TV Quote of the Day (‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ With Her Latest Party Disaster)

[Mary Richards is anxious to make a good impression on a congresswoman coming to her dinner party. Unfortunately, the food is not cooperating.]

“Happy Homemaker” Sue Ann Nivens [played by Betty White]: “Mary, dear, do you have any idea what happens when you let Veal Prince Orloff sit in an oven too long?”

Mary Richards [played by Mary Tyler Moore]: “No, what?”

Sue Ann: “He dies.” —The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Season 4, Episode 10, “The Dinner Party,” original air date November 17, 1973, teleplay by Ed. Weinberger, directed by Jay Sandrich

TV Quote of the Day (‘New Girl,’ As Jess Ponders a Novel Method of Turkey Thawing)

Jess [played by Zooey Deschanel] [unable to thaw a frozen turkey]: “Maybe if I take off all my clothes and I get in bed with it, the heat of my body will warm it up.”—New Girl, Season 1, Episode 6, “Thanksgiving,” original air date Nov. 15, 2011, teleplay by Berkley Johnson, directed by Miguel Arteta

This post is for a friend of mine (AND HE KNOWS WHO HE IS!!!!) who is a great admirer of Ms. Deschanel.

Quote of the Day (Roy Blount Jr., Honoring Cooking With Grease)

“I feel that I will never cease

To hold in admiration grease.

It's grease makes frying things so crackly,

During and after. Think how slackly

Bacon lies before its grease

Effusively secures release.”—Southern humorist Roy Blount Jr., “Song to Grease,” in Save Room for Pie: Food Songs and Chewy Ruminations (2013)

(Photo of Roy Blount Jr. taken at the 2007 Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas, Nov. 3, 2007, by Larry D. Moore.)

Quote of the Day (Nora Ephron, on Cooking and Prosperity)

“My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.”—American screenwriter-director, essayist, and novelist Nora Ephron (1941-2012), Heartburn (1983)

Joke of the Day (Phyllis Diller, on Her Cooking Skills)

“In my hands food is a weapon. I can louse up cornflakes. I serve it on the rocks."—Stand-up comic Phyllis Diller quoted in Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (2003)

Deriding her lack of culinary skills—or her wider inability at running a household—was hardly the only self-deprecating statement from Phyllis Diller, born Phyllis Ada Driver on this day 100 years ago in Lima, Ohio. Even more self-lacerating were her remarks about her looks. At a certain point, even she became sensitive about them, undergoing plastic surgery—even becoming one of the first celebrities to openly admit having done so.

Three decades ago, I made a cutting remark about Diller’s homeliness to a work colleague. “But you know what? She’s supposed to be one of the nicest people in show business,” he responded. 

Subsequently, I found out he was right—I have never, in fact, heard of anyone in the business having a bad word about her—remarkable for an industry with more than the usual number of neurotics, egotists and cheats. That realization made me reconsider my attitude about her career—and, ultimately, about “looksism” as a standard for judging anybody.

Another point I didn’t realize at the time: Before Ellen DeGeneres, even before Joan Rivers, Diller pioneered stand-up comedy for women. When she started out in the mid-1950s, she said in a 1986 interview on Terry Gross’ NPR show Fresh Air, “There were no female comics around. I was it. I didn't know that. But I had no precedent.”

It was desperation—and the inner toughness not to let anything stand in her way—that drove her in the first place to such an extremity. With five kids and a (first) husband who drank and couldn’t get a job, forced to live in a dismal housing project, she could have been the kind of suburban housewife Betty Friedan had in mind in The Feminine Mystique.

 Instead, at age 37, she took the greatest risk of her career, quitting her copywriter job in the Bay Area and, amid a decade of barely smothered, inarticulate unrest, caused a small earthquake with her wisecracks: “I was saying all the things women were thinking but not saying,” she remembered years later. At the same time, she did so without the spectacular raunch becoming increasingly common among males on the stand-up circuit.

Diller died five years ago this August, at age 95. I like to think she had the last laugh on a world that counted her out when she was a struggling middle-aged mom. Her life offers two good lessons, I think: Don't stop laughing, and don't give up.

Quote of the Day (Comic Maria Bamford, on Cooking)

“My friends tell me that cooking is easy, but it's not easier than not cooking.” — Stand-up comic Maria Bamford, quoted in Robert Byrne, The 2,548 Wittiest Things Anybody Ever Said (2003)

Quote of the Day (Chris Offutt, on the CIA and Cooking)

“An unfortunate truth of espionage is that the public only hears about the errors of the CIA; their success stories are never revealed. The opposite is the case for cooking—culinary flops are forgotten while the great meals are remembered long after. The smart cook strives for the best of both worlds—in the field and the kitchen—behaving as a clandestine operative of cuisine. Here are the essential rules for cooks and spies: Discard your failures swiftly. Learn from mistakes. Identify saboteurs such as a clumsy prep-cook or a spouse who hides the salt. Take credit for others’ work and blame your mistakes on underlings. Most importantly: keep your top recipes secret.”  —Chris Offutt, “CIA Cake and Jeff Davis Pie,” Oxford American, Fall 2014