Has "Walking Dead" jumped the zombie shark?

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The show had been gut-wrenching — and I don’t mean that as a dramatic critique.

No, in “Walking Dead” you can see people use things like wrenches to remove guts. It’s a weekly disgust.

My wife, a devoted fan, was eager to talk about it. She wanted to pick my brain.

“Are you done with it?” she asked.

I told her, no. I still feel invested in the characters and the prepper in me is still compiling survival tips on what to do in the event zombie apocalypse becomes a reality and I’ll need to be alert for a more literal kind of brain picking.

But last night’s season 7 premier crossed a line with me.

I won’t say the show jumped the shark. “Walking Dead” producers would never let that happen, opting, I’m sure, to work a zombie shark plot line into the series.

The wanton gruesomeness of last night’s de rigeur violence left me feeling diminished. Is this really how I want to spend an hour? Does this qualify as entertainment?

The presidential debates are more uplifting.

At least with those — and they’re every bit as gruesome as “Walking Dead” — I know I’ll get to see Alec Baldwin ridiculing Trump.

Anytime televised violence becomes stomach turning because characters are getting their stomachs turned (or chewed), it’s time to re-think how I’m spending my time. So I’ll, for now, continue watching “Walking Dead,” but all the while my mind will be drifting to what I’d rather be watching. The list includes:

• Porn — I’ve never been a big porn guy, but something raunchy would be a nice palette cleanser after watching Michonne lop the heads off 30 zombies intent on dining on more than finger sandwiches. If you’re looking for Christmas stocking stuffers, I like ones involving things like the saucy divorcee and her cheerleader roommate surprising the pizza delivery boy with the kind of tip he can’t claim on his tax forms.

• “Cheers” — It’s on one of the retro channels and we DVR about 20 of them at a time. I hadn’t seen the show in about 15 years and I wondered if it still held up. Boy, does it. It remains uproarious with each character deftly acted and right on the money. I love to laugh so, ergo, I’ll always love “Cheers.” It sounds heretical, but it’s right up there with “Seinfeld” and “Seinfeld” is right at the top.

• “The Fugitive” — It was about 20 years ago, before kids, and I was seeking a good show to watch with lunch. Val at the time had a full-time job in Pittsburgh. I vaguely remember my father telling me to check out David Janssen and “The Fugitive” reruns. I watched one and was blown away. Each episode was a dramatic gem. I remember Val coming home and me saying, “We’re going to have to start taping these shows to watch with dinner. They’re that good.” She responded with some version of, yeah, right, we’re going to tape shows that first appeared in 1963. Today, it remains one of our all-time favorite shows. We even have an episode guide!

• “Breaking Bad” — The show went off the air three years ago last month and I’ve ever since been itching to start it all over. It’s that good, in my opinion the best show ever. I’d watch “Mad Men” and “Sopranos” from the start again, too.

• The World Series — Now’s the time of year when every pitch becomes so precious because I know baseball’s about to be cruelly ripped from my life. In the summer, baseball is my televised security blanket. Personal calm is elusive when it isn’t near. Barring a zombie apocalypse, I’ll be writing about the World Series tomorrow in advance of Game 1.

• “The Larry Sanders Show” — Brilliant Garry Shandling comedy with equally brilliant cast led by Jeffrey Tambor and Rip Torn. Again, I just love to laugh and this one makes me very happy. HBO ran 89 episodes from 1992-98. I have a compilation disc with about 20 of them on there. Each is golden. You know what else is still really, really funny? “Third Rock from the Sun,” starring the peerless John Lithgow. Sitcom trivia: The career-making Frasier Crane “Cheers” role that went to Kelsey Grammar was offered first to Lithgow. 

• A roaring fire — Hallelujah! The weather has finally turned. I welcome the fall chill. I love fall days cooking soups and warming the house with a nice fire. And if I’m in front of a fire, naturally, I’ll have a good book with me. I’m right now in the middle of Tom Wolfe’s excellent “Bonfire of the Vanities” from 1986. It’s particularly timely with so many egos and ambitions dominating our news.

• “Walking Dead” — It’ll never be one of my all-time favorite shows — I doubt I’ll ever re-watch more than an episodic scene or two — but this show was once great.

