#they goof off onstage mainly

[voidlesscreator]

Reanimated AU

Band name - "Reanimated"

First drawing (drawn by both myself and @The_Art_Imp on Instagram).

Danny's stage persona "Crown Prince"

[potahun]

Some more Qin Shen Shen moment translations (9/?)

Link to other translations so far.

In cuts outside the final broadcast - part of the Xiao Gui series:

a. Qin Shen Shen playing quick questions, quick answers. 

ZS: Apart from me, who in the remaining three young singers (in Group A) do you most want to be paired with?

LKQ: Xiao Gui.

ZS, sourly: Ohhhh...............So...collaborating with me, you feel really... *makes motions with his hands* like there aren’t any sparks, is that right?

LKQ: ......Do you really have this little confidence in yourself?

ZS: Yes. (frenetically to the camera) I really am someone who’s extremely insecure and extremely not self-confident!! (LKQ: OK Next question, next question!!)

b. Qin Shen Shen play the lie detector game. One asks the questions, the other answers with their hand on the lie detector. If the person answering lies, they get an electric shock.  

ZS, handing the lie detector to LKQ: Teacher, put your hand here. (LKQ complies) Who’s the young singer you most want to be paired up with?

LKQ: .....Apart from you, right?

ZS, sassily: Uh, no, I’m also in it.

LKQ: Then you! 

ZS frantically presses on the button to activate the lie detector, but LKQ doesn’t get shocked. 

ZS, upon hearing the sound signalling that LKQ hasn’t lied: Ah? *gasps and covers his mouth*

LKQ: Okay lah! *smug as fuck*

ZS continues to pretend being overwhelmed with a whole flurry of shocked faces, before suddenly going “oh” and putting his hand on the lie detector:

ZS: Not me, though. (Both crack up)

c. Continuation of the lie detector game.

ZS, positioning LKQ’s hand on the lie detector: Amidst all the senior singers...

LKQ, anticipating: Mm. Me. (ZS: Apart from you.) 

Both cackle.  

ZS: Apart from you...

LKQ, already guessing the question: Aren’t you copying my question? (LKQ had asked the same question to ZS earlier but ZS had refused to answer)

ZS: Uh, is that not allowed? You didn’t fix any rules -- Who sings the worst? *activates lie detector*

LKQ: Mmmneh, it’s the same question! What’s fun about that...?

ZS, still sassily: Uh, answer quickly.

LKQ: What’s fun about that? *leans to repeat* Who...? Who - who...

ZS: ...sings the worst. .....We can give you ample time to think about it. 

LKQ, in his bullshitting voice: .........Actually, everyone still has a lot of room for improvement. (ZS: Huh??) *LKQ cracks up and gets zapped*

LKQ falls over on the sofa, dead with laughter, while ZS rushes over to grab him:

ZS: For real?? For real?? For real?? (LKQ, still dying of laughter: Yeah...!)

LKQ, whimpering after getting up: Did I say something wrong? (ZS, singing to the camera: Being invincible is so, so lonely) ....Right...I said something wrong. *shakes his hand* Whoaa!

ZS: Seriously? Did you really get zapped? (LKQ: Yeah!) For real? ...Wow!

LKQ (to the staff): I didn’t lie! (T/N: with the wrong intonation) *leans towards ZS* is it lie?

ZS, correcting the intonation: It’s “lie”.

LKQ: Lie. (to ZS) I didn’t lie!

ZS: You did lie. (to the camera) After all, how could the senior singers who come to our show have any problems?

Note: Tbh this cut is impossible to translate in written form without the visual that goes with it so here is the link. The part at issue starts from 1:20 onwards.

d. Episode 12, Backstage: Li Keqin and Zhou Shen are talking about the 3 songs they are singing for the episode, including “Your Name, My Last Name”, a Cantonese song that Zhou Shen was unfamiliar with.

ZS: We haven’t rehearsed it that much, actually. 5-6 times? 6-7 times?

LKQ: Definitely less than Xiao Ge, that’s for sure.

