In an age of “sit-ins,” “love-ins” and “teach-ins,” NBC was proposing a “laugh-in” that somehow bridged generational gaps. Originally a one-shot special, Laugh-In was an immediate hit and quickly became the highest-rated series of the late 1960s. In a decade of shouted slogans, bumper stickers, and protest signs, Laugh-In translated its comedy into discrete one-liners hurled helter-skelter at the audience in hopes that some of them would prove funny. Many of them became catchphrases: “Sock it to me,” “Here come de judge,” “You bet your sweet bippy,” and “Look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls.” In this frenetic and fragmented series, comic lines were run as announcements along the bottom of the screen, printed in lurid colors on the bodies of bikini-clad go-go girls, and shouted over the closing credits. The humor was sometimes topical, sometimes nonsensical, sometimes “right on” and sometimes right of center, but it largely escaped the censorship problems that besieged the Smothers Brothers. Its helter-skelter visual style stretched the capabilities of television and videotape production, striving for the equivalent of the cutting and optical effects Richard Lester brought to the Beatles movies.

Laugh-In broke down the traditional separation of comedy, musical performance, and dramatic interludes that had marked most earlier variety shows and decentered the celebrity hosts from their conventional position as mediator of the flow of entertainment. Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, successful Las Vegas entertainers, sought to orchestrate the proceedings but were constantly swamped by the flow of sight gags and eccentric performances that surrounded them. Similarly, guest stars played no privileged role here. For a time, everyone seemed to want to appear on Laugh-In, with guests on one memorable episode including Jack Lemmon, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Hugh Hefner, and presidential candidate Richard Nixon. But no guest appeared for more than a few seconds at a time, and none received the kind of screen time grabbed by the program’s ensemble of talented young clowns.

The comic regulars—Gary Owens’s overmodulated announcer, Ruth Buzzi’s perpetually frustrated spinster, Arte Johnson’s lecherous old man, Goldie Hawn’s dizzy blonde, Jo Anne Worley’s anti-Chicken-Joke militant, Henry Gibson’s soft-spokenly banal poet, Lily Tomlin’s snorting telephone operator, Pigmeat Markham’s all-powerful Judge, and countless others— dominated the program. Many of these comics moved almost overnight from total unknowns to household names, and many became important stars for the subsequent decades. Not until Saturday Night Live would another television variety show ensemble leave such a firm imprint on the evolution of American comedy. These recurring characters and their associated shtick gave an element of familiarity and predictability to a program that otherwise depended upon its sense of the unexpected.

While Laugh-In lacks the satirical bite of later series such as Saturday Night Live or In Living Color, or of That Was the Week That Was (to which it was often compared by contemporary critics), Laugh-In brought many minority and female performers to mainstream audiences, helping to broaden the composition of television comedy. Its dependence upon stock comic characters and catchphrases was clearly an influence on the development of Saturday Night Live, which by comparison, has a much more staid visual style and more predictable structure. Unfortunately, Laugh-In’s topicality, even its close fit with 1960s aesthetics, has meant that the program has not fared well in reruns, being perceived as dated almost from the moment it was aired. However, the ongoing success of Laugh-In alums such as Hawn, Tomlin, or even game show host Richard Dawson point to its continued influence.