Shoot the Breeze, but Aim High

The ‘20s and ‘30s had the Algonquin Round Table.

Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Heywood Broun, George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber, Alexander Wollcott, Ring Lardner and Marc Connelly were among this klatch of renowned literati that lunched weekdays and created famously witty, lively discourse around a table in the Rose Room of New York City’s Algonquin Hotel between two world wars.

Legends sprung up around them. Newspapers chronicled them. Books were written and movies made about them. Memorable quotes were attributed to them.

Parker: “You may lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.”

Kaufman, on a belligerent writer: “He’s in the chips now, but most of them seem to have stayed on his shoulder.”

Benchley or Wollcott, depending on the source you believe: “Let’s get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini.”

That was then, now is now, when no round table, not even a place setting, is visible on television.

Coming closest, but not very close, are late-night’s “Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher” and daytime’s “The View” and “The Other Half,” the latter pair always opening with 15-minute free-for-alls with their co-hosts on a variety of topics before proceeding to 45 minutes of interviews and other material that are pretty much generic for shows aimed at women.

ABC’s “Politically Incorrect” is unique in being TV’s only entertainment series consumed almost entirely by group dialogue attacking the latest headlines. Unfairly savaged recently for his misread remarks on terrorists, opinionated host Maher earns a thumbs-up here for being a funny and formidable iconoclast while enticing his diverse guests to duel on topical issues in front of a studio audience.

Occasionally some toads are booked as guests, and everyone here is very camera-aware, making this a performance show, essentially, and one in which meaningful opinion seems to surface only by accident. Even so, “Politically Incorrect” produces Socratic dialogues compared with what goes on elsewhere.

Rambling blather careening nowhere fast epitomizes the opening chattiness of “The View” and “The Other Half,” this stream of consciousness based on the false premise that celebrities and other TV-anointed sages necessarily have much to say worth hearing. No more so, in fact, than you and your friends when sitting around and shooting the breeze about waxy yellow buildup or spark plugs. Would you call in TV cameras for that?

The bigger question is whether cameras or I.Q. cops should have been called in for Dick Clark, Danny Bonaduce, Jan Adams and Mario Lopez, co-hosts of “The Other Half,” which came into existence in syndication as a males-showboating-for-women clone of “The View.”

Besides gender, there is one significant difference between the two shows. “The Other Half” is far lower on the food chain than “The View,” and Clark, especially, seems as relevant here as “American Bandstand.”

Meredith Vieira, Joy Behar, Star Jones and Lisa Ling co-host “The View,” which, its indulgent daily discussion aside, is a pretty decent show when not worshiping at the altar of Barbara Walters, its executive producer, part-time participant and full-time goddess.

As for those blabby discussion misfires, coming to mind are words Connelly used when asked years later to recall the disappearance of the Round Table. He replied that it was “like remembering falling asleep.”

Although I’m not the target audience, falling asleep fits, in a different way, with my memory of hearing co-hosts of “The View” and “The Other Half” mundanely spill their guts about the planet and its life forms.

Television can be seductive, entertaining and diverting. How often, though, do you feel smarter after watching it?

Routine talk shows have their place. Millions of viewers love them, press agents love them, advertisers love them. How ironic, though, that nowhere on a medium as intimate and deeply felt as TV is there anything today approaching the reputed high-level schmoozing of the Round Table.

This is no SOS for a bunch of pedantic swizzle sticks trashing their rivals and insulting each other over martinis. Or a neo-Truman Capote and friends snottily composing “A” and “B” lists of party guests in front of a TV camera.

Yet shouldn’t TV somewhere provide space for something like a salon, an hour or so when bright, informed, articulate people come together and shoot the breeze as equals minus a whooping studio audience and without intrusion from stars bearing movie clips or other fat egos with much less to say than to sell?

These don’t have to be silky high tones balancing teacups on their knees in a drawing room. A few blue-collar palookas with brains and a worldview will do fine.

Was the Algonquin table all it was cracked up to be, by the way?

The acerbic Parker herself later turned on her luncheon pals and noted that the age’s most celebrated writers--from Hemingway and Faulkner to Fitzgerald and O’Neill--never felt compelled to drop by. And Kaufman biographer Howard Teichmann had the literary diners existing on “an elixir of their own conversation.” So perhaps, had TV been present to record them hashing over and passing judgment on their world, they would have seemed as fatuous as do today’s pretenders.

Yet somehow I doubt it.

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg @latimes.com.