ZS, scoffing: Xiao Ge, someone here is not satisfied with you.

LKQ: So it means we’re still not (ZS: satisfied) serious enough about rehearsals.

ZS, surprised: Huh? (LKQ: Yeah!) We are very serious!

LKQ: They just casually rehearse 10 times, 17 times...right, while we just rehearsed 7-8 times.

ZS: But to be honest, even if I rehearsed this song any longer today, no matter how many times I rehearse it, it’d be meaningless. Because I need to go home and really tame it. I have to tame a song until it’s familiar, until...until it’s in my head--

LKQ: I know you don’t like this song. You’ve never heard of it, and you say it’s meaningless. *giggles* (ZS, laughing and touching his arm: That’s not it. It’s just....it’s just...)

LKQ, goofing around with lots of hand movements: After you finish singing it you’ll know how good this song sounds, and also, you will love it more!!!

ZS: That’s not it, it’s just, that song isn’t in my head yet...

LKQ (to the camera): It’s mainly that he’s slept too little.

ZS, ignoring the remark: If I kept rehearsing it onstage, I feel like it’d be a bit...Right now I just want to hurry home, I want to listen to it while I take my shower, study it while I take off my make-up... The competition’s tomorrow. (to LKQ) It’s the last episode, Da Ge. (LKQ: Right) *in Cantonese* Da Lao~

LKQ: Even though out of the two of us, I’m the one who’s relatively more familiar with the song “Your Name My Last Name”--

ZS: You’re not relatively more familiar; you’re super familiar with it.

LKQ closes his eyes and sighs.

LKQ: --because it’s in cantonese, for me it’s comparatively easier to handle. But actually, I also have a lot of parts where I need to go home and polish the harmonisation.

e. Episode 12, Backstage: Li Keqin and Zhou Shen are talking about the 3 songs they are singing for the episode, including “Hua”, which they’d originally prepared for Ep. 11:

ZS, referring to “Hua”: This is a song we’ve prepared before, so we’re very familiar with it. There’s no problem with it.

LKQ: There’s no problem when we get the demo a little bit earlier.

ZS: “Hua” is a song we were going to sing last time. Basically, it’s about showing a different style, I guess. “Hua” is also a song in which teacher Keqin sings in a cute way that people wouldn’t expect -- in a refreshing way. (to LKQ) I think it’s a cute and refreshing style.

LKQ, slightly sassy (to ZS) : Actually, I had a lot of songs in the past which were very cute and very refreshing... (ZS: Such as) It’s just that I didn’t get to show them with *motions with his hands* “someone else” in this show-- 

ZS: So it makes you regret that you’ve been singing with me until now?

LKQ stops, closes his eyes.

LKQ: No, I meant -

ZS, laughs: Alright.

LKQ: I meant I didn’t have such a collaboration with you. (...)

f. Episode 12, Backstage: Li Keqin and Zhou Shen are talking about the 3 songs they are singing for the episode, including the original song written for them, “Bu Jian Jiu San”:

LKQ: Yes. I think...from episode 1 until now, we’ve always had a great collaboration. So, to have a small “baby” come out like that (ZS makes a face), in my view, it’s like...like commemorating this group of ours.

ZS: I think--

LKQ: --It’s lovers who are breaking up and make a baby. *loses it* (ZS: ???!!!!)

ZS, feigning outrage while LKQ is still laughing: How do you want this part to be broadcasted??? Your values are VERY problematic! *sighs*

LKQ: Not at all! I think that simile was very good!

In another interview before the finale, Li Keqin “tones it down” by comparing it to “Lovers who are about to separate and make something together”. Not sure which came first. In that interview, Li Keqin calls the song “a present that the show gave to them, and a present that they gave themselves.”

