Great TV Bosses

...and DEATH

I'm not sure quite why, but the following line strikes me as just about the funniest thing I've heard in months:

"Ride it, Donaghy. Ride it straight to hell"

It was uttered by Alec Baldwin, playing Jack Donaghy, on the great, new comedy, "30 Rock." It is hard to imagine the show being anywhere near as funny without this character. He is undoubtably one of the great TV bosses of all time, right up there with Ed Asner's Mr. Grant (on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show") and Rip Torn's Artie (on "The Larry Sanders Show").

Mary Tyler Moore might still have been great, even with someone else playing Lou --> but Rip Torn's Artie single-handedly elevated to televison greatness a show that would have been merely good without him. And Baldwin's Jack Donaghy (I consider Alec Baldwin the only "real" Baldwin, by the way) similarly gives "30 Rock" a chance at greatness it otherwise would not have.

Back to that line. Why is it so funny? My wife, Beth, asked me what was so funny about it as I laughed uproariously after hearing it, and I couldn't explain it. Maybe it was just the culmination of so many great lines by Jack Donaghy, and his reckless abandon at railing against death and the prospect of going to Hell. It was sort of a "fuck you" to Death.

His counterpart, Lou Grant, said pretty much the same thing, in a more sensible manner: "We laugh at Death because we know Death will have the last laugh on us." This quote is from the classic MTM episode, "Chuckles Bites the Dust."

If it turns out that Josh Hancock was driving drunk, then yes, it is still a tragic accident.

However, the headline changes from:

Tragic accidental death of 29-year-old MLB pitcher

to:

Thank heaven that no innocents were harmed in drunk-driving death of young MLB pitcher.

And thus the media can stop lionizing him. It is one thing to die young as a hero (just ask the parents of any of the American soldiers killed in Iraq), and quite another to die young from drunk driving.