Silence of the Ham

(An epitaphany shared with Joe)

Or
Doomed DeLuise

Or
All Doms Go to Heaven
(Tip o’ the cap to Joe)

Or
Pizza Sent Out for Him
(Another accolade for Joe)
Dom Deluise, best remembered for opening the 1987 Oscars performing Fugue for the Tinhorns with Telly Savalas and Pat Morita, has died at the age of 75, I’m guessing not from choking on cauliflower. The Paul Prudhomme impersonator will be buried in a Ziploc bag to keep him fresh forever. I have it on good authority that he was the only one worth watching in the Mae West-Timothy Dalton-Regis Philbin-Tony Curtis-George Hamilton-Ringo Starr opus Sextette. The manic load had a big fan in Mel Brooks, who cast him as the larcenous priest in The Twelve Chairs, the mincing director at the Python-esque conclusion of Blazing Saddles, director’s assistant Dom Bell in Silent Movie, Emporer Nero in History of the World – Part I, Pizza the Hutt in Spaceballs, Godfather-like Don Giovanni in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and whose wife Anne Bancroft starred him as Fatso in her lone directorial attempt. He also served as Burt Reyolds’ good luck charm, doing double duty as Victor Prinzim and his alter ego Captain Chaos in the Cannonball Run franchise, and appearing in The End, Smokey and the Bandit II and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. The rest of us were pretty content watching movies he had nothing to do with, and after his career dried up with dreck like porno king Harry “the Hippo” Gutterman in Loose Cannons and Animal Cannibal Pizza in The Silence of the Hams, he turned to a line of cookbooks. Write what you know, they always say.

A fat lot of good that did Fred, who scores his first career hit, a solo job that puts his Death Row squad into the dogpile at 13th.