[madcapmoon]

Ian MacKaye interview

by Chris Summerlin and his friend Matt 1999

Back in April and May I had the pleasure of seeing Fugazi play 3 times in the space of just a few weeks when they came over here for some shows around the release of the film/soundtrack Instrument. When they came over last time in '95 I was too young to drive to go see them so the Wolverhampton show on the tour was the first time I had seen them play. At that show, because of the venue mainly, it seemed like the audience was a little detached from what was going on onstage and at times the crowd seemed uninterested despite Fugazi being an absolute force. They still blew me away though. A few weeks later I saw them play in Nottingham at the Marcus Garvey Ballroom, a beautiful blue painted dancehall. Fred Erskine's (Hoover,June Of 44) band The Boom opened and were tremendous, funky, rolling sounds and Fred (on trumpet) and his saxophone counterpart dancing away throughout. The rock star elements of Six By Seven (guitars being nonchalently tossed down for roadies to pick up for example) were only accentuated by putting them on this bill and they were met with total disinterest by most people. For Fugazi, I had the good fortune to sit on the corner of the stage with my camera and see them close at hand. Despite countless hassles with a hyped up crowd they played one of the best shows I have ever seen. Songs merged into one another, were extended, chopped and changed all on the spur of the moment by a band that played more like a unit than any other I have ever seen. Halfway through the closing Arpeggiator something like 2 hours after they had come on, the stage lights were cut off to signal time. They carried on playing with extra vigour illuminated only by camera flashes and the eery blue strip lighting in the ceiling of the Ballroom. A couple of days after the Nottingham show I saw them again in London, this time with Shellac as support and again neither band disappointed, especially Shellac who seemed to really relish playing with Fugazi who they had described previously as "the best band in the world". They were incredible, the sound was amazing for one. They steamed through most of Action Park and the singles and a few from Terraform and finished with Todd Trainer standing up to whack Steve's guitar like a cymbal. For Fugazi, the crowd was a little annoying with kids intent on killing each other and anyone in their way. Before they even began playing Ian asked everyone to stay calm and not surf or try and get onstage and stagedive. Within 20 secs of the opening Break one guy standing onstage ran through the band and dived off. Ian calmly reached over in the middle of the song and pulled his pass off his trousers as he writhed around in the crowd. Everyone laughed.

Anyway, after the Nottingham show, Matt, Tom, Ross, Tor and I were fortunate enough to interview Ian as they were packing away. Despite having just finished playing and having lots of people to talk to and lots of gear to load up Ian was astonishingly polite, friendly and easy to interview. Thanks to Anton from No Name and Jeff from Southern for helping to sort this out.

(Questions in bold and they were asked by me and Matt:)

How do you reckon tonight went?

On what level?

Well, did you enjoy it? I saw you in Wolverhampton last week and I can never tell whether you are enjoying it or not...

Well obviously we all enjoy it or we wouldn't do it. Obviously it's beyond enjoyment; every show is really different. We play as we are. If we're struggling: we're struggling, if we're happy: we're happy; individually or as a band. Tonight I actually was in a pretty good mood to start with but, not so much those kids who I was tussling with but there was a woman who was directly in front of me who was being really weird and really ugly with me the whole time.

What do you mean?

She was just yelling at me and calling me a cunt and a whore the whole time! After a while I just started to feel like, well, this is too abusive. I can't and I didn't want to, like, interrupt the show again because people at the back don't understand. I don't think people really have any idea what it's like to look from our perspective. I think most people think, like, "Oh, those guys are always yelling at people, they're always giving people shit about stagediving" and that... They don't understand, from our point of view, we're onstage looking out and we're seeing the people in the front row being, like, assaulted basically.

It must be hard for you to play and see all that going on...

Well, if you look and we do look, a lot of bands don't look. I look, I need to look. When we play shows and we have light in our eyes and we can't see the crowd it's the worst shows for us, for me it's the worst show ever because it's not at all what I want. I want to play to people. I want to try and interact with people on a level that's not just, like, me yelling at them but I want to have something, I want them to know that I'm in the room with them. I want them to be in the room with me. It's a bit of a...toss-up every time. But it was a good gig... (Guy and Brendan are packing away the equipment and so Ian goes to move the van) Let's go downstairs...

