I had long heard of this competitor to “Laugh-In” that only lasted one episode (for the stations whose directors didn’t stage-hook it before it ended) and that TPTB would always ensure that none of the episodes would ever see the light of day. Several days ago, I found out that this pilot episode, and the others that were made, were posted on YouTube by the series’ creator, and took one for the team a few days ago and watched that pilot episode.
On top of not really being all that funny, I could have pictured this, or something like it, being right at home on Night Flight (1980s on the USA Network), Liquid TV (1990s on MTV) or Adult Swim in the present day. That’s on top of wondering what drugs might have been involved in its creation process.
Has anyone watched Jackie Gleason’s diaster You’re In the Picture?
The apology, which was pretty bold and hilarious for the time, is famous. I’ve seen the unedited version of it a few times, where he references drinking, etc. Wonderful and the best way to handle it.
I watched Turn On when it was broadcast. I was a fan of Laugh-In and wanted to see what George Schlatter was going to do next.
I remember it wasn’t all that funny. I was too young to understand the sexual innuendo, but the jokes never seemed to land. It was fast-paced, like Laugh-In, but I think they were trying to do something that wasn’t just a clone and the result was that it wasn’t funny.
I made it 13 minutes. While I didn’t find it as bad as the legend says, (I mean, just because I quit, I still wouldn’t have cancelled it halfway through, because someone may like it) it was bad.
And Hamilton Camp? Speed kills, Del!
Albert Brooks wrote for the show? I guess he got better.
I’ve never been a fan of shows that try too hard to be wacky or overly hip. Even as a kid, I found Laugh-In to be cringe-worthy, and Turn-On was even worse. And shows that lean too much into being hip and topical just don’t age well. They end up feeling like a relic from another era, and not in a charming, vintage way—more like a bad fashion trend you hope never comes back.
I made it about 7 or 8 minutes. It was bad. It went too fast. The credits popping up here and there were distracting. The sign carriers who went across the bottom of the screen typically had nothing to do with the sketch being shown. And what was with the guy with the plastic hair?
In short, it wasn’t anything that I’d want to watch, even as a kid.
I was a fan of Laugh-In when it was on (I was a teenage boy, so the bikinis no doubt helped) and saw Turn-On when it aired. I was not impressed. I think the success of Laugh-In freaked the producers, so they threw anything hip on the air without understanding it. There was another show called No Soap, Radio which was not really a sketch show but even weirder.
If it were on today it would be analyzed and explained on line. Back then you watched it, said “huh?” and that was it.
I somehow got through the whole thing, wondering if it would get better. It didn’t. I thought it was interesting as a snapshot of late ‘60s culture but very dated and not very funny. The gags became repetitive once you figured out their schtick.
One gag that sticks in my head is a wife purportedly thanking a cop for bringing her drunk husband home, then it turns out the cop is actually the drunk husband. This might be funny in a world where cops brought drunks home.
Oh, and pretty much every sketch with a woman in it was misogynistic, almost casually so.
I remembered watching “Laugh-In” as a young tyke, and saw that one of the nostalgia cable stations was airing it. I made it a few minutes into an episode, and maybe that one was a dud, but I’m not the kind of person who thinks that falling down, or bonking oneself on the head with a mallet, is, in itself, funny.
BTW, a 4th possible outlet for a show like this, in the modern day, would be TCM on weekend nights. They’ll show just about anything.
I get the Jackie Kennedy/Aristotle Onassis reference (their marriage was a big deal at the time), but who the hell is the old guy in glasses at 24:47? Dr Benjamin Spock?
It’s good enough for me to wish it was better. I managed around 10 minutes but the freneticness was a bit too much for me. Some of the mini-skits were perfectly cut at just the right place. I guess there were just so many of them and they came so fast. Also they had absolutely nothing to do with each other. Maybe if they were 10-25% slower and they tried to link them together like Monty Python, with a better mix of comprehensibility versus randomness, it would have crossed the line from not-completely-horrible into somewhat-good.
This is one property where actually seeing it really did live down to its reputation.
As many others have reported, the format itself is so abrasive as to be difficult to sit through. Amazing that this saw air in the era of three networks!
Then there’s the uncomfortable sex humor and the bare bones sets. Really kind of an incredible thing to have existed.
I suspect if any of us stumbled upon Laugh-In for the first time in 2024 it would seem just as bad or worse than this. At least Turn On is trying to push the socially acceptable boundaries of TV for the time.
