Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In

By Ken Feil

The highest-rated network program during its first three seasons, comedy-variety show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (NBC, 1968–1973) remains an often overlooked and underrated innovator of American television history. Audiences of all kinds—old and young, square and hip, black and white, straight and queer—watched Laugh-In, whose campy, anti-establishment aesthetic mocked other tepid and serious popular shows. In Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, author Ken Feil presents the first scholarly investigation of the series whose suggestive catch-phrases “sock it to me,” “look that up in your Funk’n’Wagnalls,” and “here comes the judge” became part of pop culture history. In four chapters, Feil explores Laugh-In’s newness, sophisticated style, irreverence, and broad appeal. First, he considers the show’s indulgence of “bad taste” through a strategy of deliberate ambiguity that allowed audiences to enjoy countercultural, anti-establishment transgression and, reassuringly, conveyed the sense that it represented the establishment’s investment in containing such defiant delights. Feil considers Laugh-In’s camp, otherness, and “open secrets” as well as the show’s conflicted positions on the “private” issues of taste, sexuality, lifestyle, and politics. Sexual swingers, stoned hippies, empowered African Americans, feminists, and flamboyantly “nellie” men all filled Laugh-In’s routine roster, embodied by cast members Jo Anne Worley, Lily Tomlin, Chelsea Brown, Alan Sues, Johnny Brown, and Judy Carne, along with regular guests Flip Wilson, Sammy Davis Jr., and Tiny Tim. Related to these icons, Laugh-In reflected on hotly politicized current events: militarism in Vietnam, racist discrimination in the U.S., Civil Rights and Black Power, birth control and sex, feminism, and gay liberation. In its playful put-ons of the establishment, parade of countercultural types and tastes, and vacillation between identification and repulsion, Feil argues that Laugh-In’s intentional ambiguity was part and parcel of its inventiveness and commercial prosperity. Fans of the show as well as readers interested in American television and pop culture history will enjoy this insightful look at Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Nov 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9780814338230

Ken Feil

Ken Feil is senior scholar-in-residence in the Visual and Media Arts Department at Emerson College. He is the author of Dying for a Laugh: Disaster Movies and the Camp Imagination and has most recently contributed to the collections Queer Love in Film and Television and Reading the Bromance (Wayne State University Press, 2014).

Book preview

TV Milestones

Series Editors

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Jeannette Sloniowski

Brock University

TV Milestones is part of the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series.

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu.

General Editor

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Advisory Editors

Robert J. Burgoyne

University of St. Andrews

Caren J. Deming

University of Arizona

Patricia B. Erens

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Peter X. Feng

University of Delaware

Lucy Fischer

University of Pittsburgh

Frances Gateward

California State University, Northridge

Tom Gunning

University of Chicago

Thomas Leitch

University of Delaware

Walter Metz

Southern Illinois University

ROWAN & MARTIN’S LAUGH-IN

Ken Feil

TV MILESTONES SERIES

Wayne State University Press

Detroit

© 2014 by Wayne State University Press,

Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014931823

ISBN 978-0-8143-3822-3 (paperback); ISBN 978-0-8143-3823-0 (ebook)

For my parents, Naomi and Ed Feil, who introduced me to the world with love and laughter.

In memory of Alan Sues (1926–2011) and Billy Barnes (1927–2012).

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Between Inherently Tasteful and Rebellious and Weird: Laugh-In’s Taste Tests

