Set Up, Joke, Set Up, Joke

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot on KCRW.

A friend of mine called me the other day. He has a show on the air and that afternoon, he got a call from his network-s president. It was intimated, but not said outright, that his show was about to be cancelled.

Because I don-t have a show on the air, and because the failure of his show can in no way - even in the remotest possible sense - help me, when I say to him, "I-m sorry, my friend, it was a good show you did and it deserved better" what I actually mean is "I-m sorry, my friend, it was a good show you did and it deserved better" rather than what I usually mean, which is "Does this event help me in some way?" I need to think about this for a moment.

But he-s hard to feel too sorry for. He-s a friend, of course, but friends are the people you see most clearly. And according to him, the network complained early on that his show wasn-t funny enough and he rather arrogantly ignored them.

"So I told them," he said to me over lunch one day, "that I think jokes are easy. It-s easy to be funny."

Except me. I know that it-s the filler that pays the bills and buys the yachts and builds the houses by the sea.

That-s it for this week. Next week, we-ll Google ourselves.

For KCRW, I-m Rob Long. This has been Martini Shot.