#ed friendly

Kliph Nesteroff: You produced a special about comic strips in 1967 called The Fabulous Funnies hosted by Carl Reiner and written by Bill Persky and Sam Denoff.

Riding high on the success of Laugh-In, Schlatter and Friendly were approached by Bristol-Meyers to create a similar show for them.  Schlatter and Friendly, feeling their original concept for Laugh-In became too diluted by the time it hit the air, took a second swing at it with Turn-On!.

The premise of Turn-On! is that it’s a TV skit comedy show created by a computer.  At the beginning of each episode two technicians walk to computer terminal sitting in a white featureless voice.  They start the computer and it begins generating short skits, none longer than a minute in length, most only ten seconds or less.  Frequently weird animations or puppets would intrude into the frame completely independent of the actual skit being performed.  And while there were a few recurring characters and skits, many of them seemed derivative of Laugh-In performers.

No music, no laugh track, just weird blips and bloops from a Moog synthesizer (the first use of a Moog on American TV).

And to add to the confusion, the credits ran after commercials, not at either the beginning or end of the show.  Bristol-Meyer shot all tbeir commercials in a similar comic sensibility to the show itself, so it became even more confusing to viewers as to whether they were watching a real commercial or a parody of one.

The thing is, none of this is explained to the audience, Schlatter and Friendly and co-producer Digby Wolfe) simply assumed you’d either get it or not.  Without someway of making sense of the show, audiences of the era were left rudderless.

Remember, this is 1969.  Go take a look at that list up there for an idea of what America was going through, if you think the current MAGA vs progressives contretempts is bad, you’ve got no idea what the country went through with Norman Rockwell America vs sex & drugs & rock & roll (plus radical politics & civil rights & feminism & anti-war).

Some viewers complained of being physically ill by all the fast cutting and non-sequiturs, but fast cutting and non-sequiturs are de rigueur in video now.  Comedy against a featureless background is a TikTok aesthetic (and, lordy, there are some brilliantly funny comics and comedians out there).

What really pissed ‘em off was the open for the day commentaries on sex and race, with a good dollop of politics thrown in.

Please do not think this was all high brow enlightened material rejected by the hoi polloi. 

Quite the contrary.

One of their female performers appeared as “The Body Politic” reclining on a divan in sleepwear, making Playboy-quality jokes on sex.  The attractive female members of the cast were expected to do go-go dances, same as on Laugh-In, only Laugh-In’s dancers usually had some sort of funny graffiti painted on them, Turn-On!’s…just danced.

There were holocaust jokes, demeaning gay jokes, racial stereotypes, sexual stereotypes, and references to all sorts of kinks that people today think got invented in the 21st century.

Schlatter and Friendly set out to be deliberately offensive, and they succeeded.  While we can acknowledge they intended their offence to be in service of exposing hypocrisy, a lot of it remains pointlessly offensive today, and in more than a few cases their Playboy-era masculine attitudes have added brand new levels of offensiveness.

So why not ignore Turn-On! if it’s so awful?

Because it isn’t awful.

There are terrible parts, to be sure, and they spoil appreciation of what Schlatter and Friendly and co. actually wrought, bust this proved to be really groundbreaking material.  They weren’t the first to do this sort of surrealist comedy (try 1964’s Help, My Snowman's Burning Down on for size, or the earliest film experiments of Jim Henson) but they were the first to try to deliver it unfiltered and undiluted to the American public.

This show seems almost quaint and passe now, but every technique used in it is now being employed across the Internet with striking effect.

And while they made many of their points in an offensive manner, their points are typically spot on.

The show did not sit well with the American public.  According to Schlatter, there was an effort by one station owner to cancel the show before it began because it took over one of three (!) weeknight slots set aside for the prime-time soap opera Peyton Place (one of those shallow properties that makes a meteoric arc across the pop culture sphere only to vanish without a trace).  When the premiere episode aired, a couple of stations simply didn’t come back to the show but aired local programming until the next program started (one just played twenty minutes of recorded organ music!).

