I’ve never watched any of what passes for contemporary talent shows among the network’s reality offerings. I’ve seen nary an episode of “American Idol” or “The Voice” or “The X Factor” or “So You Think You Can Dance.” Call me a snob, but they all look like extended auditions for the next big lounge act in Reno or a headliner in Branson, Mo.

But I’m a Howard loyalist. I was lucky enough to be assigned the Playboy Interview with him back in 1994 and have always believed that he is an innovator and a delightfully iconoclastic comic observer of the modern world. How would he adjust to the rigors and constrictions of network TV?

The irony wasn’t lost on me that he was going to be on NBC. This was the same network that tried to end his career in the early 1980s by harnessing him to a constrictive, restrictive radio format and playing nanny about what he could and couldn’t talk about. This seemed like a chance for an unlikely triumphant return.

And he handles it with aplomb, without losing any of his quick-witted bite. He’s the reason I’ll keep watching – though the ability to skip through the show’s wasted time with my DVR is also a factor.

The rest of the show, of course, is your basic TV reality-sludge: over-extended with filler, false-suspense tropes and way too much of the show’s egregious host, Nick Cannon. Every time the director cuts away from a performer – good or bad – to show Cannon offering a feeble backstage ad lib, the show’s energy level plummets. He actually makes Ryan Seacrest look like a charismatic talent – and that’s some serious voodoo shit.

Even without Cannon, “AGT” is like a mashup of “The Gong Show” and “American Idol,” by way of the old “Ed Sullivan Show.” But Stern – and, to a certain extent, fellow panelist Howie Mandel – is funny and fast. When an act is terrible, he finds a witty way to say it; it’s even funny how fast he hits the buzzer on a bad act.

If anything, this vehicle has revealed something most casual listeners don’t realize about Stern: He’s actually a sweet guy and something of a softie. The casual radio listener – or those who only know him by reputation – tend to focus on the horny adolescent side of him; to be sure, that’s very much a part of the radio persona. Or they zero in on his tendency to mercilessly mock the people who publicly disdain him or refuse to appear on his show.

But as any number of celebrities can testify, the best way to tame Stern is to brave his studio or take his phone call. Answer his questions honestly – or sincerely say, “Gee, I just can’t talk about that” – and he moves on.

In fact, he’s a terrific interviewer, capable of getting a celebrity – in show business or otherwise – to open up in ways they probably didn’t anticipate. But he’s not the fearsome monster he’s often depicted as; if you’re a celebrity with the courage to face him, he’s actually kind of a pussycat.

That was on display during the first episodes of “America’s Got Talent,” in which he was much kinder to some of the middling talents than you’d expect. Even when he was dismissive, he wasn’t cruel, just honest (like to a woman who sang while covered with live cockatiels). No doubt he can make arguments for giving a “Yes” vote to some of the weaker contestants, like a singer who billed himself as “Simply Sergio,” who nearly got the boot for his rendition of “The Girl From Ipanema,” then won the panel over with a brave version of “God Bless America.”

But I believe you saw the real Howard the night he gave the buzzer to a pre-school rapper – and then melted into a flustered wreck when the kid started to cry. “I can’t handle this,” he pleaded, changing his vote from “No” to “Yes” – that’s the real Howard Stern.

So, yeah, I’ll keep watching, for Stern and Mandel (sorry, I’m not a Sharon Osbourne fan). But the fast-forward button will get a workout.

My pal Brother Wease and I get into it about “America’s Got Talent,” sequels and more if you click here.

When it comes to actress Zooey Deschanel, I feel as though I’m suffering from post-kid-in-a-candy-store syndrome.

In other words, Deschanel is like some favorite treat, one that’s a treat exactly because you only get it rarely and in small quantities. Then suddenly, you’re given an unlimited quantity of that treat – and the chance to gorge yourself. Until you’ve consumed so much that you’re sick to your stomach. And you never want to taste that treat again. Ever.

That’s how I now feel about Zooey Deschanel. Between her cloyingly unfunny sitcom, “New Girl,” and her ubiquitous iPhone 4 commercials, she’s way overfulfilled my daily – nay, annual or even lifetime – recommended dosage of Zooey Deschanel quirk.

