Well, this is going back over four decades, but there was this one particular Smothers Brothers skit showing a Tom Smothers-played character and his gal at her house about to go out on a formal-dress date. They are both extremely nervous. Perhaps it is their first date together.
Anyway, after some knee-shaking conversation, he decides that it’s time to pin the ol’ corsage on her. Yep! One of life’s most embarrassing moments!
I gathered that it was a “falsie” though, rather than an implant. This was about 1967 or 1968. Did they even have implants back then? And if they did, were they in general use, rather than just used by a few wealthy Hollywood ladies?
Of course, there is no “expiration date” for this kind of humor. But it’s one thing to do it these days, and quite another back then.
In the late '60’s, after a “snow-white” TV era, suddenly all sorts of boob-tube taboos * were being broken. In 1968 Laugh-In went even further, but I’m pretty sure that Smothers Brothers was the first of its kind. All in the Family and* Love, American Style* were still a few years away. (There may have been some collateral “loosening-up” in already extant variety shows, but I can’t recall any examples.)
The Brothers received a lot of heat over some of the more risqué stuff, and eventually the network axed the show. I’m sure that a skit like this was what execs and audience complainers had in mind when they got angry over the show.
It may be hard for younger people here to imagine, but much of what is now considered tame, or even neutral, was “shocking” back then. Breasts, let alone falsies, had never been referred to.
(What’s interesting here is that there never seemed to be much hostility directed at Tom and Dick, even by the most offended members of the viewing public. They reacted as if the Brothers never had much to do with the content of the show and just performed risqué stuff as their job. They both had just that aura of innocence.)
- I was going to say just “tube taboos” – and it’s interesting how much consonance and assonance there is in that. Adding “boob-” seemed just very juvenile, but it just seemed to fit the tone of this thread, so what-de-heck!
