FRIDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2025
Madness(es), Red and Blue: The ghosts and the goblins were out last night, perhaps one night in advance.
Over on the Fox News Channel, the nightly burlesque at 10 p.m. featured this ridiculous cast:
Unnamed "cable news" show, 10/30/25
Hotep Jesus: "Known for his fringe conspiracy theories"
Kat Timpf: comedian
Greg Gutfeld: host
Charles Payne: host, Making Money with Charles Payne
Emily Compagno: co-host, Outnumbered
The CEO known as "Sends in The Clowns" casts this assault every night. It's a modern form of a type of baggy-pants burlesque.
That said, with Halloween and the World Series here, we're thinking today of Bud and Lou, but also of David Kruh.
In his fascinating book, Always Something Doing: Boston's Infamous Scollay Square, Kruh records a patron's recollection of an entertainment event which took place during the Red Sox-Cardinals series of 1946.
Was that our own father in that patron's story, cast as the manager? Our father would have been the owner by then, but we can't say for sure:
Always Something Doing
[...]
Going to the Old Howard was always something of a thrill for its patrons, who sometimes saw more than they expected.
It was right after World War II and the Red Sox had been in the World Series and a friend of mine and I went to the Old Howard. Right in the middle of the show, when the comedian is doing his thing, this fat guy came out of one side of the stage chasing this gorgeous-looking girl. Who was it but Costello of Abbott and Costello!
They stopped the show, and the manager came out and introduced them and they reminisced how they had started in burlesque and played the Howard at some point. They were in Boston for the World Series and they decided to come back to their former starting place. They stopped the show and they did "Who's On First."
(Henry)
Good God! Even as the Series was taking place, the boys appeared, out of nowhere, and they did "Who's On First!"
For the modern sensibility, the premise of that famous bit doesn't even seem to make sense—but, for whatever reason, it's a sacred part of American entertainment history. For reasons we can't begin to explain, we still can't read that brief account without being deeply moved, in a way we can't explain.
Also, we know what happened in the hall when the manager, whoever he was, brought the boys out that night.
Full disclosure: As of 1946, Bud and Lou were among Hollywood's biggest box office stars. Accurately or otherwise, the leading authority starts us off with this:
Abbott and Costello
Abbott and Costello were an American comedy duo composed of comedians Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, whose work in radio, film, and television made them the most popular comedy team of the 1940s and 1950s, and the highest-paid entertainers in the world during the Second World War. Their patter routine "Who's on First?" is considered one of the most famous comedy routines of all time...
[...]
According to Quigley Publishing's Poll of Exhibitors (1932-2009+), who published The Motion Picture Almanac, Motion Picture Herald, and Motion Picture Daily, for a number of years Abbott and Costello were ranked among the most popular stars in the US.
According to Quigley, the boys were #1 in Hollywood box office as of 1942. They were #3 in 1941 and n 1943. Something else is surprisingly true:
Lou Costello was flat-out, stone-cold funny. Many major comedians aren't, but as we learned some years ago, Costello mysteriously was.
Costello was flat-out funny! We discovered that fact, maybe ten years ago, as we watched the boys doing a "down in the basement of a haunted house" scene in one of their many movies.
By now, everyone has seen some version of that scene performed a million times. Abbott keeps saying, "Let's get out of here" as a succession of scary noises emerge. Relentlessly, Costello keeps saying, "Let's just go a bit further."
By now, everyone has seen this scene performed a thousand times. But good grief! When Costello did it—it may have been the very first time some such scene was ever performed—every step he took was just flat-out funny.
At any rate, there they were that night, on stage at Boston's Old Howard, and they were very famous. Audiences are stunned when something like that occurs. We know that because of the time we ourselves brought Rosie up, right there at the D.C. Improv, probably in the late 1990s.
Rosie was in town with a show on its way to Broadway. She had called over and asked if she could do some time on stage that Sunday night.
We were the closing act in the show that week. Rosie was at the height of the enormous popularity she had earned at that point in time.
When the regular show was over, we went ahead and brought her up. Right there, in that small room and on that small stage, a very famous, hugely popular person was suddenly standing before that evening's thunderstruck audience.
People think they've died and gone to heaven when some such surprise occurs. After listening to Rosie's recent podcast with Nicolle Wallace, we feel honored by the three brief encounters we had with her down through the various years.
In that podcast, she had us when she said "Anne Frank," but there's much, much more to hear. Have we ever heard such a clear, clean voice?
We can't say we have.
Rosie is one of the people the clowns like to mock, in the most vulgar and stupidest ways, on that Fox News Channel TV program. Bud and Lou came out of vaudeville and burlesque, but that "cable news" show comes out of a garbage can. and it's a pathetic burlesque of human behavior all its own.
It's a madness out of Silo Red that garbage like that is on the air each night. It's a madness out of our own Silo Blue that this garbage can gets opened each night and no one within our own failing nation is willing to say a word.
Bud and Lou came back to the Old Howard as the World Series went on. (The Cardinals won in seven.) Was that our father who brought them up? We have no idea.
A decade later, we would watch their Saturday morning kids TV show and think how dumb they were. No one told us about the family connection—about the photos from 1941, with Bud and Lou cavorting with our mother and father and with two of our older half-siblings somewhere.
