This Day in Cultural History

January 22, 1968 – Several months after an initial special earned excellent ratings, “Rowan and Martin’s ‘Laugh-In” premiered on NBC and became an overnight success with its fast-paced sketches, one-liners, and guest cameo appearances.

Throughout its five-year run on Monday night, the comedy-variety series spawned a slew of cultural catchphrases, given great currency in their own time but without a lot of staying power: “You bet your sweet bippy,” “Veeery interesting,” “Here come da judge! Here come da judge!”, “Beautiful Downtown Burbank” and “Sock it to me!”

(The last was delivered at one point by GOP candidate Richard Nixon, in a successful attempt to counteract a lethal image—a combination of cutthroat politician and weeny. “Tricky Dick’s” appearance was almost as bizarre as his later Oval Office handshake with Elvis Presley – but decidedly less surreal than the fact that a photograph of this historic meeting has become the most requested item at the National Archives.)

The show’s “hosts,” Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, took on the usual roles that comedy teams assumed during that time: one (Martin) a dimwit, the other (Rowan) a suave straight man.

In the last few years, though, I have come to think of Rowan’s image as one of the most colossal frauds ever perpetrated on a TV audience, because early in the 1960s, the Las Vegas comedian had enraged mob kingpin Sam Giancana by making a play for his mistress, the singer Phyllis McGuire.

(Goodfella (slang)—n. – A Mafia gangster, given to fitting designated contract hits and people who rub him the wrong way with cement shoes. Synonym: “Wiseguy.”)

(Dumbfella (slang)—n. Anyone who sleeps with wife, mistress, broad, etc. of said goodfella. Ex.—Dan Rowan).

Some stars of the show saw their celebrity fade almost as soon as the series ended—Ruth Buzzi, Alan Sues, Arte Johnson, Judy Carne, and the execrable Tiny Tim. (For anyone younger than 40, wondering who this last person could be, aside from a character out of Dickens, here’s a piece of advice: Don’t go there, son!).

Others enjoyed a few other brief moments in the spotlight (Henry Gibson in the Robert Altman film Nashville, JoAnne Worley more recently on Broadway, in The Drowsy Chaperone).

The most enduring entertainment figures to come from the show are two actresses and one off-screen creative force.

Goldie Hawn became best known on the show as the ditzy blonde who gyrated in a bikini with wisecracks scrawled on her midriff when she wasn’t giggling helplessly at something or other. Within two years of her first appearance, she had won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Cactus Flower and was well-launched on a multiple-decade career as a comic force in films.

Lily Tomlin played Ernestine the nosy phone operator and Edith Ann, the mischievous six-year-old, before scoring a year-long Broadway hit in the mid-1980s with her one-woman show, The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe.

The off-screen figure was Lorne Michaels, a writer for the show who began to tire of its constraints. Nearly a decade after Laugh-In’s premiere—by which time it had become a spent force and shuffled off to TV Valhalla—Michaels created and produced another variety show, Saturday Night Live. More than 30 years after its first airing, that show remains a fixture in the TV firmament.