Steve Allen, comedian, is worried about the growing duh factor in America. You’re familiar with the duh factor. It’s like, um, the, uh, shrinkage of, you know, our, uh, basic ability to, like, um, think? Uh, critically? You know, about, uh . . . things.
That’s why the well-known entertainer agreed last August to become chairman of a watchdog group called the Council for Media Integrity, whose goals are to rebut (primarily) television programs that revel in scientific myths. Council members include such illustrious scientists as Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, and
Nobel laureate chemist Glenn Seaborg. Allen’s role is to use his celebrity prominence to speak out against phony science shows. Things like a quasi documentary about the search for Noah’s ark that’s been shown on cbs. And Chariots of the Gods, which appeared on abc and claimed that the pyramids were built by aliens. And another program, called The Mysterious Origins of Man, shown twice last year on nbc. It examined some fossilized human and dinosaur footprints and implied that early Homo and the big beasts might have lived at the same time. Hello, Barney. Hiya, Fred.
Why should we care what a comic thinks? Because describing Allen as a comedian is like describing Leonardo da Vinci as a painter. Like Leonardo, Allen is a Renaissance man. Besides being a comedian, he is an author, actor, playwright, composer (some 6,000 songs), singer, pianist, M.C.--in short, the utility infielder of the entertainment world--not to mention social critic, aforementioned pro-science spokesman, and, for all I know, part-time body-and-fender man. For the record, Allen invented The Tonight Show--and the whole talk-show format--in 1954. His whopping 48 books cover the kinds of topics you’d expect from an entertainer but also include such varied subjects as cults, corruption in America, an explanation of China, smokers’ rights, and the Bible and religion. In addition, he’s written a number of mystery novels, among them The Talk Show Murders.
Indeed, in a world that lacks critical thought, Allen seems to be trying single-handedly to make up for the rest of us. In an interview from the 1980s, for example, on the art of ad-libbing, he analyzed a joke tossed off one evening at home. It concerned his son, then six, who couldn’t reach his bathrobe and called to his father for help. Allen, busy on the phone, told him to get it himself. The boy replied he couldn’t--the robe was up on a hook, out of reach. To which Allen replied, Then go stand in a corner and grow.
