Hopefully, Carcinoma is Also Painless

Or

2017 Enters with a Distinct Lack of Jocularity

(Morose observation courtesy of Mark)

William Christopher, best remembered for picking up George Morgan’s sloppy seconds, has died of small-cell carcinoma at the age of 84. After some time on Broadway in a revue alongside Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Christopher found steady work appearing in sitcoms of the 1960s, including a recurring role on Gomer Pyle, USMC as Private Lester Hummel. In 1972, Larry Gelbart developed a series based on the movie M*A*S*H. Not uncommonly, the pilot showed room for improvement, and he wanted a quirkier actor to play the role of Father Francis Mulcahy to make the secondary character more interesting without extensive exposition. Enter Christopher, who put the improv skills he needed to contend with Cook and Moore to use during his audition, ignoring the script and ad libbing his way through the scene in character. Father Mulcahy boxed; performed a bris and a tracheotomy; destroyed a 4-star general’s gourmet dinner; told jokes, played the piano and wrote war ditties, all badly; provided counter balance for a helicopter transporting a wounded soldier; and occasionally attended to the spiritual needs of the 4077th. Ironically, with crusading liberals Alan Alda and Mike Farrell on set, the priest was one of the least preachy characters in Korea.

William Christopher's Foot Inspection by DrawnTG

Singin’ in the Dirt

Or

Dying in the Pain

Or

Sinkable

Debbie Reynolds, the wholesome ingénue turned dirty grandma, has died at the age of 84 of a stroke, but really a broken heart. Reynolds is best known for roles in Singin’ in the Rain, holding her own with Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor despite only being 19 years old and never having danced professionally, Tammy and the Bachelor, and her Oscar-nominated turn as The Unsinkable Molly Brown in 1964. She also had a starring role as the other woman in one of the first great sex scandals. In 1955, she and her new husband Eddie Fisher were the toast of the nation as one of Hollywood’s ‘It’ Couples, showing up at the best parties, usually with their best friends Mike Todd and Elizabeth Taylor. Todd was killed in a 1958 plane crash, and Reynolds and Fisher rushed to comfort the widow Taylor. Fisher was more comforting and started a very public affair that led to his divorce from Reynolds a year later. Taylor would marry Fisher for 5 years before she did to him with Richard Burton what he had done to Debbie. Reynold’s film career in light, bouncy comedies and musicals continued into the mid-1960s and was the voice of the plucky spider in Charlotte’s Web as her career hit the rocks. She took to the stage, earning a 1973 Tony nomination for the revival of Irene, then she became more famous as Princess Leia’s mother, and Carrie Fisher exposed their fraught relationship in Postcards from the Edge. Reynolds enjoyed a bit of a resurgence in the 1990s, with a Golden Globe nomination as Albert Brooks’ professionally frustrated mother in Mother, as Kevin Kline’s understanding mother in In & Out, and as Grace Adler’s ebullient show-tunes singing mother in Will & Grace, for which she scored an Emmy nomination. She took on the role of chronicler of the Golden Age, amassing a collection of Hollywood costumes and memorabilia that sold for more than $25 million when no museum for it could be established. Reynolds also waited for her contemporaries to die, then dished in a tell-all memoir about getting Cary Grant to tell her daughter to stop doing LSD, and Bob Fosse gone commando and pressing all that jazz against her while teaching her steps on stage, and two young men reaching under Shelley Winters’ dress in the middle of a party to give her a Poseidon Adventure.

Drop Dead Darling

(Props to Kirsti and Don)

Or

Picture Mommy Dead

(Kudos to Kirsti)

Or

Without a Leg to Stand On

Or

Greener Acres

(Acknowledgements to Monty)

Or 

Death of a Scoundrel

Zsa Zsa Gabor, Paris Hilton's ex-step-great-grandmother, the alleged cuckquean (actual word) to Anna Nicole Smith's tryst with Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, and predecessor to both in beav-baring celebrity spuriousness, has died at the age of 99. Gabor came to her uselessness honestly as a former beauty queen – Miss Hungary 1936 – and wannabe actress, with such credits as Lovely to Look At, We’re Not Married and Queen of Outer Space. Her goulash-thick accent and ample cleavage drew many suitors, and she went into the marrying business, collecting 8 ex-husbands, including hotelier Conrad Hilton and actor George Sanders. In another era, she might have been a much sought after courtesan, with her worldly airs, well-managed elegance, undeniable charm and quick wit. In the 20th century, she was a talk show guest, sharing stories – both factual and fictional – and quips with everyone from Milton Berle to Dinah Shore to Merv Griffin to Mike Douglas to Jack Paar to Johnny Carson to Howard Stern to David Frost to Arsenio Hall to Phil Donahue to Pat Sajak to Joan Rivers to David Letterman to Conan O’Brien. Her appearances sustained her famous-for-being-famous appeal, which also ensured guest spots on Bob Hope specials, Dean Martin Roasts, game shows like Hollywood Squares, an appearance as special guest villain Minerva on Batman, and a cameo in the first episode of legendary flop Supertrain. Although she was arrested for slapping a cop in 1989, in truth, her greatest crime was opening the door to the flotsam and jetsam of modern celebrity, the poor souls desperately craving attention who, upon tasting a bit of the limelight, are as hard to remove as dog shit from suede shoes, and about as welcome. Unlike the modern pretenders, Gabor knew to keep her appearances short and amply spaced to leave the audience looking for more witticisms like: “I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man, I keep his house,” or "I believe in large families: Every woman should have at least three husbands."

