People: Springsteen, Jon Stewart among guests at veterans benefit concert

Military service members were the guests of honor at the 9th annual Stand Up for Heroes benefit concert. The jokes, told by Jon Stewart and Seth Meyers among others, covered marriage, Las Vegas, sports, and, inevitably, Donald Trump.

Held Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden, Stand Up for Heroes was co-presented by the Bob Woodruff Foundation and the New York Comedy Festival. It raises money for the Woodruff foundation, which funds programs for injured veterans and their families. The foundation is named for the ABC news anchor injured in Iraq in 2006.

With members of the Army, Navy and Marines occupying the front rows, the comedians seemed to go out of their way to cast themselves as incapable of winning at arm wrestling, much less fighting in a war.

Stewart and Ray Romano each had grown beards. Each joked about getting old.

“Here’s what life has taught me, now that I’m in my 50s,” said the 57-year-old Romano. “I will make the time to be your friend – if you’re a doctor.”

Meyers also was the butt of his own jokes. As a husband, he said, he was too clueless to help plan his own wedding or to realize his wife-to-be had food poisoning. He also remembered being foolish – and drunk enough – to pick a fight with a stronger man at a Las Vegas night club.

“I had reached an age in my life where I thought I was no longer going to be punched,” he said. “Because of that there was no contingency plan in my brain as to what we were going to do if we got punched.”

Bruce Springsteen played four songs, all acoustic, including three from his “Born in the U.S.A.” album: “Darlington County,” “Working on the Highway” and the hit single “Dancing in the Dark,” which had the crowd clapping and singing along.

He also brought in a windfall for the foundation. Continuing a tradition at the Stand Up for Heroes shows, he auctioned off some personal items. Tuesday night’s grab bag was a pair of autographed guitars, plus concert tickets and his mother’s lasagna. The two winning bids totaled $740,000, topping last year’s take of $300,000.

Bill Nye writes book on climate change

Bill Nye is discussing his new book on climate change from an apt location: behind the wheel of a Tesla.

While electrically navigating the streets of New York City, Nye offers a supercharged warning about the dangers ahead if the problem isn’t tackled, and now.

Science has conclusively demonstrated a link between human activity and an overheated Earth, he says, dismissing the counter-arguments of doubters and deniers as “weird.”

And it’s with scientific innovation that we can rescue our home planet and ourselves, says Nye, who offers a detailed and chatty how-to in “Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World,” out this week from St. Martin’s Press.

“Unstoppable,” which opens with a stern warning that climate change “is coming right at you,” moves quickly to his advice to stop worrying – “or at least to move past it” – and get busy.

Nye has his work cut out for him: An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll in October found two out of three Americans accept global warming, with the vast majority of those citing human activities as at least part of the cause. But fewer than one in four Americans are extremely or very worried about it.

The bow-tie bedecked engineer gained fame on the 1990s TV series “Bill Nye, the Science Guy.”