchword for the series itself. In contrast to "Inside the Actors Studio" and its scholarly, well-prepared host, "Sit Down Comedy With David Steinberg" is concerned less with serious analysis than with giving Mr. Steinberg and fellow comedians - some, like Mr. Newhart and Martin Short, old friends; others, like George Lopez and Jon Lovitz, performers he admired but did not know personally - the chance to riff off of each other.

"I'm not interested in the craft of comedy," Mr. Steinberg said. "I don't think that's interesting to an audience. I just wanted to show the audience how funny these people can be."

Mike Myers is the first guest, tonight. Larry David is the second guest, next week. What more do you need to know? This is perfect!

The trouble with making fun of punditry.

A negative view of "The Colbert Report" in The New Republic (free link!):

"The Colbert Report" dragged through long laughless parts. Why? For two reasons: First, the people Colbert is ridiculing are already widely viewed as cartoonish; and second, he has chosen parody, rather than mockery, as the vehicle for making his point....

During his interview with [Stone] Phillips, Colbert complimented his guest's neck, boasted about his own Emmy and Peabody awards, and debated the merits of different tie knots. Basically he teased him. This kind of light banter is key to [Jon] Stewart's interviewing technique, but it's usually inlaid with more sincere questions. The balance of funny and anodyne keeps the report buoyant. But in his parodic mode, Colbert couldn't retreat into normal conversation. And his frantic humor seemed to discomfit Phillips, the audience, and the cameraman (the interview was a series of awkward angles and cuts).

Phillips's uncomfortable turn as a guest raises a question about "The Colbert Report": Is it lampooning newscasters, or is it promoting their senses of humor? Up until the interview segment, the show seemed like a straight-up O'Reilly spoof. But O'Reilly doesn't interview fellow cable newsmen; he talks to officials, congressmen, scandal-ridden citizens. He does so with an inane ferocity, while Colbert interrogated Phillips with a prankish, but gentle, buffoonery. So "The Colbert Report" has a split personality--on the one hand, making fun of punditry; on the other, winking along with it. The scheduling of future guests such as Lesley Stahl indicates that this schism will persist.

It is hard to do the comic character while interacting with real guests. Martin Short was able to do it as Jiminy Glick, but most of his guests were comedians, who had some ability to play along with the game. (Jerry Seinfeld was truly sublime as a guest on that show!) So far, Colbert has had only newsfolk on, and they are so preening about their images and not much good in the acting department.

Okay, enough blogging about body parts and related spiritual topics for the day. It's time to watch TV. I've chosen the extra Monday edition of "American Idol" and "The Dennis Miller Show." I think Dennis Miller has been figuring out how to do his show. It was nice to see the chimpanzee return to the show on Friday. But you can't predict how good Miller's show will be based on the Friday example, because Friday had Martin Short who was just absolutely perfect as a guest. Oh, maybe the two of them could become co-hosts, as sort of "Hannity and Colmes," but funny. That would be wonderful.