From Mensagenda - July 2004
Third Side
by Tim Goetsch
Oh, To Be in Beautiful Downtown Burbank, Now that Spring is
Here
Sometimes a phoenix can rise from ashes, given a few decades.
I found one on the digital tier.
Anyone who has digital or satellite television can tell you
that, except for premium movie channels, channels above 100 are usually wastes
of bandwidth. For some reason, even a good show can turn boring if you need an
extra click of the remote to get to it. Yet there are exceptions, and one of
them is on the Trio channel, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.
Yes, that old dinosaur. There are two reasons for
relics like this: to tell us something about the good old days and to tell us
something about the bad old days. There was plenty of both in the late ’60s
and early ’70s. There’s one more reason to watch: it’s just plain fun.
Most people get up in the morning and go to work. The people on this show got up
and went to play.
The sets were painted in psychedelic colors. The jokes were
often topical, and sight gags could come in a series of five or six played over
the course of about a second. One of the show’s signature pieces was a
bikini-clad dancer painted with jokes and slogans. The show came off as hip and
groovy. But there were also bad puns, knock-knock jokes, buckets of water in
actors’ faces, and flubbed lines. A lot of the jokes were old when the
founding fathers were still alive. Being hip and topical was just groovy, man,
but they also took the name of the show seriously. When it comes to laughing,
quantity beats quality. Fortunately, Laugh-In had both aspects.
It was very much an ensemble cast, with each member having
his or her time in the limelight. I have special admiration for the guys for
whom the show was named, Dan Rowan and Dick Martin. There aren’t many stand-up
comedy teams nowadays, and those who do exist just don’t have the rapport that
the old-timers had. They could run a series of jokes fast and easy, all the
while breaking the primary rule of comedy: never laugh at your own material. You
can tell they were reading cue cards, especially Dick, but they were such smooth
operators that you had to wonder why they bothered. Blow a line? Laugh it off
and keep going.
I have to admit that the biggest joy of this is falling in
love with Goldie Hawn all over again. Those who know her only from her movies
might be surprised by her work on Laugh-In. If there’s ever a Dumb
Blonde Hall of Fame, her induction is assured. She perfected a sort of ditzy
verbal aikido. When it worked, it left everyone flummoxed. When it didn’t, she
would let out a nervous laugh that was so endearing that no one cared. The
producers often wrote dirty words on the cue cards, just to get that giggle out
of her.
You can hardly discuss Laugh-In without mentioning Jo
Anne Worley. She was a human hurricane, a loud, brassy cheerleader for fun and
all the appetites. I usually hate people like this, but Jo Anne was so good at
it that I forgave her.
Laugh-In was famous as a bastion of liberalism. Yet the
show often had conservative guests: John Wayne, Bob Hope, even Billy Graham.
Politics was far less personal in those days, and more respectful. Guests knew
they would have fun and would be given lines to suit them.
The episodes do show their age. Each show had a news segment,
pure topical humor. If you get all the references, hats off to you. As a part of
the news, there was also a News of the Future segment, "twenty years from
now." It’s always a shock to realize that twenty years from now was
fourteen years ago. And some of it came true, dammit.
When I watch an episode in a bad mood, it’s easy to get
into a rut. "He’s dead. Dead, too. Haven’t seen him since then. She’s
going to have a bad facelift. He still looks the same; that’s scary. Oh, Dan,
those cigarettes will kill you. Wife-beating jokes aren’t funny anymore."
At least we know they’re not editing the old episodes
| 
