I've really been enjoying the reruns of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In that have been running on the Trio satellite channel — though, as is too often the case on cable, they're rerunning episodes they've already rerun, long before they've cycled through all they could run. The shows hold up pretty well, perhaps because, in trimming to allow more commercials, someone has excised some of the topical references that are now lost to obscurity. (On the other hand, one of the charms of these reruns is the occasional quote of a then-current commercial or catch-phrase, or jokes about the now-forgotten Everett Dirksen or William Proxmire. Recently, we hit a week of shows wherein every third joke was about Twiggy's lack of a bustline.)
One of the things that makes the shows work (and this was sadly absent on a Laugh-In knock-off I once worked on — taping in the same studio, no less) was that the cast had a tremendous sense of family and fun. As a kid, I sometimes went over to NBC to watch them tape Laugh-In and to see this spirit in person…but it clearly bled onto the screens, as well. With the occasional exception, the performers enjoyed doing the show, especially when performing as themselves or while doing one of Billy Barnes's clever special material numbers. There have been shows since that fired a lot of jokes at the audience but without much impact. There have also been shows that looked like the cast was having fun — often, too much to care about entertaining us at home. But this one was a hit, I suspect, because it found the middle ground. And also because Goldie Hawn and Judy Carne were so cute.
If you don't get Trio, which is more than likely, there's a big VHS/DVD home video release about to come our way. (And, by the way, one can also order DVDs of old Johnny Carson highlights over at www.johnnycarson.com. Johnny probably needs the money because he hasn't worked lately.)