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Bartender: "Are you sure you're old enough to drink?"
Girl: "Of course I am!'
Bartender: "O.K , O.K., what'll you have?"
Girl: "A Scotch and wa-wa."
In short, along with genuine wit, much of the humor is terrible/funny or just terrible/terrible. A lot of the material would have seemed dated in New Jersey burlesque during Prohibition. Can they really mean it—using this sort of stuff on TV in 1968? Laugh-In's producers know bad jokes when they use them. There is an element of camp and reverse sophistication in this, reminiscent of making a cult of Charlie Chan movies and Captain Marvel comic books. Besides, the outrageous jokes are thrown into the machinery of the show to create contrast and surprise, and to give viewers a chance to catch up with some fast, good jokes that may have come earlier—or so the show's apologists rationalize it.
The visual humor is often more original than the verbal kind. True, the show's basic gag, endlessly repeated, is throwing a pail of water at an endlessly unsuspecting girl—as simple as Punch being whacked over the head or a clown being squirted with Seltzer water, and somehow disarmingly innocent. Periodically, a bikini-clad girl is shown dancing the boogaloo; then the camera moves in to reveal that the girl is painted head to feet with silly graffiti. Other sight gags are madly literal-minded or engagingly sly. When the announcer calls for a station break, the camera will switch to a trick film clip showing an elephant's foot squashing a TV station. When a commercial is announced, a man ostensibly from Allstate Insurance will cup his hands around a tiny house, saying "You're in good hands with . . .," and drop the house with a great shattering crash. In other sequences, a girl steps out of the shower, answers the phone, hands it into the shower and says, "It's for you."
Like many variety shows, Laugh-In features new talent—except that the talent is deliberately askew: a virtuoso on the kazoo, a birdcall impressionist, or an all-thumbs juggler. It was in one such segment, for example, that the show inflicted on a helpless nation that hitherto unknown dingaling, Tiny Tim.
Wacky, rapid-fire comedy is not new to TV. Indeed, Laugh-In's attack has touches of the late Ernie Kovacs, smatterings of early Sid Caesar and Steve Allen, and a-pie-in-the-face splat or two of Soupy Sales. But on Laugh-In, the calculated aim is to create a state of sensory overload, a condition that audiences nowadays seem to want or need. Blackouts, slapstick, instant skits pinwheel before the eyes; chatter and sound effects collide in the ear. Other TV variety shows can be dropped intact onto a theater or nightclub stage, but Laugh-In would be impossible anywhere but on television. For one thing, each show is stitched together from about 350 snippets of video tape. Some of them—a flash of graffiti, for example, or a mugging face—last only an eighth of a second. Executive Producer George Schlatter calls this "energy film," a technique that gives a kind of booster burst of speed to the show. Explains Dick Martin: "Nobody's going to appreciate everything on our show. But if one gag goes completely over your head, there'll be another along in a few seconds that cracks you up and leaves