That '70s Show
I like time-traveling back to the late '60s, back when I was five or six years old, by watching old TV shows like Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. There, again, is Gary Owens and his slicked-back hair and oversized microphone. The studio backdrop is so faintly familiar as to border on eerie - a sort of ungraspable ghost-ishness. It lives in that odd border town between the familiar and unfamiliar, an image orginally imprinted on a brain that like a river was then near its source. One can forget that it records everything.
I watched a few minutes of a 1968 show before seeing the opening of a 1970 episode. And it was fun to spot the differences. The hair & sideburns on Rowan & Martin looked a bit longer. The easy animal energy and charisma of Martin seemed to have waned just a tad. The set had undergone a makeover too, the glitz of the disco '70s replacing the more laid-back '60s.
The show was much more juvenile than I remembered it. It seemed so adult, so hip then. But the hipness was, as it often is, simply boringly anti-authoritarian. Artie Johnson is a priest, sipping tea and above it all, making a joke about church teaching on the birth control pill. Later Dick Martin describes the pure joy of hitting a cop and a banged-up cop is shown doing spit takes with loose teeth. Many times. Cruelty to a policeman as theatre.
The lack of subtly in using sex to sell was almost humorous. You could see the producer's mind working when Rowan & Martin give their monologue in front of a dangling bare legs. It's as if the producer said, 'okay, in case the jokes don't work, let's distract them. Let's have a two-tiered coffee shop setting with Dick & Dan on the lower tier so viewers can look at a model's legs.' Reminds me of how a priest once said that once we get a sense of being manipulated by ads it's easier to resist their pull. We see the puppet-master behind the curtain and we no longer want to be puppets.
I extended the blast from the past by re-listening to a 1972 cassette tape made by my mom's uncle, a priest, who was practicing a sermon for a Baccalaureate mass. He talks about his generation having messed up the world, mentioning poverty, war and racism, and how he hoped they, with God's help, would fix the problems. The attitude is telling: there is humility - an "establishment" figure understanding the need to say we messed up (and at least with respect to racism that might be so). It also speaks to the idealism of the class of '72. They wanted to change the world.
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