Back when the Playboy Channel started on cable, they had a series of executives who operated on the false principle that there were things their subscribers wanted to watch other than nude women. This was apparently what they had to tell certain higher execs (especially Mr. Hefner) in order to get the job. Hef always wanted to believe that the Playmates were just one reason of many that people bought the magazine…and that may have been so but it wasn't true of the channel.
When there were no nude women, there were no viewers. But for a few years there, they produced and programmed a lot of shows that either contained no nude women or at least long periods when there were no nude women. Eventually, as Playboy's fortunes declined, they surrendered and began giving the audience what it wanted. Before that capitulation, they ran a lot of really odd shows.
I got the station for free back then and I remember many cheaply-produced roasts starring older comedians. In one, Comedians A, B and C would roast Comedian D…and then in the next one, Comedians B, C and D would roast Comedian A and then in the next one….well, you get the concept. The budgets apparently did not allow for writers so little or nothing was prepared specific to the person being roasted. The comics would just get up, do their usual acts and try to work the name of the "honoree" into the jokes somewhere.
The following is an example. It's from a roast of Milton Berle…and I suspect if you were a comedy writer back then, there was no easier assignment you could get than to write jokes about Milton Berle. You could write about his dick, about his age, about his thievery of everyone else's jokes…it was a cinch. As I recall, almost no one had much to say about those topics. They just told dirty stories and tossed Uncle Miltie's name in here and there. Here's Jackie Vernon doing that…