How's Britain been this time? You haven't been over for quite a while....

Good! I'm not really comparing. It's hard for me to, like...everything is changing. We change, people change, the landscape, the cultural landscape is changing. It's really hard for me to compare. It's been a really pleasant trip, I feel we've been playing well, the gigs have been pretty consistent. Of all the gigs I feel I have 2 gigs that I felt were really a struggle for me but they weren't necessarily even a struggle for everybody else. Each of us in the band have a different relationship with the music, it's like it's just...whatever it is. It's like: you know how some days are good days and some days are bad days? How do you compare one week with the next? You can't because it's always changing...

I have a specific question about the film. You know the part in the car parking lot where there are interviews with people about what you meant to them and things? I wondered about how you felt about that going in the film as people might have thought that was being judgemental, not on you part necessarily but just in some way being judgemental towards the people because some of them came out of that quite badly. I wondered whether you were ever in 2 minds about putting it in or not?

Well we could have just put in all the people who were nice and had nice things to say and were articulate but it would have been inaccurate. The fact of the matter is we left out stuff, a lot of the people who were in there said a lot more stupider and uglier things that that and we didn't rub it in. A couple of the kids were such assholes they had to get it! But you know there was one kid, with his glasses on he's like, he goes "They're supposed to entertain me right!" but he also went on to say I was a junkie and he wanted to kill me! I didn't put that in there, you know. But at the same time it was like...he was an asshole and that's also who comes to see us. We're actually representing, we're saying here is a cross section, here's who comes. It's been really controversial those interviews. I feel, like, let the people talk! Let em talk. I'm into it and y'know, some of it's just sense of humour for us. I mean there's like one kid who's like (adopts the accent) "C'mon! Ian MacKaye, Minor Threat, Black Flag, Fugazi"... (everyone laughs in recognition)

That's a classic part...

That guy, he was such an idiot! I mean you should have seen the other stuff that he said...

Yeah, we saw it in the cinema and as soon as that bit came on everybody just laughed

Yeah, that's good; it's comedy. This is... look, tonight I played. There's a woman in front of me all night calling me the ugliest names in the world, y'know, this is real. I had a guy, that drunk kid who came up. He was insane.

What did he say to you?

He was saying (in an English accent) "Top son". He kept saying it over and over again."Top son, Top son, Top son" (looks kind of mystified) This is real, this is what we have to deal with. I don't want to be clinical about it. I don't want to just clean up and not be representative of people because that's part of our experience and actually, we could have played much worse stuff in there but we decided not to and we could have put in only those kind of interviews but we were trying to give a cross section.

Jem (Cohen) did a talkback session at the screening of the film that I went to and he mentioned that he thought you may have been reluctant to include some of the stuff where you were goofing around. He said he had to, not win you over as such, but he had to fight to keep some things in.

Well... All I can say is there are plenty of funny things we thought we'd like to leave in that Jem didn't want to leave in for reasons that made him, because there's things that made him feel uncomfortable because we were making fun of him. Because he deserved to be made fun of on occasion because he's...if you get to know Jem; I've known him since high school...

He's pointing a camera at you as well so maybe he deserves it...

Right, so there was a little bit of erm...there were things we wanted to leave in that he couldn't deal with. At the same time, like, we are funny people, we like to laugh but we don't want to just make the movie like "Oh look, we're a big fucking joke". Who knows, we had 50 hours of material. We had to stop somewhere. There's 15 songs we recorded live in sync and we put, like five in.

Yeah, when Jem did the talkback session this one guy was complaining that you didn't put more whole songs in the thing and that the footage was so cut up...

Because you can hear whole songs all the time!

(Defensively) Yeah, I agree!

Jesus, sometimes you see a movie and the most boring aspect of a lot of rock movies is the in sync! We wanted to give people something else to chew on. It's not just, well it is about the music but the film is about everything that goes around as well as the music. So if we just had 2 hours of just us playing you would be bored out of your skulls. But anyway! It is what is. We did our best, there's no "What if?" or "Why not?"

