{"id":2757,"date":"2008-06-24T12:07:43","date_gmt":"2008-06-24T17:07:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2757"},"modified":"2008-06-23T16:57:49","modified_gmt":"2008-06-23T21:57:49","slug":"it-was-to-laugh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2757","title":{"rendered":"It Was To Laugh"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, King wrote<\/a> (in re the death of George Carlin):<\/p>\n

…for those of us who were early teens around 1972, George Carlin was the guy that gave you the “seven words you can never say on television”, which when played on your crappy stereo in your bedroom caused howls of laughter and a furtive look out the door to see if Mom had heard those words…Gone now, a reminder of how time marches past as much as my teen now being in his twenties, and my Littlest starting high school in a few months. What humor will she hear that makes her giggle as much as Al Sleet<\/a>?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was (and, actually, am) a tad younger than King – but it got me thinking; what comedy did\u00a0my little crowd listen to, back then?<\/p>\n

Here’s what I remember:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Cheech and Chong, Los Cochinos<\/em>:\u00a0 <\/strong>I can still recite large swathes of “Pedro and Man at the Drive-In”, “Sergeant Stadenko”, and “Basketball Jones”.\u00a0 As gloriously puerile as it got.<\/li>\n
  2. Robin Williams, Throbbing Python of Love<\/em>:\u00a0 <\/strong>Recorded somewhere between “Mork and Mindy” and Williams’ ascent to superstardom, I remember furtively listening to it at one of my friends’ houses; I think Elizabeth Edwards owned it, which would have totally scandalized her father.\u00a0 (I could be wrong about that.\u00a0 The ownership, I mean; Mr. Edwards would have been mortified).\u00a0 I can still recite most of “Elmer Fudd sings Bruce Springsteen” (“I’m dwiving in yoah caah\/I turn on the wadio…and when we kiss…oooh…Fiiiwe”).<\/li>\n
  3. Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation<\/em> Album: <\/strong>Most of us of the “we love Monty Python” set didn’t know, yet, that the album was a toss-off – literally, as the title said, to punch a contractual ticket.\u00a0 I doubt we would have cared.\u00a0 I and my geek friends still can recite “Traffic Lights”, “Never Be Rude To An Arab”, “Finland”, “John Denver Being Strangled” and most of the rest of the record by heart.\u00a0<\/li>\n
  4. Steven Wright, I Have A Pony<\/em>: <\/strong>This was in college, obviously – my senior year, if memory serves (and it serves less and less these days).\u00a0 And the album itself was almost as anticlimactic as one of Wright’s jokes; most of us, weaning ourselves on his regular Letterman appearances, knew most of his material (“sometimes I like to fill the bathtub up, and turn on the shower, and pretend I’m in a submarine that’s been hit”) by heart before the album made it to North Dakota.<\/li>\n
  5. And of course, Class Clown<\/em> by George Carlin:\u00a0 <\/strong>This one filtered down to us only via a few of our cooler classmates who had much <\/em>cooler older brothers and sisters.\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    OK – your turn…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Yesterday, King wrote (in re the death of George Carlin): …for those of us who were early teens around 1972, George Carlin was the guy that gave you the “seven words you can never say on television”, which when played on your crappy stereo in your bedroom caused howls of laughter and a furtive look […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-n-e"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2757\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}