Red-letter day coming up

[bpatrick]

Monday, January 22, 1968: Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In
debuts in NBC, and variety shows will never be the
same. With its fast cuts (some 250 bits in a typical
hour), topical (but not all that raunchy) gags, catchphrases
like "sock it to me", and crazy characters (Arte Johnson's
lecherous Tyrone F. Horneigh, who was forever chasing Ruth
Buzzi's Gladys Ormphby, for example), the show is soon the
talk of the country, and is number one for two seasons (1968-70).

One of the writers was Lorne Michaels, who would go on to
create the very different Saturday Night Live.

Laugh-In was first seen as a special leading into the Miss
America Pageant on September 9, 1967. NBC picked it up to
replace The Man From U.N.C.L.E. in January. But the U.N.C.L.E.
men got in one last shot, or at least one of them did: on the
first regular telecast of Laugh-In, Leo G. Carroll (as Alexander
Waverly) was shown talking to an unseen Napoleon Solo and Illya
Kuryakin on a two-way radio, informing them that he had "found
THRUSH headquarters."

Richard Nixon, then running for president, uttered the immortal
words, "Sock it to ME?" on one fall 1968 telecast.

Goldie Hawn, Lily Tomlin, and Jo Anne Worley all became famous
as a result of this show; Richard Dawson was also a regular at
one point.

In 1977, NBC tried to revive the show; one of the regulars was
a then-unknown comic named Robin Williams. When Williams clicked
in Mork & Mindy a year later, NBC reran the 1977 episodes, playing
up Williams' contribution, which was actually quite minimal.

Laugh-In also inspired Turn-On (from the same producer, George
Schlatter, who also created Real People), which lasted one telecast
on ABC (February 5, 1969). The most successful Laugh-In copy
was Hee Haw (from different producers), which lasted from 1969-92,
by which time an entire generation that never heard of Laugh-In
had been born.

 

[rugrats1]

> The most successful Laugh-In
> copy
> was Hee Haw (from different producers), which lasted from
> 1969-92,
> by which time an entire generation that never heard of
> Laugh-In
> had been born.
>

Lest we forget the Canadian import "You Can't Do That On Television", which was practically a kiddie version of "Laugh-In" (down to the lockers, which was their "joke wall"); it was seen on Nick from 1981 to 1993, and helped defined the network to what it is today (their trademark "green slime" (YCDTOTV's answer to "Sock it to me") was derived from the show).

 

[Joseph_Gallant]

Every Monday night from 1968 through 1973, I would impatiently wait for 8 o'clock and "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In" to start.

Actually, my parents were the ones who got me to watch. They had seen the pilot the previous September and thought that it was the funniest thing on TV since the glory days of Sid Caesar. I'm too young to have seen Sid Caesar's best work when it was broadcast on live TV in the 1950's, but "Laugh-In" was the funniest thing I had ever seen.

One secret was that so many jokes, non sequiters, and funny things were put into the show, often one after the other, than only a few needed to be funny for the show to appear to be very funny. But almost everything on that show was funny, which resulted in my laughing nonstop for a full hour (minus about ten minutes of commercial time) every week.

If my memory serves me correct, only a few portions of each show (Rowan and Martin's opening banter, the "Party" scenes, the "Laugh-In News" and the "Joke Wall") were shot with a studio-audience. The rest of the show (usually very short clips) was shot without an audience, and I believe canned laughter was used for those parts of the show.

Had "Laugh-In" come onto the scene four or five years earlier, it probably would have been shot entirely on film since videotape editing was still in its infancy. But major advances were made in tape editing during the middle 1960's, which made it practical to shoot and edit "Laugh-In" on tape.

If there is such a thing as a Hall Of Fame for videotape, the team of videotape editors who worked on "Laugh-In" should be inducted, for they did a lot to advance the art of tape editing.

It's safe to say that "Laugh-In" speeded-up the pace of virtually all genres of television programming, not just comedy/variety.