There was a point when Deschanel was one of my favorite young actresses. She’d show up once or twice a year in a movie like “Elf” or “Yes Man” and knock it out of the park, no matter how good or bad the movie was, reaching a certain perfect critical mass in “(500) Days of Summer.” Even in bad movies (“Gigantic,” “Your Highness”), she’d win gushing reviews from critics for her off-beat timing, her scratchily lovable voice and that beguiling blend of little-girl sensibility in a big girl’s body.

Plus she had terrific comic timing and a great ability to react to other characters in unexpected ways. She was, in other words, quirky – but unpredictably so. Her characters weren’t always the same – or at least didn’t seem to be because we didn’t see her all the time.

Quirkiness is in the eye of the beholder, of course. It’s like Eccentricity Lite – and eccentricity, too often, can come across as a pose or an affectation. So can quirkiness. But if you mix it up a little, if you don’t only play quirky characters, then it works that much better when you do, if your talent flows in that direction.

Hollywood, however, loves its quirky actors – and often takes that quirk and drives it into the ground. Hello – Jon Heder?

Unfortunately for Deschanel, she made the deadly choice to do “New Girl,” a flat, forced Fox comedy, in which she plays a character who is nothing but quirks. So instead of seeing her once or twice a year, she’s on every week.

Even worse, she now appears in that commercial, which is like an ode to self-involved quirk. And that’s on the air seemingly everyday.

What it seems to show is that, far from being an imaginative young actress with a lot of different facets to her talent, Deschanel is a one-trick loony. If she were a stand-up comedian, she’d be Gallagher, still slamming watermelons with a sledgehammer, or Emo Phillips, circa 1985.

I’m not saying she’s without talent; I’m saying that her career choices have given me doubts about that talent. Sure, she’s done serious roles – but I defy anyone to remember her in the pokey “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.” She needs to do something drastically different – Laura Wingfield in “The Glass Menagerie” or its equivalent – to pull herself out of this rut.

Until then, well, sorry, but my quick-draw is pretty ruthless on the mute button of my remote control whenever she pops up on my TV screen these days. And her next movie better be a doozy or the only thing she’ll be remembered for is Abby Elliott’s devastatingly spot-on impression of her on “Saturday Night Live.”

Let’s start with “The Three Stooges,” which I didn’t catch up with until a couple of weeks after it opened.

Frankly, I felt lucky that I had a conflict with the only press screening of the Farrelly brothers’ version of the old comedy team. The idea of actors like Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro or any of the other names that were tossed around over the last few years of casting discussion never excited me. When they actually started making the movie with distinctly less star power, well, sorry, I didn’t care.

But, when some of my colleagues from major publications raved about the film, I begrudgingly decided that OK, I’ll buy a ticket and go see it. Which I did – and came away thinking, “Meh.”

Yes, I laughed a few times. Mostly, I laughed at the near-perfect recreation of the Stooges’ various bits of slapstick shtick: the slapping, the eye-pokes, the bonks with hammers and other implements of destruction. It reaches its apogee in one balls-out round-robin of slapping and sound effects the three perform on a bare stage. I also laughed when Moe slapped around the cast of “Jersey Shore” because, well, someone finally did that.

Otherwise, well, hey, there are boxed sets of the Stooges’ output that capture the real thing. For that matter, you can find their shorts (or parts of them) on YouTube.

The guys in the Farrelly brothers’ version – Chris Diamantopoulos as Moe, Sean Hayes as Larry, Will Sasso as Curly – are inspired imitators. But the script itself was just a mishmash of old Stooge routines and clichéd plot points. And when it turned sentimental – with the Stooges having misunderstandings and hurt feelings – well, the Three Stooges aren’t about feelings. That just seemed like a sentimental sop to screenwriting conventions.

So “The Three Stooges’ – been there, done that. Give me the originals anytime.

