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"At first," says Schlatter, "everybody turned us down. Nobody could identify with the show. There was no guide through this maze of wildness." Then NBC Vice President Ed Friendly pronounced himself so impressed with the show's possibilities that he quit his job to form a production company with Schlatter. Finally, at Friendly's urging, NBC gave the go-ahead to shoot a one-hour pilot of the show.
Inauspiciously, the network slipped the show in at midseason 1967 as a replacement for the slumping Man from U.N.C.L.E. CBS's Lucy and Gunsmoke, two top-rated shows sharing the opposing time slot, never knew what hit them. Within twelve weeks, Laugh-In leaped from 48th to fourth place in the ratings and tripped off with four Emmys as the most successful program of the season. What brought that success was not only the partnership of Schlatter, Friendly, Rowan and Martin, but the group of bright, young, remarkably versatile comics who people the show. Among the regulars:
> Judy Carne, 29, from Northampton, England, played cabaret revues in London before coming to the U.S. in 1961 to star in the short-lived TV series Fair Exchange, The Baileys of Balboa and Love on a Rooftop. A spunky little pixie of a girl, she is the one forever getting drenched with water when she cries "Sock it to me!" Since she is presumably a little wiser now, the scripts go to elaborate lengths to get her to utter the deathless phrases. Now, when she appears as a geisha girl and says, "It may be rice wine to you, but its saki to me," kersplash!
> Arte Johnson, 39, from Chicago, is described by Martin as "the man with a thousand faces, which makes bed check difficult after some of the cast parties." Johnson, who used to do TV commercials and cartoon voices, makes as many as ten complete costume changes each show. He appears as a double-talking Russian, a freaked-out Swede, the German soldier ("Verrry interesting"), a dirty old man and a guru ("Man who speaketh with forked tongue should never kiss a balloon").
> Goldie Hawn, 22, a former chorus girl from Tacoma Park, Md., is the resident dumdum who takes all the verbal pratfalls. In the thick of quick exchanges, she will giggle, shake her haystack pile of blonde hair and say in a little meowing voice: "I forgot the question." At first, her fluffs were a case of misreading the cue cards. Now they are part of the act, as when she bites her lip and chirps: "I don't like Viet Cong because in the movie he nearly wrecked the Empire State Building."
> Ruth Buzzi, 28, from Wequetequock, Conn., plays Gladys, the man-hungry frump in the hairnet and ratty sweater—a character she developed when playing the spinster secretary in a summer-stock production of Auntie Mame. A graduate of 20 cabaret revues, she excels at song-and-dance numbers but is guaranteed to break it up when, as Gladys, she confides: "I never go out with soccer players. I hear they're not allowed to use their