Arts Funny Old Men
Before we jump back into the land of Danish cartoonists (new slogan the tourism industry never thought it’d see: “The Danes—They’re a Riot!”), here’s a funny:
Last night, I read Kennth Tynan’s 1978 profile of Johnny Carson, which is pretty good, but not as good as Hilton Als’s 1999 profile of Richard Pryor.
Anyway, two lines cracked me up. One, by Carson, satirizing the pro-gun lobby: “Always remember: you can get more with a smile and a gun than you can with just a smile.ā€¯
The other, by Gore Vidal, when he agreed to accept Tynan’s daughter as godchild: “Always a godfather, never a god.”
I love Carson, but he's not quite the originator of this one -- it goes way back and is attributed (probably apocryphally) to Al Capone. The version I've always heard is, "You can get a lot further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone." :-)