I grew up watching CNN, and my memory of CNN is James Earl Jones saying, 'This is CNN.'
Was that Donna Brazile, a CNN analyst, or a [Hillary] Clinton partisan? Two batches of emails posted by WikiLeaks show Brazile gave Clinton advisers a heads up about questions the candidate might receive at CNN events during the primaries.
Now we're here in 2009. My boys are 16 and 18, one's going to USC film school, and the other seems to be a natural comedian. So now I have to go back into show business as a senior comedian. So I hope to get Walter Brennan-type roles, Gabby Hayes kind of stuff, be the old-timer. We'll see what happens.
In the stand-up comedy top, there's room for everyone - if you're good, there's room for everyone. You'll put on your own show - no one casts you. You cast your own show as a stand-up comedian. When you get good at stand-up comedy you book a theater and if people show up, people show up. If people don't show up, people don't show up. You don't have a director or a casting agent or anybody saying if you're good enough - the audience will decide.
Every day my love for you grows higher, deeper, wider, stronger... It grows and grows until it touches the tip of where you are and comes back to me in the loving memory of you, and my heart melts with that love and grows even more.
A runner doesn't just show up and win a race. He trains long and hard. Do you just show up every day and hope to win?
When you're a comedian, and you show up on set to a job where you're not writing, and you get handed material that's as good as we do on 'Brooklyn Nine-Nine,' you just feel lucky every day.
Two subsequent incidents of import established CNN: the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, which CNN was the only network to cover as it happened, and the 1991 Gulf War, which CNN chronicled round the clock from a proximity as irresistible as it was alarming, bomb blasts and gunfire lighting up TV screens from coast to coast.
It used to be if you wanted to be a comedian, you used to just do sets. You'd go up three times a night, just get better, and then some people would see you and you'd do 'The Tonight Show,' and then boom, you're a comedian.
Hope is not mere wishful thinking. It is the precursor of a new dawn that slowly, steadily and unerringly comes to the fore and eventually grows into reality's existence.
There's a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly . . . survives without sun, water, and seemingly without earth. It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it.
Television has certain imperatives that CNN had the luxury of ignoring for a long period of time. CNN could take the position that the news would be the star, because in most of the programming day, they were the only all-news operation on the air.
Just because somebody says you are not trustworthy, that doesn't mean it is so... CNN's brand equity is built over 37 years doing hard work in very dangerous places... those who rely on CNN trust CNN more than ever.
I did say to myself one day, 'I'd love to be a Jewish comedian,' but that's my only memory with any connection to show business.
The one show that I will continue to be a guest on is 'The Daily Show' with Jon Stewart, if he'll have me. It's not competitive with CNN and it's too much fun.
No one grows up thinking they want to be a ghostwriter. No one plans on that job.