Actually I watched Welk on a double bill with Hee Haw every Saturday. Is that why I wake up screaming?
Easy now boy, them’s my home boys.
I worked on a lawn sprinkler system for ol’ Merle at his digs out in the canyon. Hung out at the Blackboard too. Years earlier I snuck cigarettes with Buddy Alan, Buck’s son, in the Oswell Street 'hood in Bakersfield.
I got roots, man. 
I remember exposing my darling child to this show when she was around 13. Her reaction was, “WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS THIS?”
And then we sat together and watched the whole thing. Seriously, we couldn’t take our eyes off the television. So many bubbles, so much frou frou and polka music. It’s pure comedy pleasure.
I remember staying at my grandmother’s house back in the day. Two things I remember about her and LW:
-
Everything had to come to a halt when LW came on. Sit down, shut up, don’t move. Pure agony.
-
She later started complaining about the scandalous outfits that the women like the Lennon Sisters were wearing. They were showing too much of the goods!
I’ve been right there with you! Whenever we visit my wife’s mother (mine’s been dead since 1999) we either have to avoid Saturday night or be subjected to that same sanctity when Welk is on. What is that? How does that bilge rise to the level of that amount of worship? Liberace was the same way when I was a kid.
Maybe those old timers didn’t have anything like SNL to worship? 
Check out Welk the hippie. Yes, that’s really him and he’s pretty spry.
My grampap always watched it, every week like clockwork. The TV could not be tuned to anything else on Saturday night.
Unlike some other posters, though, because of this I came to associate the show with him, and therefore kind of liked it. After his funeral, when we all burned the broken-down easy chair he always sat in to watch it, we all sang the “Good Night” song. And frankly, were somewhat surprised that bubbles didn’t come out of the chair while we sang it.
I find it very ironic that PBS was created to present more artistic and creative shows than what was on commercial TV 50 years ago, such as Lawrence Welk. And nowadays PBS runs Lawrence Welk because they found his fans actually contribute money. All those poseurs who tell you how great Sartre, Pinter and O’Neill are and have important things to tell us peasants, they don’t put their money where their mouth is!
Arrrrrrrrggggghhh!!! Now I have that saccharine dreck lodged in my head! Darn you to Heck!
At one point when I was in college, I happened to go to my aunt’s for dinner one Saturday night, blissfully unaware that her cable allowed her to watch the same LW feed from Chicago (Central time), then from Salt Lake (Mountain time), then from Spokane (Pacific time). The experience brought home the concept of relativity in a way that no amount of lecture could have done — to this day I could swear that those three hours lasted at least as many thousand years.
I remember this show as a kid. I thought then–how is this even entertainment? Amateur night is better than this. School plays are better than this. Elementary school plays are better than this. Sunday school Nativity Pageants are bett–you get my point.
I can’t even call it gay (not in the sexual sense). Gay in the sense I mean (lame or putzy) at least has some charm. LW is so alien, so bizarrely whitewashed, it’s like from another galaxy or time warp. Either that or I need better drugs to watch it.
As someone who used to work weekends in a nursing home, I came to appreciate the repeats of Lawrence Welk on Saturday nights. It was the only night of the week that most residents would want to get to bed early.
That is their audience still today. One of our local venues books their “friends and family of Lawrence Welk” tour regularly and the shows sell well here.
I remember seeing VERY young Robin Williams impersonating Welk-
"And now, Barbara and Bobby answer the musical question: “Strangers In The Night.”
Say what you will about the music, which I can’t stand either, but his people were good.
JoAnn Castle (sp?) played great ragtime/honky tonk piano; I ignored the icky mugging and smiles, and wondered how she played like that with such stubby fingers.
Myron Floren was an extraordinary accordionist, took the instrument far beyond the oom-pah polka stereotype. (I studied accordion for eleven years.) A far better musician than might be apparent to Welk-Watchers.
And if anyone here likes Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats album, the incredible drummer on “Son Of Mr. Green Genes” and “The Gumbo Variations” was Paul Humphrey, whose impressive resume includes six years as Lawrence Welk’s drummer.
.
My favorite LW parody.
(When I saw kd lang do Miss Chatelaine in concert, right after she’d explicitly come out of the closet, she introduced it by saying something like, "I’m so glad you’re all here tonight. I always feel very comfortable with you guys, the audience. I feel like I can be myself. . . . in fact, I have a confession to make. I’m a . . . LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLAWRENCE WELK FAN! Cue bubbles and accordian.)
Jesus Christ, what utter crap.
So it’s an encore you want?
I really like KD Lang. I hug cows too!
But what makes this a part of the show’s Twilight Zoney charm is that this was going on at the same time other young people were “dropping out” and burning their draft cards and monks were setting themselves on fire. It’s hard for me not to watch LW without imagining what was going on in the world around it, and seeing all these plastic haired, plastic faced, plastic souled young people dressed in yellow chiffon or green checkers and grinning their vapid Stepford grins into the camera–truly, fiddling while Rome burns. These oblivious people in their vacuum of a studio, bubbles for air and spotlights for a sun, ballroom dancing to 3 Dog Night songs, must have seemed like pure evil: the literal embodiment of all that was wrong with the “establishment,” the utterly perfect, and perfectly horrifying, manifestation of the idea of “square.” And of course you add to this apocalyptic vision, the people sitting at home, blinds drawn, their children killing and being killed in SE Asia, and you have a whole nother layer of what the screaming bloody fuck?
That’s why I like it.
You?
Maybe he’d like this one better, where kd lang mimes getting beat up by her boyfriend.
For you and your homeboy, mangeorge 
I watch it with the sound off and something like Tool or Metallica cranking on the stereo. The on screen dancing/playing often synchs up with the beat of whatever I’m listening to… which is hysterical.
Ever notice that the tap dancing guy always does the EXACT same routine every time?