The Only Living Boy in New York

Leslie Nielsen: What I’ve Learned

Excerpted from the March 2008 issue of Esquire Magazine. Read the full piece here.

If you’re going fishing, make sure you don’t bring your sperm-whale line with you. A sperm whale goes down to twenty-five hundred feet and can hold its breath for eighty minutes.

Even if you did catch a sperm whale, when you put it in the boat, he’d sink it.

Yes, it’s true, I’ve been called the Laurence Olivier of spoofs. I guess that would make Laurence Olivier the Leslie Nielsen of Shakespeare.

I really have to keep an eye on myself, because sometimes I think I might say something important.

People ask me, “What would you like to be remembered by?” It really doesn’t make any difference. I’ve done Airplane!, three Naked Guns, Wrongfully Accused, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It. The way I look at it, I’ve built my own little pyramid and it’s gonna be around for as long as people have eyes to see.

28 November 2010 ·

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• esquire
• what i've learned

I’ll Miss You Tom Bosley

Happy Days was fine, but I was a weekly watcher of Father Dowling Mysteries. It was the best show about a priest and a nun solving crimes that has ever been created.  And the sexual tension between Father Dowling and Sister Stephanie (played by the redoubtable Tracy Nelson)?  It was off the charts!  Wouldn’t it be beautiful if Tracy Nelson died within the next week because she just can’t live without her holy padre of the small screen?  Wouldn’t it be poetic if she woke up tomorrow morning with her mouth agape, waiting for Father Dowling to give her the Eucharist, only to remember that he’s gone.  His ministry of mystery is complete, Sister Stephanie.  Now it is your duty—heck!—all our duty, to see to it that mother church does the right thing and makes Father Dowling the patron saint of criminology and the Chicago Cubs.  Let the canonization process begin!

19 October 2010 ·

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• tom bosley
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• father dowling mysteries
• i had a mad crush on tracy nelson