I think it’s too infatuated with devastating its audience with increasingly graphic violence. Last night’s brutal killings of two main and beloved characters couldn’t have been more disgusting.

Plus, I don’t foresee a “Walking Dead” happy ending and that turns me off.

See, I love happy endings.

Like the kind awaiting that lucky pizza delivery boy!

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Yukkin' it up over laugh track history (from '15)

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I plan to spend tomorrow commemorating the 2003 death of Charles Douglass by laughing my merry ass off.

I’ll chortle, giggle, titter, guffaw, hoot, howl, cackle and generally spend the day behaving like I’m being tickled by invisible feathers. 

Douglass died 12 years ago tomorrow at the age of 93. If his funeral was a sad one, I think Douglass would have disapproved. His funeral above all others should have been a laugh riot.

Douglass was the father of the modern laugh track.

From the late 1950s through well into the ‘80s, Douglass was responsible for  mechanically producing nearly all the laughter for America’s golden age sitcoms. TV Guide profiled him and said in 1966 he’d built a monopolistic empire on canned laughs.

Douglass’s recorded laughs are the uncredited co-stars of “Bewitched,” “The Munsters,” “I Dream of Jeannie,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Lucy,” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”

It was very expensive, but apparently less costly than producing anything that was genuinely funny on its own.

“Cheers was filmed before a live studio audience.”

Except when it wasn’t.

Every episode of  “Cheers,” one of my all-time favorites, kicked off with those words, a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval that verified the laughs you were about to hear were authentic.

The problem is Douglass’s tickling fingerprints are all over “Cheers,” too. Same goes for “Frazier,” “Barney Miller,” “The Bob Newhart Show,” “Taxi,” and a host of others.

Many of the supposedly “taped live” shows were artificially sweetened by what was known in Hollywood as Douglass’s “mysterious laff box.”

Want to hear something funny?

The laughs over the years are all the same. Many of the laughs you still hear on today’s shows were harvested from shows from decades ago and simply replayed.

So a truly discerning listener could conceivably go back and detect the same precise laugh from the same man or woman who laughed one time at a show that today is 40-years old.

The humor changes. The laughs do not.

I became hyper-sensitive to laugh tracks, I guess, when I started being bludgeoned by the ones Disney Channel uses on shows designed to appeal to girls like our young daughters.

Each punchline produced the uproarious kind of laughter you’d hear down at the old Bada Bing after Tony Soprano told a knock-knock joke.

The only ones not laughing were the intended target audience right there in the room.

The blatant manipulation was infuriating. They were watching something because they thought it was funny even when they reflexively understood what they were watching wasn’t funny at all.

As a father, it was upsetting. It was upsetting, too, as a hockey fan because I wanted to throw their asses the hell out of the room so I could watch the Penguin game.

But, no, they kept staring at the mysterious laff box like it was bestowing the gift of spontaneous hilarity.

Does the laugh track make something funny even when it is not?

“Seinfeld,” maybe the funniest show ever, uses a heavy, but deft laugh track. 

Would it be as funny without? I think so.

“Curb Your Enthusiasm,” its sort of alter-ego uses none and it’s every bit as funny.

Would this blog be funnier if I had a chorus of gigglers to prompt you where you’re supposed to chuckle?

Maybe it’d be worth a try.

I guess I feel the same way about laugh tracks as Milton Berle did. He was at first reportedly miffed his humor needed any sweetening. He didn’t become a believer until one of his favorite jokes failed to click with the actual audience.

“Well, as long as we’re here doing this, that joke didn’t get the response we wanted,” Berle said, directing laughter be added. First some, then more and then until finally his ego was satisfied.

“See,” he said, “I told you it was funny.”

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Dino diets are a gas, gas, gas

Did anyone else notice frightening parallels between the two seemingly unrelated headlines I spied this morning on the Google News round-up?

First up from BBC Nature: “Dinosaur gases ‘warmed the earth.’”

Then this from the L.A. Times: “42 percent of American adults will be obese by 2030.” Writer Melissa Healy uses the playful verb that the ranks of obese are bound to “swell.”

Very clever.

