Joe Keenan

These 1500% cuts in drug prices will kill us. If big pharma has to pay $1400 refunds on every $100 pill we consume, by 2026 we’ll all be rich but dead of overdoses.

DuBarry Was a Lady, just to see Merman and Lahr bring down the house with "Friendship."

After high school I attended Columbia College. I later moved to LA and spent 14 years writing TV shows for Paramount. Some of them ran on CBS. Now when I meet new people, I tell them I spent those years selling clean urine to parolees.

You realize, Rob, that if said that in any sitcom writers room, the immediate reply would be, “Are you sure you don’t?”

I’m sorry, 44? Are we sure it’s not a three-digit number *ending* in 44?

Great. Wouldn’t you know the tsunami is coming from Russia, so when it reaches the west coast ICE is sure to let it in.

Emil Bove, all smiles.

He won’t be smiling when that Supreme Court seat Trump promised him goes to Ghislaine Maxwell.

Frasier trapped naked onstage in a children's show (don't ask how), is forced to don a diaper and baby bonnet

Frasier scowling as his radio play unravels around him

Frasier, performing "Buttons and Bows" on a public TV telethon has forgotten the lyrics.

Frasier in the Ski Lodge episode where no one was chasing him.

Yes, but if Frasier had been less insufferable, would people have enjoyed all the brutal ways we found to humiliate him?

"My client had no idea her lifelong friend was a cannibal. She was shocked to learn what became of the girls he specified wanting to mentor ('young, fit-but-not-stringy'), girls who, when last seen by Ms. Maxwell, were resting comfortably on non-stick trays, surrounded by carrots and potatoes."

I dreamed last night that we were all trapped in a sequel to the musical Chicago where Roxie and Velma are the POTUS and VP, Billy Flynn’s Attorney General, Matron “Mama” Morton is running the FBI, and Mary Sunshine’s been banned from women’s sports.

(I had included the married initial in that query, then saw the result, thought “Well, there’s an acronym I didn’t intend,” and removed it.)

Is the J. E.‘s maiden (as one said) name?

I don’t recall much about it, except finding it a slight but more than adequately charming two-hander in hands as capable as DHP’s and Uta’s. I like Polly Bergen and worked with her on Desperate Housewives, but I recall suspecting that she wouldn’t be as endearing as UH was.

Did you expect me to spoil the inscription reveal?

My hardcover copy of the book David describes above.

An inscription inside: “For Joe Keenan with my best wishes, Uta, Hagen, July 13, 2001.“

Being a twin I was obsessed with this book and couldn’t wait for the movie. Years later David Hyde Pierce did a play with one of the film’s stars, got me a first edition of the book for my birthday, and had the great lady sign it (exactly 24 years ago today).

Trump's career in presidential politics turned ten this summer which means it's now old enough for Jeffrey Epstein to fuck it.

You’ve sufficed, Mr. Benedict…

It’s no longer possible to deny that our DOJ has become a criminal enterprise on a scale that makes the Mafia look like Fagin’s underage pickpockets in the musical Oliver!

Not yet, thank God. But oof! Sounds kinda demoralizing.

[Wipes forehead, deletes 29 skeets and five limericks]

I hated missing a chance to meet my childhood fantasy mom. Years later returning from a NY trip I saw her exiting LAX ahead of me. I yelled "Miss Lockhart!" She looked alarmed by the strange man barreling toward her but once I explained why I wanted to say hi, she was as lovely as I knew she'd be.

6 writers explored a love triangle in 6 parties. Told to write a tea party, I gave one character a mom who's a dauntingly refined British author. (One of her books is titled A Vulgar Superfluity.) Lockhart played her. I had a show in New Haven, so I was the only writer not in LA for the shoot.
(2/3)

Happy 100th Birthday June Lockhart!
🧵
Lost In Space debuted when I was 7. I became obsessed with it. I longed to join the Space Family Robinson and have June for a mother. (Lassie reruns confirmed her maternal perfection.) In 1993 I wrote a scene for a round robin script called Sleep With Me.
(1/3)

Exit polls show that Cuomo did so well with older voters today that if he hadn't killed so many of them he might have won.

I haven’t met Mad Miss Manton but I have it on my DVR from the last TCM airing.

I found Sturges’s Miracle at Morgan’s Creek more broad than funny till I saw it in a packed theater and howled all the way through it.

This might explain why Iran avenged the “obliteration” of its nuclear program by striking our base in Qatar with a custard pie and an intimacy coordinator.

I caught it a few years ago and liked it a lot. But my favorite Joel McCrea comedy remains “The Palm Beach Story” and my favorite Charles Coburn is still “The Lady Eve.”

It’s times like this that I wish Emily Latilla was still here to mount a spirited defense of enriched geraniums.

Maybe we should have let him be Pope. He couldn't have done this with just the Swiss Guard.

Know what creeps me out about AI? It never needs, let alone wants to hear a song twice. “Hey, ChatGPT, want to hear “I Got Rhythm’ again? ‘Born To Run’? ‘Finishing The Hat’?” “No,” says ChatGPT, “I’m good. Would you like to know three biographical facts about George Gershwin, two of them correct?“

Exactly. One song pulls the audience in, the other repels them from the start.