2. Hip to the Put-On and Pitching Camp: Vulgarity, the Counterculture, and Beautiful Downtown Burbank

3. Mass Camp, Open Secrets, and the Agency of Otherness: Laugh-In’s Hip Closets

4. Verrry Integrated: Laugh-In’s Identity Politics and Other Humor

Conclusion. Put-Ons, Closets, Cop-Outs, and Legacies

Notes

References

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This little book is the product of a long journey, one that I could not have undertaken and completed without the support of so many friends, colleagues, and loved ones. First, many thanks to my editors Kristina Stonehill and Annie Martin, who got the ball rolling and patiently awaited my pitches (as well as socked it to me when my pace began to slack). I remain genuinely indebted to the extremely careful and perceptive advice offered by Wayne State University Press’s anonymous readers and copyeditor M. Yvonne Ramsey. I am so grateful to Steven Allen Carr, Michael DeAngelis, Jenny DiBartolomeo, Michael Selig, Janet Staiger, and Jess Wilton; without your insights, inspiration and wit, this book and I would be as fragmented as a Laugh-In episode. Thanks also go to Miranda Banks, James Delaney, Peter Flynn, Eric Schaefer, Jane Shattuc, and the Visual and Media Arts Department at Emerson College for consistent encouragement and support. For their invaluable and unending help with research above and beyond looking things up in my Funk ’n’ Wagnall’s, I am indebted to Robert Fleming and the research staff of Emerson College’s Iwasaki Library and Comedy Archive and to Amanda Stow and John Waggener of the American Heritage Center archive at the University of Wyoming. As always, I tender my infinite gratitude and affection to Michael S. Keane, whose patient help with research combined with his enthusiasm, sense of humor, and jovial tolerance (three years with Laugh-In!) made this writing experience a true love-in; you ring my bell, as Big Al might say. Thanks, gratitude, and love also go to Stucka and Stoughton for leaving your paw prints on this project. Finally, I offer my heartfelt thanks to the creators and cast of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In for devising a program so rich and weird that, despite the fickle finger of fate, it continues to fascinate, amaze, and entertain.

Introduction*

The comedy-variety show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (NBC, 1968–73) remains a woefully underrated innovator of commercial television in the United States during the late 1960s. Television histories commonly acknowledge Laugh-In’s contributions to video editing, ensemble comedy, political satire, and broadening network self-censorship policies, but the show remains overshadowed by both predecessors and successors: the anarchic, reflexive television comedy of Ernie Kovacs; the campy, Pop-influenced Batman (ABC, 1966–68); The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (CBS, 1967–69) and The Flip Wilson Show (NBC, 1970–74), two popular comedy-variety shows notable for their political significance; the taboo-breaking, socially conscious sitcom All in the Family (CBS, 1971–79); and the absurd, adult, politically incorrect, and quasi-underground sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live (NBC, 1975–present). Contemporary scholarship on television comedy persistently underestimates the inventiveness and impact of Laugh-In (Marc 1998, 124–25; Marc 1996, 157; Bodroghkozy 2001, 149–51; Erickson 2000, 40; Staiger 2000a, 86–87, 89, 98; Spigel 2008, 268–70; Thompson 2011, 5).

When Laugh-In reigned as the highest-rated network program during its second and third seasons, audiences reportedly reveled in what appeared to be an utterly novel and unbelievably hip, campy, anti-Establishment assault on white-bread, middlebrow network television (Erickson 2000, 145; Staiger 2000a, 12–13; Barthel 1971, 61). Commentators marveled over Laugh-In’s mockery of the tepid tastefulness, moral seriousness, and safe aesthetics of Lawrence Welk, the Cleavers, Ed Sullivan, and the like. The show’s unifying appeal garnered further attention. Old and young, square and hip, hawk and dove, African-American and Anglo-American, straight and queer, and highbrow and lowbrow audiences watched Laugh-In, engaged in its derision, and chanted the show’s suggestive catchphrases: Sock it to me, Look that up in your Funk ’n’ Wagnalls, and Here come the judge, among others. It appeared quite clear that Laugh-In had reached across the boundaries of age, taste, race, and class, for instance, when the New York Shakespeare Festival’s 1968 production of Hamlet quoted the program and evoked its irreverence to taste and racial decorum, from African-American actor Cleavon Little’s entrance as the sweet prince roaring Here come de judge to the audience screaming Sock it to ’em as Hamlet kills Laertes (Lahr 1968, D1).