That's fine...

Yeah, I'm just saying it is what is and we're done with it that's all I can tell you. It was thought out, we spent a lot of time working on it, a lot of years.

I wanted to ask you about when you were playing in DC at, I believe, an event for Martin Luther King. How did you get to play there, what was that like? All you can see from the footage is the needle (monument) because it was from the back of the stage. Was it a proper stage set up? I was just really amazed by that whole section of footage...

It's a small ampitheatre right there at the base of the monument. They've been doing shows there for a number of years... you can rent that, or like you can get a permit for that space. You seem to say we were doing like a protest or a demonstartion but it was a legitimate event, we got a permit from the park service and everything.

It's amazing to look out on the film and see how many people there were there

Well, it's sort of an illusion I think. I actually can't believe there were that many people there!

Do you want to do more stuff like the quieter stuff on Instrument?

Well, we don't have a direction. We just work.

It's weird because the stuff that ended up on End Hits that was demoed on Instrument were demoed as really quiet, I'm thinking about Slo Crostic in particular, and then it turned out much louder on the record. I wondered if you felt a need to, and I can't think of a word for this, kind of Fugazi-fy what you do and make it more rocky when it goes to a proper album. I don't know if it's for the crowd or for yourselves or if you're even aware of it but do you feel a need to rock it up?

(Big pause) (Apologetically) I can't think of a better word to describe it with...

No, no I see your point, I'm just thinking about it. I don't think we think of it as a need to "rock it up" but I think that we...every song we write we go through, like a dozen different versions of it. We just fool around with it. When you first write a song you tend to be more tentative because you're just fooling around with the actual parts and how they fit together. I think that we probably do have...there's probably somewhat of an iclination to kind of overly structure. I think we're kind of freaks about structure. We will take a song, a perfectly beautiful, simple song and chop it into so many pieces and rearrange it so many times that we'll eventually drop it. We drop so many songs you can't imagine. There's so many pieces of music that never made it just because we just...we beat it to the ground, we just kept fucking around with it until it just doesn't exist anymore: literally. So, I think that in some ways, for instance like Crostic, that was recorded that way on purpose, that slow weird version. That's not the way it was originally. Originally it was a lot more like the way it was on the record.

You recorded it specifically for the soundtrack?

We just recorded it because we thought it would sound cool. And it did...

Yeah, it did...

But like, you know...with the more tentative stuff like the Rend It thing, that's just Guy by himself on a 4 track in his room so he can't "rock it up". He's just trying to work out the lyrics. But it's a fair question, you're right in some degree that we do... Put it this way: some songs we write are really unorthodox and I think they're really cool because of that but then by the time they end up on the record they've become more normal.

I think as well it's because I guess you see yourself as a live band more than anything...

It has to somehow work yeah...It has to translate. We play almost everything we've ever recorded.

Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. I was watching you tonight from a lot closer than I did in Wolverhampton, because you don't have a setlist are you mouthing what's going to come next to each other?

Sometimes we mouth it and sometimes, you just know. You know every little click and chord and every sound, every rhythm; you just know. I can't...it's just...I dunno. Hang out with 3 other people for like 12 years and you begin to get a sense of it.

In theory yeah! (laughter)

OK gimme one more and then I have to pack up

What is your writing process like?

Well, when we're at home we never practise our old songs. We only work on unwritten stuff and we usually practise 2, 3 maybe 4 times a week 2 or 3 hours a day. We sit in the afternoon, we sit in Joe's basement and just fool around with ideas and sometimes we'll just get together and just sit around and talk for 3 hours without even playing. We just get together... That's the way we do it.

OK thanks Ian...

Thank you.

[houstonlocalus-blog]

Laugh-In: An Interview with George Schlatter

Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In was a phenomenon of its time and one that’s not likely to be repeated.

