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What the two shows do have in common is their audience: both draw the majority of their viewers from the 12-to-18-year-old bracket. "We've got that wonderful generation of kids that no one else has been able to reach," says Laugh-In's Director Gordon Wiles. "LaughIn entertains all three generations enough so that nobody leaves. And you have no idea how many parents come back into communication with their kids, just sitting on the sofa and laughing at the same show with them. Nobody else is reaching the teens and subteens. That's why we go for a tremendous amount of hip, on-the-nose, topical humor."
Downright touching, this notion of parents and children bridging the generation gap while watching some old vaudeville skit in mod undress. But Wiles may be a little too sanguine. Quite a few unenlightened parents of subteens still feel that Laugh-In is not exactly a substitute for The Flying Nun.
Now that the Laugh-In format has been proved, everyone else is trying for more of the same. Says Bob Finkel, executive producer of the Jerry Lewis and Phyllis Diller shows: "We've been forced to change our style. Our old form is archaic, oldfashioned. To stay alive in this business, you have to be cautious because you can be hurt, but once a show makes a hurdle like Laugh-In has, everything changes."
The most obvious changes are shorter skits, more slapstick and, above all, racier material. You Can't Do That on Television!, the pilot for a new series recently shown on ABC-owned stations, was a blatant copy of Laugh-In, but it was so intent on being shocking that it forgot to be funny. Still, the imitations seem to prove that the medium has caught up with Rowan and Martin's notions of what TV comedy should be. "The day of the highly polished show is over," says Martin. "We use the medium for what it's for—visual comedy. The greatest punch lines are in Punch and The New Yorker. A picture, a one-line caption . . . bam! That's how we do Laugh-In."
Adds Rowan: "It's important to have waited, as Dick and I did for a long time, to do in our business what we felt should be done. Not just another situation show, but the sort of show that changes the TV picture, that every now and then says something. That's satisfying, and it makes a whole lot of the dues paying worthwhile."
Rowan, the son of a carny worker, began paying his dues at four, dancing a jig and singing The Wearin' of the Green on the plank stage of a touring carnival. He was born in Beggs, Okla., a way station along the carnival route. Orphaned at eleven, he was raised in a Colorado orphanage, hitched a ride to Los Angeles after graduating from high school. At 19, he landed a job as a junior writer at Paramount Pictures-When World War II intervened, he enlisted in the Air Force and flew P-40s in New Guinea. He was shot down there in 1943 and was severely injured in a crash landing. After that, he lived out