Alexander Proves No Script Is Worse Than Lame Script
Some people should not ad lib. Nuclear engineers. Pharmacists. Jason Alexander.
A star of stage, screen and television, Alexander is a terrific actor. He’s a wonderful singer. He dances beautifully. When he does these things, everyone is suitably impressed.
But when Alexander, Cybill Shepherd’s Emmy Awards co-host, tried to vamp Sunday night on Fox, all he did was prove that there indeed can be something worse than those lamely scripted bits that are an unfortunate staple of televised awards shows.
Working with material off the top of his head, Alexander had even less material than on the top of his head. He wasn’t the worst thing about the lackluster Emmy telecast, just the most disappointing.
It is nothing short of a travesty that the Emmy people hung him out to dry. Alexander, after all, is a veritable god to pudgy, hard-luck, balding guys everywhere as George Costanza on “Seinfeld.” But the brain trust behind this year’s Emmy show instead trotted out the mere mortal who hawks pretzels on the side.
Twice Alexander claimed that his prepared jokes would surely bomb - although the script actually said, “Jason ad libs” - and then he went out and bombed on his own.
About the funniest thing he did during those agonizing unscripted moments, which were generally greeted by silence from the assembled back-slappers at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, was his questioning why Barbra Streisand, one of the evening’s big winners, didn’t perform on the telecast. It was funny because it was true.
Alexander deserves some points for trying to liven things up by departing from the banal tradition of having performers read off remarks they would never use on their own shows.
This would be a marginally better world if they just handed out the statues, let the winners weep and wrapped up in about 45 minutes.
But as the best ad libbers will tell you, it never hurts to have some prepared material on which to fall back. Even Jay Leno doesn’t just go out and wing it.
As Jack Benny once said when insulted on the radio by Fred Allen, “You wouldn’t have said that if my writers were here!” And Benny’s writers probably wrote that.
You would think the television industry at least would know how to put on a television show.
It apparently doesn’t even know how to stage a decent food fight, if the time-killing skit with Shepherd in the Governors Ball kitchen was any indication.
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Phil Rosenthal Los Angeles Daily News