Garry Shandling: GQ's Man of the Decade

Okay, maybe not, but he should be. Aren't these types of magazines getting tired of honoring George Clooney? Besides, he's going to start doing another Coen brothers movie, so he'll be too weird for the Tiger Beat crowd. But Garry Shandling, he's Da Man! We're dipping back into all those old Larry Sanders shows lately. One kinda takes for granted how good they were. I sure hate to think that Johnny Carson was as awkward backstage as Larry was, if that's the show's implication. And apparently they made all of HBO's other shows possible: Curb Your Enthusiasm comes in a close second on the Awkward-o-meter compared to Sanders. Need I mention that the show provided Rip Torn and Jeffrey Tambor with the roles of their lifetimes? I think not. And yes, I am aware of Dodgeball and Another Midnight Run, thank you very much. (TYVM?)

My close friend and I have been talking about Garry Shandling, and we've come to the concensus that Shandling's kind of a weird dude! What's that boxing thing all about? But he's one of these guys that's just naturally funny. There's not many of them. I guess Steve Martin sort of still is. Colbert seems naturally funny; Jon Stewart seems like he needs a script. You know, that kind of thing. I'd go on, but I still want to work in this business. The point of this post being that, Shandling's slowly coming back into the public eye. He was on The Daily Show to flog the latest installment of the Larry Sanders DVD, and he was on Bill Maher's show recently and held his own with Hurlyburly co-star Sean Penn. He said in one of his stand-up specials that he's middle-of-the-road politically. Not a bad place to be; if only more people on the right did that. That, and the boxing thing (it's how he works out, with a boxing trainer...) , I've been getting the vibe that, with all the talk that all these magazines throw about of the Man of the Year, Man of the Decade, the GQs and Details and Maxims and the Vanity Fairs of the world, you need look no further than Garry Shandling! He is your man of the whatever, year, decade, moment. AARP could have him as the It-Guy, if nothing else, but he probably wouldn't like that. :)