Painfully Uneven, Irritating to Watch Today...

My comments were aimed at the one who started this thread...not you, jr.

but it's a mainstream media sociopolitical document for the time.

I mean, seriously. It is. But instead of resisting it, watch it in a certain context.

To the OP... So, let me get this straight. You're not only dissing the show, but the people who watched it when it first ran? And you're how old? Oh, not even born yet? This means that you're watching a show made in the 60's from a 21st century perspective. Is that right?

I'm sure that when that show was made in the late 60's, it was done with contemporary audiences and current events in mind and not for someone watching it 40 years later. It's a show that you have to take in the time and the context to appreciate.

I was there during it's first run, and it's something we looked forward to watching. There was nothing else on TV like it. Smother's Brothers was good too, but it wasn't as fast paced as Laugh-In.

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I'm just a patsy!

The show IS a mainstream (or, rather, mainstream-trying-hard-to-be-swinging-and-hip) socio/political/popculture/showbiz document of its time period. A time capsule, if you will. And it DOES have truly funny moments. So, for those of us who were around in the late '60s-- I was seven when it started-- it does have some value. (Granted, the only episode I've seen in decades is the 25th-anniversary special, which I taped off the air in '93, and that may be enough for me. Then again...)

So the players "look like Bob Hope trying to be Fonzie" when making political points? Well, I would point to, for example, Dan Rowan's "Fickle Finger of Fate" segments-- in one of them, seen on the 25th-anniversary compilation, he was taking dead aim at Pentagon overspending on unnecessary billion-dollar (corporate) weapons projects, with lots of specifics-- which, at the time, probably did not please the NBC corporate suits one bit. I get the impression that Rowan had some of the most deeply felt political views on the show, or at least was in a powerful enough position there that he could openly express them. And by the way, other than Laugh-In and the Smothers Brothers, there were NOT many comedy shows in the late '60s (nor many American network entertainment shows of ANY kind) that would ever explicitly criticize the Pentagon and its corporate enablers or call for the Vietnam war to end! You may not realize that such things were not at all common on ABC, NBC, or CBS in those days-- not by a long shot. It was a completely different television era. No Jon Stewart, no Colbert, no Democracy Now. No cable networks-- just the Big Three and, in some places, NET (predecessor of PBS). So when Laugh-in went after topical issues, it could, as a top-rated show, have a real effect on viewer opinion. Not that they were some great voice of radicalism, but they did take some chances, not always playing it as safe as they COULD have.

I'm glad the OP has backed away somewhat from the initial post, because that rant reminded me of some of the hipper-than-thou, more-politically-committed-than-thou screeds I used to read in the '80s, in the British music press and the Village Voice, until finally I got fed up with all the sneering, self-righteous, self-satisfied attacks that seemed intended to build up the prestige of the writers at the expense of their targets, and at the expense of any kind of fairness or reasonable perspective.

Does Laugh-In seem dated? Well, uh, yeah. And so does the Smothers Brothers show in some ways. But does anybody think the people who made those shows ever imagined we would be watching them on DVDs and downloads almost 45 years later?!