Recent Losses

It is really amazing the number of truly amazing talents we have lost so very recently.

Maybe it just really strikes me, because they have all had an influence on me, or in my particular area of interest- comedy.

But in recent months-

Rodney Dangerfield, one of the few remaining true 'living legend' comics, and with Alan King only months before, when Pryor and Klein go, an entire era of pioneer comics will have passed.

Johnny Carson- perhaps the who, despite not being a comic, has had a bigger influence on the evolution of modern comedy than anyone else.

Arthur Miller- probably the greatest American playwrite of the past century- Death of a Salesman and The Crucible capture the hopeless aspects of American suburban and consumer life, and America's dangerous tendency towards a group mentality, repespectively, in a way that astounds one that two such dazzling and different works could have come from the mind of the same man.

And finally, Hunter S. Thompson- my hero, see below.