I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together

by Kevin Burton

   On the night of the first full day of the return of the American Nazi Party to power in the United States, I watched the first ever episode of the Carol Burnett Show and of Laugh-In.

   I needed a laugh.  Badly

   I did this via Amazon.  Before that time the only thing I ever watched on Amazon was Thursday Night Football. Then one day my wife Jeannette said there was all manner of content available on Amazon, much of it for free.

   First we watched a really good documentary on the music career of Gordon Lightfoot. Then Jan. 21 we watched the Burnett Show and Laugh-In, both episodes from 1967.

   I had made vague plans to do a blog on the irony of the US regime change falling on Martin Luther King Day; the honoring of a black civil rights leader on the day of the coronation of a racist bully.

   The plans were vague because I never get the tone right on that kind of post. Fellow WordPress blogger Mitch Teemley did a much better job with that theme than I ever could have.  He talked about how King was about inclusion rather than division. He took the high road. He expressed himself without adding to the national cacophony.

   I recommend his Jan. 20 post to you and his blog in general.

   My plans were vague also because you can get that sort of thing anywhere and everywhere. It’s not easy to escape it, actually. I got a temporary escape on Amazon that night.

    Carol Burnett is an absolute treasure. If you’re young enough to have never seen the show (1967-1978) or later in syndication, I encourage you to check her out on You Tube on wherever.

   It was not just a hilariously funny show but a very intelligent show.  Carol Burnett has class. It showed on screen and it shoes up in print if you look into behind-the-scenes accounts of the show, how selfless Burnett is and how well she treated her cast and guests.

    Back in the day I heard stories about people turning down dates on Saturday night to stay home and watch the Carol Burnett show on CBS, before the late local news.  I don’t doubt this happened but I couldn’t find any first-hand accounts of that on a quick look around the net just now.

   Was talking with a co-worker once about this and that and I mentioned people staying home to watch Carol Burnett. She said she didn’t watch the show.

   “Yes you did,” I said. “Everybody did.”

   My co-worker didn’t argue the point, perhaps because she wanted that particular conversation to be over. But I like to think it was a concession that, yes, she did watch the show.

   Laugh-In I put in another category, but it is also side-splittingly funny.

    “The show, hosted by comedians Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, originally aired as a one-time special on Sept. 9, 1967, and was such a success that it was brought back as a series, replacing The Man From U.N.C.L.E. on Mondays at 8 pm (ET),” according to Wikipedia. “It quickly became the most popular television show in the United States.”

   That 1967 pilot was the episode I watched. It was so early in the series that Dick Martin mispronounced the name comedian JoAnn Worley, saying it with a long O, so it rhymes with “sorely” when she pronounces in with a short E sound to rhyme with “girly.”

   The show was a reflection of the mod, hippie culture of the time.  It was clever, not high-brow but not low-brow either. Laugh-In’s quick-hitting comedy catered to a low-attention span, years before that became necessary to reach Americans.

   Laugh-In made popular a number of catchphrases, such as “you bet your sweet bippee” and “sock it to me.”

   The lasting cultural takeaway from the Carol Burnett show was her ending song. You probably know it.

    “I’m so glad we had this time together, just to have a laugh or sing a song. Seems we just get started and before you know it, comes the time we have to say, so long.”

   We have reached that time in America.  So long.

    After I voted on Nov. 5 an election worker gave me a sticker, which reads, “I Voted.”  Americans will be familiar with that. 

   Usually my sticker is lost or forgotten by the time on election night when the results from the West coast come in. Not this time.

   I still have my sticker because I am convinced it will be the last time we have a free election in the United States.

   And now I can’t get through Carol’s show-ending song without crying.

   On Facebook it’s all “such and such is going on, wake up!”

   But it is not only too late to wake up, it’s way, way too late. This thing is over. Blood in the street will follow soon.

   I was very, very proud of the country I grew up in. It was something to see. You knew that because seemingly everybody around the world wanted to see it, sometimes in movies made here, sometimes by coming to these shores to work or live.

   It was the kind of place that was liable to produce a Carol Burnett.

  I’m glad to have been a part of the United States.  Many historians had it on a short list of the greatest nation states ever.  It was at least in the conversation.

   That is gone now. So long. Rest in pieces.