The obvious connection is that some future species will one day report that noxious gas from sauropod-sized humans rendered the planet wholly uninhabitable to all but fraternity house refugees used to dwelling in hot, smelly environs.

Researchers estimated that the dinosaurs produced 520 million metric tons of methane gas annually. As part of my vow to be less politically antagonistic, I’ll refrain here from making a cheap Rush Limbaugh comparison.

It’s a truly stunning figure considering that dinosaurs were a species who were physically and intellectually incapable of playing the old pull-my-finger stunt my father taught me when I was a boy.

Questions bloom rose-like when you consider scholarly men and women are today paid to speculate about the metric tonnage of long-spent dinosaur farts and how the gases ravaged the globe.

As boys, did the men once dream of growing up to be storm chasers before opting to pursue more Jurassic sorts of winds? Does dinosaur gas research lead the women to be extra careful in choosing perfume for that all-important first date?

Of course, we’ve known for years that cow flatulence is wreaking havoc on our ozone layer.

Or is it reeking havoc?

Maybe it’s that scientists are too polite to bridge the subject, but I’ve never seen a study that says how much human-produced methane is harming the environment. It’s got to be substantial.

I know guys who are so fluent in flatulence you’d think they were conversing in a secret language. 

That brings us to the second study, the swell one that says that 42 percent of Americans will be obese by 2030.

I read that twice to make sure it didn’t say “by 2:30,” which seems as likely. 

I golfed this weekend with three stout gents who were concerned about burgeoning weight. 

They talked about the diets with which they were engaged, their exercise regimen and the importance of portion control.

Like most middle-aged people, I share their concerns. That’s why I was flattered when one of them turned to me and said, “I guess you never have to worry about your weight, do you?”

It was such a kind observation, I felt immediate shame when I blurted out, “Not as long as I’m standing next to three lard asses like you.”

The remark led to an unexpected burst of physical fitness as the tubby trio chased me with their clubs intent on killing me for 14 feet until they got too winded to pursue. 

I spend a lot of time wondering about the long-term impact mankind has upon the planet.

It’s a pet theory of mine that if our march toward mass obesity continues our aggregate weight will soon be so great the exhausted earth’s rotation will slow to a crawl and each day will last 28 hours. I’m hopeful with those four extra hours our scientists will have more time to devote to solving all our most pressing environmental problems.

Me, I’d probably devote the extra hours to watching eight more daily “Seinfeld” episodes I’ve already seen on average 197 times each.

Still, given the cataclysmic consequences, it probably makes more sense for us to watch what we eat, exercise and ignore the cow when she asks us to pull her finger.

Count me as among those who believe our jewel-like earth is a fragile and should be preserved. We need to keep it as pristine and odor-free as possible.

We don’t want to be the generation responsible for putting the stink in extinction.

Read this then go straight to sleep

Many fine Americans are eager to stand up and fight against perceived flaws they believe are harming the nation.

Me, I’m about to lay down and nap over one.

The stigma against sleep is costing America. No one is getting enough of it. It’s obvious in our stress, our productivity and our spiraling ethics.

Well-rested people aren’t prone to violence, sloth or felonious business practices.

We should be inviting sleep, not fighting it. If sleep beckons, we should obey, the exception being people like train conductors and airline pilots.

We’ve all heard hyper-productive Type-A busybodies brag about needing just four hours of sleep per night, but you never hear anyone bragging they enjoy 10 hours of sleep each night.

My nights are interrupted by two tiny sleep bandits, woodsy creature noises and the nervous yipping of a dog with a BB-sized bladder capacity.

I’m on a quest to get everybody under my roof to go to bed two hours earlier and get up two hours later.

The kids would be asleep by 8 and would wake up at 9. Sure, Josie would miss her first hour of fourth grade, but nothing important happens in school until 10 -- and I don’t mean 10 a.m.

I mean 10th grade.

My wife and I would be undercovers by 9:30 p.m. and up at 8:30 a.m.

Doesn’t that sleep schedule strike you as nirvana?

It does me.

Not Val. She got mad at me recently for dozing off at 9:30 in our bed after reading to one of the kids and just, ahhh, staying there like a sedated mental patient clear through the next morning.

