Of my haunted Saturday nights
For a string of Saturday nights I’ve been sitting at my workstation and, upon the 10 o’clock hour, I’ll hear the elegiac trumpets of an old variety show theme song in my head. It’s a single-verse, no-chorus piece written by the variety show star’s husband, which she sang upon the close of her show on Saturday nights long ago:
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."
On the last line the comedienne would tug her earlobe by way of telling her grandmother watching the show from home that she was thinking of her. (She would continue this practice after her grandmother’s death sometime throughout the run of the show.) “Good night, everyone!” she’d call out and the theme song’s melody would play as the credits rolled. So ended Saturday night’s television entertainment. It was time to go to bed and rest up for church in the morning.
Like all nostalgia, it’s not so much the old TV show that I miss as I do the feeling I had in the early to mid-1970s when I had a mother and grandmother—The Carol Burnett Show was their mutual favorite—and I wasn’t worried much about anything outside of school. The humor was corny, but wholesome. I remember laughing at some bits but I don’t know if I’d enjoy watching an old episode today so much beyond an appreciation for the fact that there was a time when women didn’t have to talk about their private parts to be funny.
As a very important aside, I must point out that it says much about how today’s mass media works that, whenever the question of “Can women be funny?” is raised, no one mentions Carol Burnett, let alone her mentor and the first lady of 1950s television, Lucille Ball. Despite their multi-decade career successes, it’s as if they or the other great comediennes of movies and TV never existed.
As smarter writers have pointed out, the media’s power isn’t so much in what they promote as in what they make you forget by omission. The purpose of the absurd “Can women be funny?” question is to stir animosity between today’s comediennes, whose shtick almost invariably revolves around their body parts and sex lives, and the men who are simply tired of being grossed out. Conflict sells, and in the end it’s another demoralization psy-op. When you think of it, the biggest insult is to the ladies who went before and their sufferings and sacrifices to achieve their success. Hey, remember ladies? Oh, how I miss them. Another post, another time….
After the third consecutive Saturday of that theme song in my head, I went to The Carol Burnett Show’s Wikipedia page. I was surprised to learn that the show first aired in 1967 and lasted all the way until 1978. Burnett was given the option for a twelfth season but she correctly observed that the variety show format with comedy sketches and songs was on its way out. With respect, it was quite obvious to anyone paying attention. The television landscape of the mid- to late 1970s was littered with the canceled remains of variety shows awarded various young best-selling pop acts. The only people watching Carol Burnett by 1978 were my mother’s and grandmother’s generations.
I wonder if Burnett had seen any episodes of the early Saturday Night Live after its 1975 debut and what she’d thought of it. When you think of it, Saturday Night Live—for years now, simply SNL—is the very last of the variety shows. Instead of one host, it has a celebrity guest host each week. Instead of songs and dances sprinkled throughout the hour, you get two songs from a rock/rap/whatever act, with many a sketch between the performances. The biggest difference is in the mood.
Saturday Night Live was very much cutting edge in the 1970s if only because the comedians on the show seemed so obviously stoners and recreational drunks just like our teenage selves. They seemed so much more real than the people on every other show. When that saxophone wailed at the very end of the show you felt sad because the only people on TV who (we thought) understood us were going away for another week. Now back to the Big Fake Everything Else, I remember thinking then.
This lasted only as long as the 1970s, though. After nearly half a century of ups and downs, SNL is now the Establishment, and it’s even more insufferably sanctimonious and fake than the one I grew up under.
This brings me back to the biggest difference between that sole survivor of the old variety shows, SNL, and, say, that corny old last-of-its-kind Carol Burnett Show. There was a lot more joy in even the cheesiest variety shows, mainly because no one was striking a too-cool-for-school political pose or trying to convey A Very Important Message About Your Racism/ Sexism/ Preferred Presidential Candidate through the comedy. There was no resentment or anger behind the zaniness.
One longs for shows like Carol Burnett, when, for an hour, you totally forgot who was president. Call it “fake,” but there is a place for escapism in entertainment, whether your particular manifesto of How People Should Think and Live approves or not. And before someone wants to splutter “whuddabout duh Bible?” at me, the Holy Word of God is completely mute on the morality of Tim Conway going off-script and making Harvey Korman break character and laugh in the middle of a skit. (Most who remember will tell you it was the most anticipated moment of the show. How will he crack him this week?)
I will also note that for all the hours of preaching Jesus did, in the synagogues, on mountainsides, from boats on the water, none of it involved stand-up. Not one of His parables could be construed or taken as a joke. No teaching of moral lessons via humor. Another essay for another time and I don’t think Jesus would have minded The Carol Burnett Show. At worst it was frivolous, but that still beats gross-out degenerate.
So another Saturday comes and that ghost of a melody appears in my brain sometime in the 10 p.m. hour. I feel a twinge of that sweet melancholy for an age so far past it might as well never happened. I was surprised further on the Wikipedia page to learn that the peak four seasons of The Carol Burnett Show were those years when it was on Saturday nights, from 1972 until 1977. That time I’m feeling the warm sad fuzzies for was actually quite a narrow window. It seemed to me it had always been on Saturday nights. But, frankly, we didn’t watch it as much after my maternal grandmother died.
My grandmother, who had congenital heart issues, dozed off during the 27 September 1975 broadcast of the show. As the credits rolled and that music played, my grandfather got up from his chair to where she was lying on the folded out sleeper sofa. We were satisfied she’d not only passed in her sleep, but during her favorite show.
I don’t remember seeing much of Carol Burnett after that. I remember seeing the infamous Gone With the Wind sketch in which Burnett, as Scarlett O’Hara, wears an enormous curtain rod over her shoulder. According to Wikipedia, that was November 1976, and the last I was aware of it. As a full-fledged teenager by then I was well out of the habit of watching television with my mom.
This will alarm and dismay some, but my mother and maternal grandmother have been so long gone I don’t particularly miss them. We weren’t the most lovey-dovey of families to begin with. My maternal grandmother had a kind spirit, but she suffered for her heart condition. She really did go out the best possible way.
Aside from the very precious few people whom I miss, it’s the secure feeling of having something close to a family as I did that the nostalgia comes from. And, of course, times were so much simpler and far more proper than they were now. My mother, who passed in 1986, would be aghast at this wildly degenerate 21st century post-America. She’d be in her eighties now and it’s just as well she’s not.
Maybe writing this will finally make that ghost of a theme song go to its rest. I’m fine either way. I do rather like being reminded that TV/Internet time is over and it’s time to go to bed. We’ve got church in the morning. So, once more, with feeling:
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."