Complementing Laugh-In’s newness, sophisticated style, brazen impertinence, and broad appeal, the show’s greatest innovation (and ultimate put-on) might have been perfecting the pose of playful ambivalence and the strategy of deliberate ambiguity.¹ Laugh-In presented prime-time audiences with the unprecedented means to enjoy countercultural, anti-Establishment transgression through the indulgence of bad taste and, reassuringly, conveyed the sense that the show represented the Establishment’s investment in containing such defiant delights.

In tandem with the show’s rebellion against good taste, Elana Levine (2007, 11, 22) credits Laugh-In with instigating television’s construction of the new sexual culture. Laugh-In openly targeted youth culture and its part-time, middle-of-the-road adherents (Gans 1999, 123) by integrating sexually explicit content "suggestively; the show could seem current and keep within the boundaries of acceptable TV content" simultaneously (Levine 2007, 21–23, 170). Laugh-In’s navigation of tastefulness seemingly upheld the limits imposed by NBC on the representation of sexuality as well as race, gender, and politics, even while the show regularly ridiculed censorship and good taste. The show’s numerous rapidly edited segments gave abrupt and questionably tasteful glimpses of countercultural figures: sexual swingers (women and men), stoned hippies, empowered African Americans, feminists, and flamboyant nellie men. Related to these icons, Laugh-In reflected on hotly politicized current events: militarism in Vietnam, racial discrimination in the United States, civil rights, Black Power, birth control, free sex, feminism, and gay liberation. Establishment figures always made guest appearances, led by hosts Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, two aging, tuxedoed, Las Vegas–style lounge performers whom no one could mistake for youth movement fellow travelers (Bodroghkozy 2001, 149). Establishment figures also materialized in recurrent characters, such as Rowan’s fascistic warmonger General Bullright and Lily Tomlin’s obsessively class-conscious Tasteful Lady, in addition to guest appearances from Richard Nixon, Bob Hope, John Wayne, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Liberace, Rock Hudson, and many others. Establishment stars appearing on Laugh-In continually expressed embarrassment about appearing on such a low, vulgar program, providing the normative square voice that confirmed Laugh-In’s hip, current value; appeased more conservative audiences; and redeemed the Establishment as hip.

The cast and producers of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. Courtesy of the American Heritage Center, Dan Rowan Collection.

The opening moments of a second-season episode capture these features of Laugh-In in addition to its signature reflexivity and Eisensteinian editing (Marc 1996, 157). First, a flamboyant film director (Alan Sues) addresses a blond belle wearing a pink gown and clutching a parasol, her back to the camera: "You’re perfect, absolutely perfect for Scarlet O’Hara in our new remake of Gone with the Wind! Except, there’s just one thing wrong. The woman spins around, revealing African-American comedian Flip Wilson in drag, who replies in the brassy voice later associated with Wilson’s character Geraldine: You mean my New York accent?" This cuts to Henry Gibson, Laugh-In’s resident folksy poet (famed for the rhyme Marshall McLuhan/What’re you doin’?). Gibson intones to the camera, "Tell it like it T-I-Z ’tis, Flip." Laconic Dave Madden (known soon after as Reuben Kincaid on The Partridge Family) then declares, Now, as a public service, here is a list of all the swingers in beautiful downtown Burbank: Helen. This cuts to two furniture movers (Dan Rowan and Dick Martin) carrying a table. When told by a woman (Ruth Buzzi) to remove the legs, they matter-of-factly break off the appendages. Next, a barber cheerfully peels the white bib off his client who, dressed in a white robe, energetically dons his Ku Klux Klan hood. Wilson reappears in a gi and karate-chops a cement block, stunned when his own hand shatters instead. Suddenly, Sammy Davis Jr. blurts to the camera/viewer, Two for flinching! The scene cuts to aging Hollywood star Van Johnson in front of a psychedelic backdrop disclaiming any responsibility for appearing: Hey, you better stop drinking. I’m not in this show. I’m on a war movie on Channel 14. This cuts to Greer Garson, another classical Hollywood icon posed in front of a psychedelic backdrop, who admits with royal bearing, I didn’t know that. Cut to show announcer Gary Owens, booming in a style redolent of radio’s Golden Age: "And now, from the pot room of the beautiful downtown Burbank Kitchen Utensil Factory, NBC proudly presents—well, let’s just say, NBC presents, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In! Following cast introductions, Wilson enters joined by Chelsea Brown, the show’s first regular African-American ensemble member, to usher in the titular hosts: Now here are two guys who can move into my old neighborhood anytime they want" (10/21/68).²