For the first time in months, I reached the most hallowed state of sleep. Yes, I hit pillow puddlin’ slobber sleep.

In sleep terms, that’s like bowling a 300.

To her, it seemed like a waste of time. She thinks we should stay awake so long we become actual zombies so we can enjoy adult shows about things like fictional zombies.

In an ideal world -- and in any ideal world, there are no children -- we’d have about an hour of bedtime unwinding, reading, TV or couple cuddlin’ from 9 to 10 p.m. each and every night.

But years ago we made the cheap-skate mistake of not getting a DVR for our bedroom.

Without the bedroom DVR, we are forced to stay awake in the living room long enough execute a series of maneuvers similar to what happens in far flung U.S. Army outposts around the globe.

We need to secure the fireplace, check the perimeter and do a quick head count before finally getting to bed at 11 sharp in time to watch a 1996 episode of “Seinfeld” we’ve only seen 114 times before.

It’s so bad it took us four nights to watch one 2 hour, 45 minute movie. We’d recorded the outstanding 1959 Alfred Hitchcock movie, “Anatomy of a Murder,” starring Jimmy Stewart.

We both kept falling asleep during key segments and would spend breakfast trying to unravel plot lines and determine if we’d spied the Hitchcock cameo he so cleverly asserts into each of his films.

It wasn’t until the movie finally concluded we realized it would have been Hitchcock’s most clever cameo ever.

Because in our sleep deprived state, neither of us ever realized it was an Otto Preminger movie.

Everything would improve if we got more sleep.

Our families would have less time to bicker. We’d all get more done in less time. 

Me, I’d have time to dream up better story ideas and, thus, would start receiving a better class of rejection letters from more prominent sleep-deprived editors.

Sleeplessness is often confused with physical virtuosity. It’s a quality we’ve always sought in our elected leaders and a keystone critique of those right now tromping around desolate Iowa.

It should be the other way around. 

So wake up, America!

And go right back to bed.

We’ll all be better off.

From sea to shining zzzzzzzzz . . . .

Speed reading as unwanted as speed sex

I have about the same interest in learning speed reading as I do in learning speed sex.

If I’m doing something I enjoy, I want to extend the pleasure. I like it when the baseball game goes into extra innings, when the leisurely director’s cut is included in the DVD and that soothing fall weekend when we all get an extra hour of sleep.

I don’t know what the rush is when it comes to reading. I’ve read the reports that you can increase volume without diminishing comprehension, but I never want to read like I’m racing.

Time spent reading is like a stealth vacation. I want to savor every sentence. I don’t want to gulp a glorious book. I want to sip it.

Alas, I no longer have the time to read the way I always wish I could.

Ever since we’ve had children, I read like I’m cheating on a diet. I sneak a bite here and there when I think no one is looking.

It seems like I’m doing something criminal if my wife or one of the girls walks in during the daylight hours and I’m sitting in the easy chair, feet back with my nose pointed at the interior spine of a really fat book.

Of course, we spend about an hour each night reading aloud to our girls, ages 8 and 3, and that’s a joy. I hope we’re nurturing in them the same joy for reading our parents did in us. But reading Dr. Seuss’s “The Things I Think I Think” with a cartoonishly animated voice isn’t the same as settling into a book like David Halberstam’s lively 801-page book, “The Fifties.”

And after we’ve tucked the kids in we’re both too whipped to do much reading so we usually just zone out to something like a 1994 Seinfeld episode we’ve both seen a combined 324 times.

As for romance, speedy or otherwise, that’s another casualty of trying to do our very best raising our little rascals.

It is, indeed, one of life’s great ironies that the ultimate result of having sex becomes one of the greatest impediments to ever having it again.

Like many couple we want it all. We yearn to be outstanding parents with many gleeful evening hours of quality time with our darlings. We want to indulge our intellects with cerebral readings and we want to maintain an enthusiastic and vigorous love life.

We often make the mistake of trying to do all three in order and on the same night with predictable results.

We get engrossed in our books and, dang it, the moment is gone. We’re too tired for intimacy.

Hmmm . . .

Maybe there’s something to that speed reading thing after all.