He never thought of the era when he wrote TV comedy as the Golden Age. For him that honorific was reserved for the earlier epoch of Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner. But Marty Nadler, staff writer and producer in the 70s and 80s of Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Chico and the Man, The Odd Couple, Perfect Strangers, Valerie, and Amen, was part of a time in Hollywood entertainment that, hands down, is considered Most Funny.

It’s official: Kindle and e-books may flourish, but real books with pages you can turn are here to stay. Just as television thrived without disposing of movies, books and book lovers will never go away. Last Sunday’s Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival proved it.

Not to start on too bossy a note, but do go out and catch all five plays and musical productions of the African American Theatre Festival being performed, mostly, at the Vineyard Playhouse and running this week through early September.

The festival began this past Wednesday with Root, a one-woman play written and performed by Vanessa German and directed by Heather Arnet. The play travels from 1980s Los Angeles to the Civil Rights marches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to drug-saturated Juarez, Mexico to a battered and drenched New Orleans.

At the age of thirteen Helen Phillips made a New Year’s resolution to write and read a poem a day. She stuck with this pledge until the age of 21. Ms. Phillips is now 29 years-old, an award winning writer, and on tour with her first novel, And Yet They Were Happy. She will appear today at 5 p.m. at the Dragonfly Gallery in Oak Bluffs.

“Hi, is this Tim Conway?”

“Depends. Are you a bill collector?”

Already I’m laughing over the telephone. The comedian, star of movies and two of television’s most successful series of all time — McHale’s Navy which aired in the 1960s, and the 1970s Carol Burnett Show — is most likely older than 25, but his lighthearted manner makes him sound improbably young.

First, let it be said that on the evening this critic attended the Vineyard Playhouse’s outdoor performance of The Comedy of Errors, Friday, July 22, when the weather was so warm it felt as if the entire Island was holding a Bikrum hot yoga class (for those unfamiliar with the workout, the purpose is to reproduce a boiling afternoon in Calcutta), the heat itself became a starring character.