Out-maneuvered

(Props to Monty)

 

Or

Choked Off

Henry Heimlich, who empowered people to take bigger bites and be less diligent about chewing, has died of a heart attack at the age of 96. A thoracic surgeon and medical inventor, Heimlich developed the procedure in 1974, but it was initially derided as unproven, unsafe and more likely to result in injury than benefit. In the 1970s, choking on food or objects was the 6th leading cause of accidental death in the United States with more than 4,000 fatalities annually, many in children. At the time, the recommended approach to resolving a blockage in the airway was a few solid slaps on the back or a finger down the throat. Heimlich recognized that was actually more likely to wedge the obstruction more solidly, and instead seized on the reserve air in the lungs that could be forced upward by thrusting the diaphragm to expel the object. Knowing the scientific community is full of prissy fussbudgets, Heimlich skipped the journals and went right to the public, sending his article to newspapers around the country. Within a few days of reading about the life-saving bear hug, a man in Washington had performed it to help a neighbor. Heimlich and others demonstrated the technique on TV, further spreading the word, and Heimlich was a celebrity. The AMA came around in 1975 and formally endorsed his approach as the Heimlich maneuver and said it saved thousands of lives a year; in 2009, The New York Times said that it had saved more than 100,000 lives. Less well reported are Heimlich’s surgical technique to reconstruct the damaged or diseased esophagus in patients who had lost the ability to swallow and how he converted a Japanese toy noisemaker to make a device to drain fluid from an open chest wound. Illustrating the fine line between genius and insanity, Heimlich advocated for the widely discredited strategy of malariotherapy, deliberately infecting people with malaria to treat cancer, Lyme disease and HIV. He also promoted the use of his namesake technique to clear water from the lungs of drowning victims, and to treat asthma, cystic fibrosis and even heart attacks, despite extensive evidence that it was at best ineffective and at worst life-threatening. Perhaps his strongest critic was his own son, Peter, who campaigned extensively against his father’s “wide-ranging, 50-year history of fraud.”

Sidelined

Or

Craig and the Amazing Technicolor Death Shroud

(Props to Phil)

Craig Sager, whose outrageous wardrobe served to distract from the utter pointlessness of sideline reporting, has died of leukemia at the age of 65. Since college, Sager sought an up-close view of sports. At Northwestern, he suited up as Willie the Wildcat and taunted Ohio State fans after an upset football win. As a stringer in Atlanta on April 8, 1974, he ran onto the field for an interview after Hank Aaron hit his 715^th HR. He slept in Seattle Slew’s stable the night before the 1977 Belmont Stakes where the thoroughbred won the Triple Crown, saving a pile of shit as a memento. Collecting crap would come to be his stock in trade. After stints with local TV and CNN, Sager joined Turner Sports, where he brought his basketball knowledge and closet full of pastels, neons, paisleys, TV test patterns, plaids and Rorschach tests to highlight pregame and between period interviews with sweaty players telling him they need to play harder and get more open shots and cranky coaches rolling their eyes while being asked why their team wasn’t winning. His rarefied status among the ranks of the useless is typified in an exchange with renowned misanthrope Gregg Popovich: “This is the first time I’ve enjoyed doing this ridiculous interview we’re required to do, and that’s because you’re here and you’re back with us. Now ask me a couple of inane questions.”

Paging Dr. Bombay

Or

Dr. Bombay’s Last Call

(Kudos to Monty)
Bernard Fox, who went down with the Titanic twice, has died at the age of 89. Best remembered as Dr. Bombay, Warlock, MD, attending to the mystical medical needs of Samantha, Endora, Aunt Clara and Uncle Arthur on Bewitched and Col. Crittenden, the inept regular visitor who keeps having to break out of Stalag 17 on Hogan’s Heroes, Fox was the perfect, “Hey, it’s that limey,” on sitcoms throughout the 1960s and ‘70s. Somehow he ended up in Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show, he showed Hawkeye the merits of tough love (and learned the risk of peritonitis from drinking tea in post op) on M*A*S*H, and visited Hazzard County to meet the Duke boys. The best thing about The Mummy series was that it gave Fox a fitting final tally ho as Captain Winston Havlock, World War I vet who manned an abandoned base in Egypt and gave his life to defeat Imhotep. He was in Titanic in 1997 and A Night to Remember in 1958, where he got to announce "Iceberg dead ahead, sir!" With his death, Bernie Kopell, the Apothecary, is the only surviving adult from Bewitched and Robert Clary and Nita Talbot are the only survivors from Hogan’s Heroes. 

Glenn Gray, Glenn Lost

Or

Astro-Not

 Or

Space Ghost

John Glenn, one of the few men brave enough to tease Ted Williams, has died at the age of 95. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Glenn joined the Marines and flew 59 combat missions in the Pacific, earning two Distinguished Flying Crosses, then flew 90 more in the Korean War, where he had Williams as a wingman. On one mission, Williams’ plane was in flames, and Glenn flew alongside, motioning for him to fly higher, where the diminished oxygen extinguished the flames. Glenn took on even more dangerous missions testing supersonic jets, then applied to become one of NASA’s first test pilots. One of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, Glenn took the leap into the unknown and became the first American to orbit the earth. The flight was short, but was seen as a victory in the Cold War for space, making Glenn more valuable as a symbol than as an astronaut, so he was grounded for PR appearances. Spinning around and ending up in basically the same place prepared him for the next phase of his career – the US Senate, where he represented Ohio for 24 years. He eventually got a return flight, boarding the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1998 to become the oldest man in space, apparently to test the effects of weightlessness on old man testicle droop. Perhaps his most impressive achievement coming from an era when astronauts had the sex appeal of rock stars and the morals to match, Glenn stayed married to Annie, his high school sweetheart, for 73 years.