Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In

Lore & Background

The title of the show was a play on 1960s Hippie culture 'love-ins' or counterculture 'be-ins', terms derived from the 'sit-ins' common in protests associated with civil rights and antiwar demonstrations of the time. In the pilot episode, Dan Rowan explained the show's approach: 'Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to television's first Laugh-In. Now for the past few years, we have all been hearing an awful lot about the various ins. There have been be-ins, love-ins, and sleep-ins. This is a laugh-in and a laugh-in is a frame of mind. For the next hour, we would just like you to sit back and laugh and forget about the other ins.' Laugh-In had its roots in the humor of vaudeville and burlesque, but its most direct influences were Olsen and Johnson's comedies (such as the free-form Broadway revue Hellzapoppin'), the innovative television works of Ernie Kovacs, and the topical TV satire That Was the Week That Was. The show was characterized by a rapid-fire series of gags and sketches, many of which were politically charged or contained sexual innuendo. The co-hosts continued the exasperated straight-man (Rowan) and dumb-guy (Martin) double act that they had established as nightclub comics.

Reader's Guide

Laugh-In was designed to be lightly structured and consisted mainly of short comedic sketches. Some of these would reappear multiple times throughout an episode with variations on a theme, while others involved recurring characters created by the cast. A trademark of the series was its blackout sketches, often involving rapid-fire cuts between two or more scenes or camera angles, set to a six-note musical sting. Each show started with a batch of sketches leading into Gary Owens' introduction, in which the cast and announced guest star(s) would appear behind open doors of the show's iconic, psychedelically-painted 'Joke Wall'. Another weekly segment was 'Laugh-In Looks at the News', which began with the female cast members singing the segment's opening theme. 'Mod, Mod World' was a group of sketches introduced by Rowan and Martin that fit into an announced theme, notable for being interspersed with film clips of some of the female cast members performing go-go dancing in bikinis. At the end of every show, Rowan would turn to his co-host and say, 'Say good night, Dick', to which Martin replied, 'Good night, Dick!', leading into the final Joke Wall segment. In 2002, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In was ranked number 42 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time.

Did You Know?

• The show originally aired as a one-time special on September 9, 1967, before becoming a series.
• Gary Owens served as the on-screen radio continuity announcer, often facing a microphone with one hand cupped to his ear.
• At the end of almost every show up to the Season 5 finale, the last gag was Arte Johnson's character Wolfgang slowly rising from plants and saying 'Veeeeery eeenterestingk!'