I have older-than-average parents for someone my age and, as such, was exposed to a variety of older films and television during my formative years. These all shaped (warped?) my sense of humor and understanding of the world and the people in it, and as a result my frame of reference for popular culture is far more broad than you would think if you based it purely on my age.
2018 was a big year for a television show that was incredibly innovative and even slightly dangerous for its time--Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. Laugh-In celebrated fifty years last year, and all six seasons are currently streaming on Amazon Prime. I have no qualms with this. I am reveling in the fact that with the push of a couple of buttons I can watch Judy Carne get water thrown all over her, or Ruth Buzzi beat Arte Johnson over the head with a handbag, or Jo Anne Worley chew the scenery with an operatic flourish, or just drool over Dan Rowan and his mustache. (What? He was gorgeous. You won’t convince me otherwise.)
Now, since Amazon got the rights to stream the shows themselves, Netflix (not to be left out) produced an event which was filmed at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, entitled Still LAUGH-IN: The Stars Celebrate. And this, friends, is what is making me want to scream.
I had high hopes going into it, really. The promos were pushing the fact that Ruth Buzzi, Jo Anne Worley, and Lily Tomlin would be performing along with a number of other actors, comedians, and show business people, so I figured it couldn’t be all bad. (After all, there are sadly only five of the original core cast of Laugh-In still alive--the other two are Arte Johnson* and Goldie Hawn, and there could be any of a number of reasons that they didn’t attend, so I won’t bother to speculate.) I assumed that the cast of the show were involved because Laugh-In formed their comedic style or inspired them to go into television, and that was the case, but I also assumed that in producing this tribute to a show they knew and loved, that they’d do their utmost to do it justice.
Friends, they did not.
Laugh-In originally aired between 1967 (the initial one-off show which then landed the series) and 1973. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. America sent its first round of troops to Vietnam in 1965. The Civil Rights movement was winding down. Hippie culture was on the rise. The Sexual Revolution was in full swing.
There was a lot going on.
The show had a unique ability to put a humorous spin on just about everything that was happening in the world at the time while also adhering (at least mostly) to far more stringent censorship regulations in television broadcasting than we have today. Not only were they forced to be clever in their satirization of the world at large, they were forced to be clever in their delivery of it, and that is where Still LAUGH-IN failed to live up to its idol. Let me put it this way; in 1970, you couldn’t drop an F-Bomb on television (or any number of other types of media). The subject of sex, though becoming less taboo, was still discussed in an obfuscated fashion. Drug use--mainly marijuana--was hinted at and suggested, but not openly touted. Still LAUGH-IN was floor-to-ceiling swearing, sex, and blatant pot jokes. No physical comedy entendres. (Castmember Dave Madden would toss a handful of confetti into the air whenever he had a “naughty thought”.) No thinly veiled references to sex. (“Blow in my ear and I’ll follow you anywhere.”) No obvious doubles for curse words. (“Look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls!”)
The core cast of Season Two (L to R, bottom to top): Dan Rowan, Dick Martin, Dave Madden,
Judy Carne, Henry Gibson, Ruth Buzzi, Jo Anne Worley, Chelsea Brown, Goldie Hawn,
Arte Johnson, Alan Sues, “Sweet Dick” Whittington
These days, we get away with a whole pile of things we couldn’t in media fifty (forty, thirty, twenty, ten…) years ago. Apart from an increasingly shortening list of things that aren’t allowed to be broadcast before the watershed, we can use what used to be ‘blue’ language with a minimum of fuss and we can talk about nearly everything, including topics some people might still find questionable or risqué. The few remaining true pearl-clutchers bemoan this loudly to anyone who will listen.
“Is nothing sacred?!”
::falls dramatically onto carefully placed fainting couch as necklace string breaks and pearls scatter, but they don’t scatter wantonly because that would be très vulgaire::**
This rapid relaxing of the level of what is ‘socially acceptable’ has made us complacent. There is no need to veil anything anymore. We can just come out and say it. I’d even go so far as to say that ‘shock value’ is going extinct--if it hasn’t gone that far already. The majority of the comedy in Still LAUGH-IN was lazy. The original show couldn’t afford to be lazy--they’d have been thrown off the air in a heartbeat. There was thought and craft and artistry behind Laugh-In’s writing because there had to be. In order to push the boundaries they pushed, they had to get creative on so many levels. I’m not sure there are too many more boundaries to push, nowadays.
Maybe this was the ideal end result of the shake-up in comedy that Laugh-In stoked. They were clever in 1972 for our right to say ‘fuck’ after 10 PM today. It’s not an inherently bad thing, but in giving us so much more freedom, we have lost our ability to look at things from skewed angles and offer a seemingly innocent product with subtext that reads any way but. No, I don’t think draconian censorship is a good idea, but you do have to admit it makes you work harder to circumnavigate it, and the results can be significantly more satisfying. And it’s not as though Laugh-In isn’t representative of its time in many ways--there are scenes they got away with that today wouldn’t make the final cut because, for just one example, blackface has been determined to be wildly inappropriate and out of respect it is no longer an acceptable comedic device.
Even with what we find to be its faults today, Laugh-In helped to pave the way for modern media, and it is certainly deserving of tribute on the august occasion of its 50th year. But you’re not going to do it any justice if you overlook the thing that made it work in the first place. Still LAUGH-IN could have paid considerably better homage to its source material if someone had just taken the time to really think about what they were doing rather than taking the easy way out by going for the obvious jokes. In the end, George Schlatter seemed to be enjoying it, so maybe that’s all that matters. But was I deeply, deeply disappointed?
“You bet your sweet bippy!”
*At time of writing this was accurate. Mr. Johnson passed away on July 3rd, 2019, one day before this post published. (I found out the morning of 7/4.)
**Laugh-In even took a shot at the pearl-clutchers--when she joined the cast in the middle of Season 3, Lily Tomlin created the character of Mrs. Earbore, The Tasteful Lady, who was everything you'd think a pearl-clutcher would be...until she stood up.
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