The program was taped yesterday.
The program was taped last week, and no one at ESPN had the good taste to rule that anal-sex and gay jokes (Armstrong followed one with the other) exhibited a lack of decorum?
Dave Kansas, the editor in chief of TheStreet.com, published a column the next day on TheStreet.com Web site criticizing Mr. Cramer for making the comment and noting that before the program was taped he had refused to say what he planned to recommend, as participants usually did.
The program is taped in Los Angeles before a studio audience, with professional actors cast as the dysfunctional guests.
Twenty-six nepisodesdes of the program are taped each year, usually two or three in a week.
The program being taped on Thursday did not require as much trust, on either side of the camera.
The Selected Shorts program is taped, and an edited version (actually of the previous year's programs) is distributed throughout the country through NPR.
On ESPN, other cable outlets and local news programs, columnists depart temporarily from print journalism, with its backstopping of editors, to offer viewpoints that, if inappropriate, may be deleted only if the program is taped.
During a visit last month to the studio and the set where eight episodes of the program were taped, a reporter was told that the children knew they would be quizzed on topics in which they were experts, like World War II aircraft, the Civil War or Egyptology.
Every afternoon before the show, Mendez transcribes a draft of jokes for Letterman's two-thirty meeting with two of his writers, Bill Scheft and Gabe Abelson, then prepares a final batch — the monologue usually contains eight to ten jokes — shortly before the program is taped, at five-thirty.
His mistake was taking an accountant's ill-founded advice to promptly send a $72,000 income-tax payment to New York State, in which the program is taped, before the end of 1999 so that he and his wife, Debbie, could deduct it from their Federal tax for the year.
