The Larry Stage

August 29th, 2009

James Wolcott writes amusingly in Vanity Fair that Larry King Live, through its bizarro coverage of the deaths of David Carradine, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson, has become “the funeral parlor of the gods.” Wolcott writes of King, “Wearing his trademark suspenders and purple shirts, he looks as if he’s strapped to the chair with vertical seat belts, unable to eject.” While Charlie Rose tends to assemble panels of august Times and New Yorker writers to weigh in on the deceased, King books “just about any showboat with a slim connection to the departed.”  In closing: “Elisabeth Kubler-Ross may have given us the five stages of grief, but she left out the sixth: the Larry stage.”