Lou Costello was flat-out funny. Many comedians aren't. It isn't even required. Occasionally it turns up.
Tonight, the ghosts and goblins are out. Last evening, at 10 p.m., so were the corporate clowns.
Just about a week ago, we saw a Democratic strategist offer some good sound advice. We refer to the Lady Smith, who had spoken with Jen Psaki with Tommy Christopher looking on:
‘People’s Heads May Explode!’ Jen Psaki And Lis Smith Drop ‘Hard Truths’ on Key Trump Appeal
MSNBC’s Jen Psaki and Democratic strategist Lis Smith dropped some “hard truths” about the way Democrats should deal with a key strength of President Donald Trump’s—his political exploitation of immigration.
Psaki—a former Biden White House press secretary and current host of MSNBC’s The Briefing with Jen Psaki—launched a podcast called The Blueprint with Jen Psaki this year, focused on Democratic strategy and lessons learned.
On this week’s episode, the two veteran politicos conceded that Trump was “right” about the importance of securing the border, and discussed how Democrats can translate that acknowledgment into effective strategy.
Say what? President Trump had been right about something? In fact, Smith was quoting a column by Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY). Writing in the New York Times, Rep. Suozzi had offered this:
“Democrats must concede that Donald Trump was right about the importance of securing the border. And he was right about the need to deport violent criminals who are in this country illegally.”.
Sadly, it seems to us that Suozzi is basically right, even though it may be hard to offer belated concessions to a fairly obvious political truth.
We've often said that the corporate clowns on the Fox News Channel can never be totally wrong. That's because they can always fall back on certain kinds of Blue American madness after they've finished with their ugly and inane lines of night assault.
Shortly after Christopher's report appeared, Benjamin Hart interviewed Smith for New York magazine. He'd seen the podcast with Psaki too. Headline included, here's part of where things went:
Lis Smith Thinks Democrats Treat Voters Like Children
[...]
I was watching an interview you did with Jen Psaki in which you reminisced about working on Obama’s reelection bid in 2012, when the campaign painted Romney as this corporate villain early in defining him and how effective that was. That reminded me of Mamdani a bit—not so much defining his opponents that way but the relentless focus on the economy and affordability. With all this talk about the future direction of the party, do you think that is the most surefire way forward for Democrats right now?
Yes. And the biggest mistake we made in 2024 was not leading every single conversation by talking about the economy. When people feel like they are one accident, one incident, one layoff away from financial collapse, they do not want to hear us starting conversations by saying, “The most existential issue you should care about is democracy.” Or abortion rights. Those are very important issues, don’t get me wrong. But we were not listening to voters, and we were not meeting them where they were.
I think this is part of a trend among Democrats in recent years, where we stopped treating voters like adults. When they would say, “Prices are killing me,” we would say, “Actually, inflation is higher in Sweden.” When they would say, “Crime is out of control,” we’d respond, “Actually, it’s lower than it was 40 years ago.” And when they said, “Hey, shouldn’t we maybe do something about the border?” we said, “Turn off Fox News. That’s a right-wing talking point.”
Voters noticed that. They thought we weren’t listening to them. And that is why they were willing to go vote for someone like Donald Trump. Say what you will about him—he at least was speaking a language of grievance, talking about taking on the status quo that was driving a lot of these problems. And to a lot of people, that was more appealing than people who were talking down to them or not even listening to them.
Extremely sad but true! In that exchange, Smith captures the kind of group dissembling in which we Blues engaged during the campaign—a campaign we managed to (narrowly) lose to an unpopular figure like President Trump. She captures the phony bits of misdirection we would routinely voice in a type of pseudo-response to certain kinds of accusations and complaints.
In many ways, those lame presentations were political malpractice of the Blue American kind. We refer to the repeated, ludicrous claim that the border was shut uptight as a drum, but to other groaners as well, including some of the implausible political stances which were amazingly easy to ridicule as "woke."
It's hard to cop to such sweeping mistakes, but we Blues have yet to explain the things that were done—-and it's those refusals to be forthright on which the Fox News Channel relies.
We still want to tell you about the Michelle Goldberg column—about a point we think she got wrong, about a point we think she got right. Having said that, let's return to this:
This is a very special night, with ghosts and goblins flying about, and with the World Series on. It was years later when we first saw those photographs, of Bud and Lou with our own mother and father, and when we read about that manager bringing the boys on out.
We've wanted to get back to the podcast Nicolle Wallace staged with Rosie O'Donnell. Have we ever heard a clearer voice?
We don't even agree, in basic ways, with where Rosie seems to have come down with respect to President Trump. But we don't think we've ever heard a clearer, cleaner voice.
The Fox News Channel runs a series of burlesques. Those ludicrous "cable news" shows are a form of Madness Red.
The fact that we Blues refuse to report and discuss those imitations of life is a form of Madness Blue. Also this:
We Blues badly need to get over ourselves. It's a point we'll stress when we discuss the point where we think Goldberg probably made a mistake.
People long for something better. When a star they admire is suddenly present, up on a stage with bright lights on, an audience feels that something bigger and better is suddenly present.
Voters long for something better, for something straightforward and true.
Forgive us for wandering a bit far afield today. We didn't want to forget Rosie's podcast, and this is a very spooky night, with the goblins and the ghosts known to be all around.