# # #

I’ve also been amused by the backlash against Lena Dunham’s HBO series, “Girls.” Hailed as the second coming of the sitcom on the cover of New York magazine more than a month before it even hit the airwaves, “Girls” debuted to a round of rave reviews, followed by the inevitable negative reaction of social commentators who are always suspicious of anything that’s too popular and of the moment.

I personally don’t care one way or the other about how young Lena Dunham is, how nondiverse the show’s cast is or any of the other gripes. I think the show is smart and funny – but then, I was a fan of Dunham’s film “Tiny Furniture,” and was pleased to see her apply the same sensibility to a weekly TV series.

No, what I found particularly amusing was the fact that the bulk of the sniping came from writers who seemed to be of Dunham’s generation. Whereas everyone I talked to about the show loved it – because we’re all roughly old enough to be parents of children who are Dunham’s age.

So the opening sequence of the pilot – in which Dunham’s character, Hannah, is told by her parents that they’re no longer going to support her at age 25 – not only rang true but caused gales of laughter among the people I was watching with.

Perhaps it’s a generational thing: the wisdom of age, looking back with amusement, not only at what our own kids are doing with their lives at this economically rocky moment in history, but how we dealt with the same issues when we were that age, back in the caveman days.

I get the feeling that a lot of the naysayers are uncomfortable with the accuracy of her portrait of the cluelessness one suffers in one’s 20s. To me, that’s what a lot of this backlash seems to be saying: “Hey, I’m not like that. Therefore, she’s way off-base.”

Yeah, that mirror can be a brutal thing.

# # #

Finally, the Tribeca Film Festival. I only got down to a couple of press screenings this year and rarely go to the public screenings or panels themselves. As in past years, there were a handful of movies I wanted to see that hadn’t been at Sundance or Toronto. But the big titles were things that would be in theaters soon anyway – everything from the opening and closing night films (“The Five-Year Engagement,” “The Avengers”) to such arthouse fare as “Hysteria.”

Really, it was more of a scheduling thing, which it always seems to be. It wasn’t that the press screenings during the festival were at a multiplex on W. 23rd Street; I’d rather go there than down to the Tribeca Film Center. Rather, it was that the press screenings were all clustered together in the mornings and early afternoon. Even if my schedule had allowed me to attend more than I did, every day offered an opening slot that had two or three movies that I wanted to see, all at the same time.

If they’d been spread through the day, as they are at Toronto and Sundance, the two major festivals I try to attend regularly, it might have made a difference. As it was, Tribeca still remains a kind of film-festival afterthought for me: a chance to see a couple of extra films but, otherwise, not something I’m going to devote several days to.

My pal brother Wease and I talk about the movies and the world – and everything else, if you click here.

Thank you, Jack Nicholson.

Thank you for being so perfect and unpredictable and bold as an actor.

Thank you for having taste in choosing scripts that so often led to memorable quality films.

Thanks for being one of the actors whose films defined the 1970s and 1980s. You were part of a coterie I think of as the post-Brando generation, an outstanding set of actors that included Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Warren Beatty, Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman.

What made you stand out was your wild-card quality. It was shared by Pacino, Hoffman and De Niro, all of whom could be quite funny early on, but who ultimately focused on more serious roles. But you, Jack, understood the value of comedy – and how to find serious material that injected comedy as both leavening and relief.

Hoffman, De Niro and Pacino conveyed an unmistakable ethnicity in their onscreen personas. Beatty was eternally WASP-like; Hackman could portray blue-collar grit or white-collar hauteur.

But Nicholson was always different. His performances have an insinuating quality, a slyness, a canniness that practically oozes from his pores, whether he’s plays a slickster like Jake Gittes in “Chinatown” or a fair-minded knuckle-dragger like Bad-Ass Buddusky in “The Last Detail.” With his characters, it was never a question of whether he had an angle; it was which of the several angles was he going to play.

I’d also say thanks for Nicholson’s willingness to work with a wide variety of directors in material that called for him to be unlikable, threatening and just plain bad news. He was closed-off and small-minded in Alexander Payne’s delicious, “About Schmidt,” a cool but bored adventurer in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “The Passenger” and a smoothly manipulative womanizer-control freak who himself is out of control, in Mike Nichols’ “Carnal Knowledge.”

Yes, Nicholson’s characters lost control – memorably so. Whether it was Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” chopping his way through a door with an ax, or Frank Costello in Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed,” pounding Leonardo DiCaprio’s broken hand with a construction boot, Nicholson threw himself into each role with the same crazed energy that earned him an Oscar for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Think of the immortal chicken-salad exchange in “Five Easy Pieces,” as Nicholson shifts from reasonable to riotous while trying to order dry toast in a truck stop.

There are books to be written about Nicholson’s career and films, but what I admire most is that, once he hit with “Easy Rider” in 1969, his film choices were comparatively impeccable for long stretches. When he made missteps – such as “Blood and Wine” or “Man Trouble,” both relatively unseen in the 1990s – they usually had to do with loyalty to a pal (in this case, Bob Rafelson, who directed both of those films – but also was a longtime collaborator with Nicholson, directing him in “Five Easy Pieces” and “King of Marvin Gardens”).

Or, as was the case with Tim Burton’s vastly overrated “Batman,” his piece of the financial action made the role impossible to turn down. (Indeed, his Joker was the only interesting part of that wildly overpraised 1989 film.)

Nicholson has sort of slid into retirement gracefully. Since the turn of the millennium, he has made “The Departed,” “The Pledge” for Sean Penn and a quartet of comedies, including “Anger Management,” which showed him severely outstripping Adam Sandler when it came to winning big laughs in a formulaic comedy.

IMDB lists Nicholson as a possible participant in the sketchily penciled-in “Warren Beatty Project.” But you get the impression that Nicholson is happily playing golf, hanging out with his children and grandchildren, reading and rejecting scripts.

With luck, he’s still got a couple of killer performances left in him. It would be nice to see him choose to work with filmmakers like the Coen Brothers, Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh and Paul Thomas Anderson before he’s done, just to see what they’d do with him.

But even if he never steps in front of a camera again, Jack Nicholson is already an all-timer, as emblematic of a certain age in Hollywood – and a certain level of quality – as Clark Gable or Humphrey Bogart were to theirs.

So happy 75th birthday, Jack – and thanks again.

It’s not just that it’s an unnecessary sequel (which it is). But it also threatens to tarnish what little reputation Ferrell still has.

Although that reputation apparently is a generational thing. Ferrell is a favorite among Gen Y and Millennial types, who were kids and teens when Ferrell was a “Saturday Night Live” favorite, which led to his real movie breakthrough in 2003 with “Elf” and “Old School.” (The less said about 1998′s “A Night at the Roxbury,” the better.)

Look, I recognize that comedy is extremely subjective; what makes me laugh may not amuse you and vice versa. It’s also a personal thing, a factor of class, politics, religion and other classifications, as well as individual funny bones.

Sure, you can make generalizations about comedy, i.e., that women are less amused by slapstick than men. Years ago, Jay Leno (pre-“Tonight Show”) had a routine about the things that divide men and women – and, at the top of the list, he listed the Three Stooges.

I had this brought home to me recently, when I was teaching a writing workshop for elementary-school kids and showed them a Laurel & Hardy short. None of them had ever seen L&H previously; the boys were howling and the girls mostly looked horrified. These were 9-to-11-year-olds.

But back to Will Ferrell, who has been commercially successful but artistically lazy almost from the start. “Anchorman” was the first film that was pure Ferrell (“Elf” was a starring vehicle in which he was cast; “Old School” wasn’t really his film) and it remains probably his best.

But that’s not saying much. “Anchorman” has too many slack moments, too many jokes that probably sounded funny in the writers’ room and which may have made them laugh on the soundstage but which play out too quickly on screen. And, like all of his films, it offers a few too many moments where Ferrell is obviously just riffing and making his colleagues laugh, but which come across as self-indulgent on screen.

To his credit, Ferrell regularly has stepped outside his comfort zone: “Stranger Than Fiction,” “Everything Must Go.” He can bring real pathos and depth to a role, when he puts his mind to it.

But too many of his movies are essentially one-joke efforts, with Ferrell riffing and otherwise improvising. And that includes “Land of the Lost,” “Semi-Pro,” “Blades of Glory” and “Step Brothers,” all of which are listed on a mind-bogglingly stupid list of Ferrell’s “best” films on Time.com recently.

While Ferrell may be able to extract all the comedic potential out of an established character in a five-minute sketch, his improv skills are limited. I wouldn’t actually apply Johnny Carson’s long-ago assessment of Chevy Chase (“He couldn’t ad lib a fart at a baked-bean dinner”) to Ferrell – but close.

As noted, comedy is generational. Comedians pop out of the zeitgeist at their moment – whether it’s Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, Jim Carrey, Mike Myers, Will Ferrell, Jack Black or Ben Stiller. They have their moment, when their humor synchs up with the national psyche (or, more accurately, the national psyche of 12-to-24-year-olds) for a year or two. Then they either fade away in a series of increasingly lame projects, or find a way to mutate and evolve to reach new audiences while trying new directions.

Ferrell keeps making gestures in that direction. But apparently the promise of a massive paycheck for ‘Anchorman 2” was too good to pass up. He’s never been a comedy giant – but he’s on his way to comedy-midget status.

And, while we’re at it, how about the same thing for movies shot to look like they’re hand-held documentaries, even when they’re just fiction films?

Yes, “Hunger Games,” I’m talking about you. I enjoyed the film, admired the way that author Suzanne Collins and writers Gary Ross and Billy Ray adapted a complicated novel written in first person. But that bogus documentary look – of jittery handheld cameras meant to give the footage a “You Are There” feeling, even when nothing is going on – is distracting (though not a dealbreaker for me).

Still, it called to mind two other films about teens already out this year: “Chronicle,” about a trio of friends who gain super-powers after being exposed to an asteroid; and “Project X,” about a group of friends who decide to throw the most epic party ever while the parents of one friend are away.

Both films ostensibly are constructed from footage shot by one of the kids and later assembled by some genius editor (who apparently watched all the raw material and instantly intuited the story, its structure and the characters’ arcs). Both films are shot by characters in the film: In “Project X,” he’s just a kind of creepy guy named Dax, who always happens to be in exactly the right spot and never gets particularly involved with the action. In “Chronicle,” he’s the least socially adept member of the newly empowered trio, the one who refines his powers farthest (so he can teleport and operate the video camera with his mind, freeing his hands to do evil once he turns bad under the influence of the powers themselves).

What hath “The Blair Witch Project” wrought? That film was a huge hit in 1999, with its “found-footage” shtick yoked to an effectively vague horror story; it was also one of the first viral movie hits on the Internet. “Blair Witch” made its creators rich (though not necessarily successful) and spawned a mini-industry of mock docs, ones that used modern surveillance and home-video technology to manufacture genre exercises like “Paranormal Activity” and Brian DePalma’s “Redacted.”

But the almost back-to-back release of “Chronicle” and “Project X” put into stark relief how threadbare the concept is becoming. It’s the same approach used on ABC’s recent (and short-lived) series “The River” – or the beginning of “District 9,” which made much better use of the assembled-footage approach to an unfolding story, before the filmmakers jettisoned it to simply make their film.

That’s not to mention, of course, TV shows, starting with “The Office” and continuing with “Modern Family,” which use the mock-doc structure in a way I consider to be of a piece with the Christopher Guest masterpieces, “Best in Show” and “A Mighty Wind.”

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed “The Hunger Games.” I thought it was exciting and romantic – not the Oscar juggernaut that some insisted was a possibility, but better than the first Harry Potter movie, with more emotionally complex material.

I thought “Chronicle” was only OK, and didn’t think “Project X” was a lot better as a movie – so why did I enjoy it so much? No doubt it was the brutally vulgar humor and the series of pranks, stunts and moments of grinding humiliation from which the film was assembled. I got several big laughs out of it, many more than I did from the direly overrated “21 Jump Street.”

But the fake-found-footage doc is officially ripe for retirement. Give it a rest for a while.