wikkidpissah
Footballguy
If i didn't have Jean Shepard as such an influence, it would have been these guys.
Back to real third grade after a disastrous double promotion (mostly cuz i was a pipsqueak even in my own age group) the previous year, i became forever bored & bold in school. The cutting up in class became so egregious that one teacher made a deal w me - don't disrupt and on Friday i get 15 minutes to goof my foolass off in front of the class. I took it very serious, spent my allowance on Bennett Cerf books, accumulated every knock-knock in creation. And there was a new King of Late Night. Me Da didnt like Jack Paar and they switched off after the news, but they liked this gameshow host NBC had hired and suddenly i was hearing laughter at 11:30 again. There was a perch toward the end of the hallway where i could be close enough to hear the TV without being noticed and, soon enough, i was actually studying Johnny Carson with a hunger of learning that never extended to the classroom. I poached me some art-of-the-laugh from Beatmaster Carson in that hallway spot for years after i lost my official Class Clown gig. Wouldnt be who i am without it.
There are two things about being older than mosta y'all i cant seem to impress enough - how heavy a presence social pressure was in community life in the 50s and how little sarcasm there was until David Letterman. I grew up with two kinds of humor - vaudeville shtick and what was known as "sick" humor, which we now call observational - Lenny Bruce-to-Carlin-to-Seinfeld. Both were incredibly earnest and even the absurdist humor that boomers like SNL, Steve Martin, Andy Kaufman, Robin Williams were trying on was very hard-trying. It was cool to be funny, but you just couldn't be funny being cool.
Until Dave. When i look back on his old stuff, it don't even feel right to me cuz we've had 40 years of sarcasm & deadpan overstatement to inure the impact. Goes back to the first time i saw him. One of my music clients signed with RCA Windsong Records (John Denver's vanity label) and another Windsong act, Starland Vocal Band, had just signed to host a summer variety series on network TV (all there was then), so i watched for relevance to our client. There was a goofy, buck-toothed guy sort of hosting it and, at one point, he answered viewer mail. Wasn't til the bit was over that it struck me that there could be no viewer mail on a pilot show. I'd never seen a bit with that kind of arc, that kind of patience of payoff and i was intrigued. Anyone who saw Dave's brief daytime show finally got to understand what this whole deconstruction thing was actually about. The unhappy happytalk, the weird premises (they had a "conspiracy theorist" on regularly who attempted to prove that the great disasters of the previous era were all down to noted baseball player & broadcaster Joe Garagiola, whose proof were pictures of Pearl Harbor & Three-Mile Island with pictures of squatting catchers photoshopped into them) and, most of all, the host as victim of everything around them. In the late 70s, not even the cleverest people were deadpan overstating or using the bait&switch in conversation. By the time Dave was done with us, soccer moms & 8yos were doing it.
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at Joe Buck.