These inaugural few minutes crystallize the show’s strategy and appeal. The avant-garde editing style showcases the program’s McLuhanist modernity—which many TV critics noted, giving the show cultural credibility—and also ensured that meaning cohered only through speedy association. Innocent and suggestive gags, jokes, and sketches burst out in a frantically paced stream, with rapid-fire revelations of countercultural otherness and dissent alongside conventional comedy shtick, appearances from Establishment stars questioning the show’s cultural status, and self-mocking commentary about Laugh-In, NBC, and the institution of television. Wilson’s drag—racial, gendered, and regional—frames the themes of sexuality, race, taste, and counterculture that ensuing bits underscore: the references to swingers, the KKK, racist real estate practices and the Fair Housing Act, and marijuana. On the heels of the Gone with the Wind and KKK citations, Davis’s nonsensical insert becomes a sick pun on lynching. Other bits recall animation and vaudeville shtick, such as Wilson’s martial arts stunt, although the karate scene turns into a running gag with a racialized punch line later in the show. When Chelsea Brown pummels Wilson’s white opponent, he proclaims, Now that’s black power! Wilson’s racialized drag also recurs just a few minutes later, accompanied by a rejoinder that entertains racist stereotypes. Wilson—bewigged in auburn ponytails tied with a red ribbon and wearing a lace collar—remarks on Goldie Hawn’s line fumbling: That’s easy for you to say, honey. This cuts to Hawn, who replies, Not really, Sapphire, a reference to the infamous sitcom Amos ’n’ Andy (CBS, 1951–53).

The explosion of borderline taste motivates representatives of the Establishment—Van Johnson, Greer Garson, NBC’s stand-in Owens—to playfully question the show’s legitimacy, gestures that reconcile Establishment and counterculture. Doubting Laugh-In’s status suggests nostalgia for Establishment culture, the institutions of classical Hollywood and network TV, as well as hip, ironic validation of its members; as Garson utters anon, You know, being on this show should prove that I’m not all that stuffy. I may be square but I’m not stuffy. Owens likewise ironically unites the square Establishment and hip counterculture when using an outmoded presentation style to both imply NBC’s shame in Laugh-In and refer to marijuana.

Laugh-In milked a strategy of ironic, hip, camp ambivalence, dancing at the borders of socially charged binaries that middlebrow TV had always neatly divided: high/low, public/private, apolitical/political, and serious/frivolous, among others. This flirtation with subverting bourgeois taste also endowed the show and its audience with hip distinction. If middlebrow sitcoms and comedy-variety shows took their normative moral precepts and tasteful exposition seriously, Laugh-In conversely embraced the distanciation and aestheticism characteristic of highbrow taste and appropriated by the countercultural sensibilities, camp and hip. Bourdieu (1986, 178) defines distanciation as the refusal to invest oneself and take things seriously. . . . There is nothing more naïve and vulgar than to invest too much passion in the things of the mind or to expect much seriousness out of them. As distanciation resists the vulgarity of straightforward sincerity, aestheticism delights in celebrating what middlebrows would perceive as vulgar by conferring aesthetic status on objects or ways of representing them which are excluded by the dominant aesthetic of the time, or on objects that are given aesthetic status by dominated aesthetics. The cool formalism of aestheticism serves the detachment of distanciation, both of which motivate the