Agent Palmer

My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman is simply brilliant. If you have Netflix, it has likely been suggested to you as a touted original series, but if you are a fan of people in general – not just celebrity or long form conversation, comedy, or anything, just people – then this show is built for you.

He definitely hand selected the cream of the crop for guests, but these celebrities and personalities are people, and David Letterman gets everything out of them.

They’re back with a new season or series (depending on who you ask) on Amazon Prime. Along with their long-overdue revival comes The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks, a two-part documentary about their decades-long journey from origins to success, failure, and everything else in between.

I have yet to watch the new material, and I will, but a few months ago, I started rewatching the old stuff.

Today, the average content creator is likely to get “canceled” by either the right or the left because what they said was ideologically different.

But decades ago, the Smothers Brothers were removed from the airwaves because they were ideologically ahead of their time, and perhaps because they were trying to ruffle a few feathers along the way.

The point is, Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” by David Bianculli is more than a walk through a different time.

While the Olympics have been a bit hit or miss for me, less of it has to do with the network and more of it has to do with time zones, I have caught some of it, and of course, the USA’s win in the Gold Cup has continued the summer of soccer, but sports is not the only thing I have been consuming this summer.

I have been watching and listening to other things as well, plus my regular podcast habit (with a few new ones I’ll be mentioning), and my reading, means that there is literally always something to consume.

I’ll admit it. I only know Lee Mack from YouTube. At first, he was a guest on some panel shows I was watching before I went into a deeper dive of panel shows and enjoyed him on Would I Lie To You?

That show plus all the guest appearances is one of the reasons I picked up David Mitchell’s Back Story: A Memoir, and it was also enough of a reason to pick up the other team leader’s autobiography; Mack the Life by Lee Mack.