In television primetime comedy you have benchmarks that include shows like The Ernie Kovacs Show in the 1950s (which at one time or another was on four different television networks), That Was the Week That Was (1964-1965, itself a remake of an English series), Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969 – 1974) and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (1967 – 1973).

The current go-to irreverent comedy skit show Saturday Night Live, which in many ways amalgamates elements from all the previous shows mentioned, while not actually in prime time, uses subliminal social and overt political humor to achieve its laughs.

One thing is certain — all of these shows were cut from a unique bolt of cloth that eludes the majority of television shows comedy or otherwise.

George Schlatter was the executive producer and producer (and wrote the pilot) on over 140 episodes of Laugh-In. Schlatter’s previous producer credits included variety shows like The Dinah Shore Chevy Show (1960-1962) and The Judy Garland Show (1963).

“It was a different time; one year there were seventeen variety shows,” says Schlatter during a phone interview with Free Press Houston.

Laugh-In launched on January 22, 1968 on the Peacock Channel. The comedy revue was a Monday night replacement for NBC’s The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and was up against CBS war-horses Gunsmoke and The Lucy Show.

“NBC put Laugh-In against them because it was cheap and they didn’t have anything else. It took them fourteen weeks to develop a replacement. We were cannon fodder against Lucy and Gunsmoke,” says Schlatter.

Somehow Laugh-In caught the zeitgeist of that tumultuous era. Think about all the events that formed 1968, whether it was the Vietnam War, Chicago election riots or the assassinations of Martin Luther King or Robert Kennedy. Almost immediately Laugh-In was catapulted to the number one show of that year.

“We appealed to little kids with the colors and the old guys with the content, but in the middle was your group who knew we were saying something,” Schlatter says when I tell him Laugh-In was a staple of my then 12-year old existence.

Laugh-In coined what became catch phrases like “Sock it to me” and “Here comes the judge.”

“We had Sammy Davis, Jr. and when he came up with ‘Here Comes the Judge’ we immediately put it in the next show. The following day, when the Supreme Court justices walked in, someone in the back yelled out ‘Here Comes the Judge,’ and the whole room cracked up. It was the first laugh the Supreme Court ever got,” says Schlatter.

The show mainly used one-liners at His Girl Friday-speed and as such the editing was equally rapid fire, another first for television at the time. Laugh-In would be perfect for a re-launch in the current era of one sentence social media interaction.

“There was a woman named Carolyn Raskin who developed many of the editing techniques we had. We didn’t even have time code then, we had to physically splice everything,” says Schlatter about some of the transitions that had multiple images per second. “It was an adventure technically as well as creatively.”

Guest stars like John Wayne, Cher, Carol Channing or Johnny Carson would appear in the studio for one episode but could be edited into numerous episodes. “Some of them we grabbed off the hallway,” says Schlatter referring to another Laugh-In catch phrase: “From NBC Studios in beautiful downtown Burbank.”

Here’s another typical joke that was delivered by Cher: “I’ve heard of all the great Hollywood marriages. Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, Eddie Fisher and Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher and Connie Stevens.”

You like that? Here’s another Cher zinger: “Sonny and I are totally compatible. Anytime there’s a problem his psychiatrist contacts my psychiatrist and they work it out.”

While the heart of the show was slipping in sly drug references and double entendre, the show became such a hit that it attracted conservative faces like Dr. Billy Graham. Graham can be seen mugging for the camera saying, “The family that watches Laugh-In together really needs to pray together.”

“We had Barry Goldwater, we had Bill Buckley. Buckley, you know, was a conservative reporter. We wrote to him and he replied, ‘Not only do I refuse to appear, I resent having been asked,’” says Schlatter. “I responded that I would fly him to California in an airplane with two right wings, and he agreed to appear.”

Laugh-In also debuted talent like Goldie Hawn, Flip Wilson, Tiny Tim and Lily Tomlin, who herself didn’t appear until the third season. On Tomlin, Schlatter recalled: “The night after she did Ernestine, everyone was walking down the hall saying ‘One-ringee-dingee.’ In one show Lily would do seven characters, and nobody had seen anything like that before.”

