Taking the Good with the Bad: Any Fish Today?

A noted book critic on a lecture tour warmed his audience with this opening: "There are good books and there are bad books much as there is good cholesterol and bad cholesterol." To this we can add that in the wonderful world of television there are good times and there are bad. Here, for example, are some of the good.

In or about 1970 I was happily doing time as the head writer of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. It was a lifestyle akin to being a favored inmate in a minimum-security prison: There were chores to be performed, but they were counterbalanced by the laughs that were the real currency of the day. A reporter asked me what it was like writing Laugh-In. As I recall, I compared it to being a stoker on an old-fashioned ocean liner. The sort of vessel where Henry Fonda met Barbara Stanwyck and then anything could and did happen. Those of us in the hold of that ship knew that on the upper decks beautifully garbed women and intolerably handsome men were dining, dancing, and drinking, but all we heard was "More coal, Scotty."

But there were times when the sun broke through and warmed the lives of those of us who kept the ship on course and on time. When Laugh-In first went on the air, it inherited a time slot that had the executives at NBC living on antacids and shattered dreams and sufficiently desperate to give the "go-ahead" to that "crazy show." The first episode aired on a Monday night and enjoyed the favor of all reviewers on Tuesday morning. A celebration was in order, and the writing staff, all twelve of us, headed out to lunch as a unit. Perhaps the Gods of Comedy directed our footsteps since we entered a restaurant where the occupants of almost every table were ignoring their burgers and bratwurst to sing the praises of that "crazy show" that was on last night. We, the writers, hastily divided up into teams of two and went table-to-table letting the diners know that we wrote that "crazy show." The rest of the week skipped by in a haze of happiness, and no one gave a damn how much coal was called for.

Laugh-In, when it first aired, did more than make viewers laugh, though it did a good job in that area; it did more than enrich the vocabulary of people with words and phrases that were soon embedded in the everyday speech of Americans. If you don't believe that, I suggest you look it up in your Funk and Wagnalls—more about those gentlemen later. What Laugh-In did that was probably its most telling effect on TV and the audience was to change the way people looked at the tube. Never before had images danced onto the screen and almost immediately been replaced by another and after that another and on ad infinitum in such rapid succession that they seemed to some a multi-colored blur. For verification you can check with any multi-hued member of the Farkle Family. And a little something about Freddy, Frankie, Felicia, and any other freckled member of that "F"-loving family later. In the beginning, to use a term popularized by another vehicle that changed people's lives, viewers and friends (who one hopes were also viewers) would whine, "Things go by too rapidly," "How are we expected to know what's going on," and similar complaints. The more sophisticated would smirk and let us know that they were hip or hep, depending upon how hip or hep they were, to our M.O.—that we cut so quickly so we could get subversive material past the censors. For subversive, read salacious. Not that it wasn't a worthy undertaking to do just that. But more uplifting words on smut are in the offing. "Too fast" was the anthem of year one. Year two, we heard a different song: "Boy, have you guys really slowed up." The truth, and you can bet...