Public and critical reaction appeared uniformly negative.  Even Harlan Ellison, while refusing to call it bad, acknowledged it as “awkward” in The Glass Teat.  ABC-TV preempted the second episode in order to start their movie The Oscar a half hour earlier (and if you know anything about Harlan and this movie, you can appreciate the irony).

After that the series was quietly shelved, with Schlatter reporting ABC-TV paid him the full series production budget on the promise he never show it again to anyone. Well, all involved are long out of position to do anything about enforcing such a contract, so the first two episodes -- the premiere hosted by Tim Conway –--and the second –--hosted by Robert Culp and his then-wife France Nuyen -- finally surfaced, allowing us to see for ourselves what caused all the fuss.

As Harlan said, awkward but not bad.  As I said, a brilliant misfire.  It really appears to be a show several years ahead of its time, something better suited for late night TV than prime-time.  Could it have made a cultural impact the way Laugh-In did?  Maybe, given enough exposure.  Many of the mini-segments were shot by film students Schlatter recruited; as a showcase for new talent it might have proved interesting.

Since it was shot on film, I’m surprised Schlatter and Friendly didn’t try re-editing it for theatrical release.

 © Buzz Dixon

Turn-On! episode one with Tim Conway

Turn-On! Is a legendary 1969 TV show legendary for all the wrong reasons:  It was cancelled during its first commercial break.

Typically when TV shows of that era are discussed it’s out of context with the time.  This is okay when discussing conventional westerns or cop shows or comedy-variety shows since they typically took great pains to avoid the social issues of their day in order to maximize appeal.

But there’s a different breed of cat that went out looking for trouble, and boy howdy!, was Turn-On! one of those.  It was a brilliant misfire, w-a-a-a-y ahead of its time, offensive then, and in an odd way, even more offensive now.

First off let’s set the culture temperature for the U.S. on February 5, 1969, Turn-On!’s premiere:

1967’s Summer of Love morphed into 1968’s days of rage

The Vietnam War continued to drag on in the wake of the Tet Offensive in January 1968

Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated

Political infighting split the Democratic Party, culminating with the infamous 1968 Democratic

Convention riot in Chicago “The whole world’s watching!”

White racist George Wallace created the proto-MAGA American Independent Party and siphoned off enough votes from Hubert Humphrey to cost him the election

Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, who until recently were the sleaziest bastards ever to set foot in the White House, won election for the so-called “silent majority”

The popular and innovative 1967 show The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour became increasingly more political, rousing both White House and network ire (it would be cancelled on June 6, 1969)

On January 22, 1968 Rowan And Martin’s Laugh-In, produced by George Schlatter and Ed Friendly. replaced The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and became an immediate smash hit

The latter bears great importance on the story of Turn-On! and not merely because Schlatter and Friendly produced both shows.

Turn-On! has been accurately described as watching a half-hour’s worth of TikTok videos back-to-back.  While Laugh-In pioneered fast paced rapid-fire editing for skit comedy, it nonetheless maintained enough form for (most) audiences to get their bearings.  Whenever things grew too frenetic, they could always return to hosts Dan Rowan and Dick Martin or announcer Gary Owen to give viewers a chance to catch their breath.  They employed regular skits so the folks at home could find reassuring familiarity each week as well as more or less conventional satirical musical numbers, all backed by well placed laugh tracks.

They also hired a good cast, created several recurring stock characters who remain familiar to this day, and launched several catch phrases emblemic of the era:  “Sock it to me” “The flying fickle finger of fate” “You bet your sweet bippy” “Here comes the judge” (Okay, that last one is actually a call back to African-American vaudeville, but bravo to Laugh-In for sharing it with the rest of the country.)

And while the show didn’t steer clear of political and social satire, they lacked the heartfelt intensity the Smothers Brothers brought to theirs. 

You’re scarcely nibbling the hand that feeds you when you invite Richard Nixon to say “Sock it to me” on national television.

So Laugh-In had a sense of rebellion, a sense of daring, but in truth often appeared no more edgy than a copy Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang.  It was a format swiftly and ironically even more successfully imitated in cornpone by Hee Haw (and don’t get me wrong, Hee Haw could be damn funny).

 © Buzz Dixon

Turn-On! episode one with Tim Conway