Other performers who came and went over Laugh-In’s six seasons include Judy Carne, Ruth Buzzi, Jo Anne Worley, Henry Gibson, Arte Johnson, Alan Sues, Eileen Brennan, Chelsea Brown, Gary Owens, Teresa Graves, Pamela Graves, Larry Hovis and the list goes on and on.

Hawn won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1970 for Cactus Flower and left the show, but when she made a post-Oscar cameo the cast played it to the hilt like she was a princess and they were all trying to kiss her ass.

Every episode introduces serious performers goofing it up. Jack Lemmon’s son told him he couldn’t possibly be a movie star because he hadn’t been on Laugh-In. In its first year Laugh-In got a cameo from then Presidential candidate Richard Nixon.

“It might have been the reason he was elected,” says Schlatter. “I apologize for that.”

In one early episode Nixon says “Sock it to me,” phrased like a question. In fact it’s the same iteration that Alexander Waverly (Leo G. Carroll) uses in the debut episode. Carroll was the head of the show bearing the U.N.C.L.E. logo that Laugh-In replaced.

Tiny Tim was a longhaired fop that played songs from the 1920s on a ukulele and had never been on television prior to Laugh-In. “We brought him in what we called the new talent department. He sang “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” Schlatter recalled. “The network said ‘You can’t put him on, he’s a freak.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘He’s a big star.’ And they were like, ‘Okay.’” Perhaps not oddly, once Tiny Tim appeared on Laugh-In, he became a star.

As big of a success as Laugh-In was, Schlatter also produced a show on ABC the following year called Turn-On. It took the Laugh-In ethos yet made the tune-in-turn-on message more obvious. It was no problem for Schlatter to be running shows on two networks, in a time when there were three broadcast networks and PBS. Laugh-In gave him carte blanche.

“Well, I’m arrogant now, but with a fifty-share back then, c’mon,” says Schlatter. “The network was selling time for so much per commercial they pretty much looked the other way.”

The writer’s room, while atypical of the time, mirrors modern day writing groups. “There were maybe fifteen writers. But they were not the normal sitcom writers or the variety show writers,” says Schlatter. “These were rebels. One had been a professor of political science, and many of the others did not fit any categories.”

Schlatter realized early on that the way to get lines past the censors was the blindside them. “Every week they would send the script back full of paper clips. Sometimes we put things in we knew would purposely upset them so we could slip by other stuff. They didn’t have a way of handling us because there had never been anything like that on the air.”

Turn-On was greeted with a different response.

“It didn’t even last one episode; it lasted twenty minutes of the first episode,” recalls Schlatter. “Some stations literally pulled the show during the middle of the opening show.”

Another show Schlatter produced, Real People (1979), predated reality television by decades.

“That was another adventure,” says Schlatter. “An attempt to look at ordinary guys, the unsung hero, eccentrics. It was the first television show that saluted the little guy but without any guest stars.”

Just months after, another network had a copycat series called That’s Incredible.

Schlatter made a foray into feature film making with Norman … Is That You? in 1976, which revolved around Redd Foxx discovering his son is gay.

“At that time I could do anything I wanted to do on television, but to go on a movie lot and spend the time it takes to make a film took a year. Television was immediate. We’d write it down and it could be on the air the next day.

“We were freefall television. We touched on all sorts of issues but we never dwelt on them long. We were always off on something else but by the time you got the previous joke you would’ve realized we just said something revolutionary.

“Dan [Rowan] and Dick [Martin] did a sensational nightclub act. They were not friendly. When they left the stage they didn’t talk to each other until the next time they came back onstage. But it was one of the funniest nightclub acts ever.

“Timex said they wanted us to have hosts so we got Dan and Dick for our pilot. They wore tuxedos and craziness happened around them. It worked.”

Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In – The Complete Series is available exclusively through TimeLife. The box set includes thirty-eight discs and will likely take you months to conquer.

Laugh-In: An Interview with George Schlatter this is a repost