"Some of us here, particularly me, would like to buy you a drink and shake your hand."

Gratuitous cute kitty pic of Tiny atop the woodpile to celebrate the return -- after 18 long days -- of our Pentax Optio 450 from its annual trip back upstream to Colorado for repair. The satiny blue folds are highlights of an ordinary black plastic tarp caught in the low-lying rays of an early-autumn sun.

"He just keeps me laughing all the time. See?" laughs Myrna Sokoloff in an exclusive Pajamas Media podcast interview with Roger L. Simon featuring Sokoloff  and David Zucker, co-producers of what we referred to in our previous post as "the blockbuster that dare not speak its name." They talk about the unorthodox marketing of the political ad in question, their own post-911 conversions and how, in Zucker's words, "sometimes humor is the best way to tell the truth." A few excerpts:

David Zucker: You just don’t notice the change. It’s kind of like the traffic in LA. I don’t think it’s any worse than it was when I got here in 1972 but it’s horrible. And you just don’t notice the change if it’s gradual. And I think the Democratic party has really, really changed. And I just can’t support it anymore.

Myrna Sokoloff: But I hardly know anybody in my circle that’s changed. I’m the only one. I had to find other people to talk to, you know, about politics. And that’s why I joined a Republican Jewish coalition.

DZ: Also, Myrna, people didn’t talk to you because of your shoplifting conviction. I mean, let’s be truthful.

You can see why he keeps her -- and Zucker cultists like ourselves and Mark Steyn among others -- in stitches. About the RNC's decision to market the ad via a well-timed leak to the Drudge Report rather than prime-time TV:

DZ:  These are just how things are done today, Roger . . . You probably didn’t know that . . . I’m teaching a remedial internet course on Thursday nights that you’re welcome to attend. That’s right. I know this is all new to you . . . And actually, you know, it’s had a huge response on YouTube . . . And I think we did have in the back of our minds that this could be released on the internet.

There's a transcript of the PJM interview -- a godsend for bloggers like ourselves who want to cut and paste -- but we recommend listening for yourself for the pleasure of the laughter that plays among the words, illuminating the great humorist's thinking. A final snippet:

Roger Simon: Well, I mean, it may be, and I’m sure this has occurred to you guys, that this thing gets more play by being not used than it gets by being used . . .

DZ: Right. I mean, it always happens that way. You cannot cover things up. The more you make something exclusive the more people want to see it.

RS: I mean, would anybody have heard of Henry Miller if he hadn’t been banned back in the 1930s?

"Reportedly the YouTube Web site made viewers confirm they were 18 years old to see this. That certainly didn't happen with 'Death of a President,' a film in which President Bush is assassinated. Why slap a warning label on this one?" John Gibson asked Zucker in a Fox News interview last night, inviting the producer/director to comment on that controversial movie in which President Bush is depicted as being assassinated. [Note: YouTube's apparent  censorship of Zucker's ad was brief and -- unlike their outright rejection of Michelle Malkin's work recently -- appears to have been a result of outside mischief quickly corrected when YouTubers had a chance to review Zucker's video.] Re "Death of a President":

'I'm very offended when entertainers go to foreign countries and start bad mouthing a sitting president . . .

Although, you know, people say, who am I to ever comment on this but I think that's in poor taste. I mean, I'm the guy who had Peter Graves telling a kid, "Have you ever seen a grown man naked?" But there's good bad taste and there's truly bad taste.

And when you are talking about a sitting president depicting it in that way and it's not meant in fun or as a satire or in any way to be light-hearted, I think that is bad.

As Capt. Kramer said to Ted Striker in "Airplane!" "Some of us here, particularly me, would like to buy you a drink and shake your hand."

Update: Friday Ark #108 at Modulator now boarding.

Comments

[goomp]

It is good to see awareness of the real world slowly penetrating the world of celebrities and that some of them have a sense of what is improper political slander.

[Tara]

Google leans left and with their buying You Tube I get the feeling that the internet is going to suffer a lot more suppression of ideas and creativity liberals don't like.For all their screaming about oppression of thought and suppression of dissent, they are the ones censoring things.

[Gayle Miller]

I was still living in California when the movie "Airplane" was in previews. A friend had screening tickets for it and off we went. I don't know that I have ever laughed harder than I did that evening - and I was scarce alone! You could barely hear the dialogue, so persistent and noisey was the hilarity in the screening room. I still keep a VHS copy of that film in my collection for days when I have just had enough of reality and it still brings me to uproarious laughter. Zucker is a genius. I really do want to see the whole commercial, so hotly debated.

The best way to defeat a would-be autocratic tyrant is with laughter. It may be a slower process but it is no less sure.

[Teresa]

Age verification is so amusing. How in the world can they "verify" you're over 18 without actually seeing you in person? Since there is no possible way, anyone who is deterred didn't want to see it in the first place.

As for Google. They support internet censorship. They support stacked search engines. They support so many anti-American positions it's amazing. And they have the position to do this because they are in America. Can we say hypocrites?