I have a distinct but false memory of a Dom DeLuise appearance on Dinah Shore's afternoon talkshow in which he slyly but cruelly made fun of her deformed leg, some vicious campy remark that froze her face in pain for a couple of seconds before she recovered her composure and laughed it off. A few awkward chuckles from the audience but mostly stunned silence. Naturally this couldn't have happened, such an excruciating moment in a taped show would never have made it to broadcast. And anyway Dom and Burt Reynolds were close friends, he would never have insulted Dinah on her own show, would he? I think when I was a little kid I spent a fair amount of time daydreaming such horrible television moments, some perverse imaginary cringe reel, a collection of scenes of such severe and harrowing embarrassment that even people with the strongest constitutions, people whose sensibilities had been toughened by military combat, say, or inner city emergency room experience, would be driven from the room in horror. I think I intuited that the only proper response to television's quotidian cheapness and casual psychological terror was to take it to the extreme, to dream of the fulfillment of its implied promise of utter, devastating humiliation for every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth.