I think somebody played this clip on TV last night. I picked it up from Ben Smith.

An interesting sidebar to the Batman rehearsal of an old rhetorical trick we’ve seen revived by McCain ads asking, “Who is Barack Obama”; is that Burgess Meredith, who plays The Penguin, was blacklisted in the 1950’s after being declared an unfriendly witness by HUAC. Various online sources note a hiatus of about a decade in his film career, though he continued to perform on Broadway, on radio, and in television during that time. His IMDb bio lists a number of Meredith quotes, among which is this revealing one about the Batman series.

I did ‘Batman’ for two reasons, one of which was the salary. The other was that, after the first few episodes, ‘Batman’ became the in-thing to do. Everybody…would either play a villain or appear as himself in that cameo showcase where a celebrity would poke his head through the window of a building that Batman and Robin were climbing…Actually, we didn’t get as much money from the show as you might think, although we were paid decent money for the feature film version. The main impetus to continue appearing on ‘Batman’ – beyond the desire to get some TV work – was that it was fashionable.

Apparently Meredith also suffered from a bipolar disorder. For more on the Hollywood blacklist, this site has a good many useful links.

And then there’s this (also from IMDb):

I know we have about 23,905 rumors about The Dark Knight sequel floating around the web, from potential villains to casting news to possible titles. Have you heard about the latest one? John McCain might be playing The Penguin! That’s right, if the whole President of the United States thing didn’t work out, he can always rule the box office instead of the country. Okay, so no, it’s not really a real casting rumor. It’s just a little joke that’s been populating YouTube because at his rally last Friday, McCain accidentally channelled Burgess Meredith’s Penguin squawk while talking about Sarah Palin.

There are already a couple of videos of McCain as The Penguin, but this one is my favorite.