Herb on Laugh In
- Thread starter Steve Sidoruk
- Start date
Bobberman
Well-Known Member
I've still love his appearance on Laugh in. I remember first seeing it in reruns in my much younger years.
abstract_fan
Well-Known Member
Laugh In was a show where if you laughed too hard at a joke, you missed the next three jokes.
It definitely lined up the humor
abstract_fan
Well-Known Member
On the other hand, 99 percent of the jokes were pretty awful, but they came by so fast! The show was basically a relief from the turbulent 1960's.
You were there? Was the Vietnam war wild or does pop culture build it up bigger than it was? I've talked to people who were teenagers in the 60s and they said that people weren't as worked up about it left or right as TV makes it seem. Like, it was THAT big a deal in the public consciousness.
GDBY2LV
Well-Known Member
It was a huge deal. Mostly what we saw was on the network news in the early evening, Monday-Friday, and the daily newspapers. The marches in Washington D.C. were big, and powerful. The democratic convention in Chicago was very chaotic with all the anti-war demonstrations, and brutal police actions. Some college campuses had daily protests or sit ins, to disrupt the normal routines of the day. I remember they were huge at the University of California, Berkeley, and Santa Barbara. But the most tragic was Kent State University in Ohio, where 4 were killed and 9 wounded, while protesting. It made things worse for the powers that be. A very sad time for our country, and the men who gave their lives, and those who suffered upon return, with mostly no recognition, or thank you for your service from much of anyone. They all deserved better.
P. S. I remember around 1976-77 when they told us we no longer needed our draft cards. It was a huge relief for those of us not called up, or still in college.
P. S. I remember around 1976-77 when they told us we no longer needed our draft cards. It was a huge relief for those of us not called up, or still in college.
If you weren't there (I was), it's hard to explain the culture at the time. TV was three channels---ABC, CBS, NBC. If you lived in a bigger city like L.A., maybe you had seven or nine stations. News wasn't on all day. There was the TODAY show on NBC, which was pretty softball, half an hour of local news in the early evening, the network news at 7 for half an hour and another half hour of local news at eleven.
Film cameras were large, cumbersome and film itself was expensive and took time to develop. Much of the news was a talking head reading stories that took 30 or 60 seconds each.
So when the networks sent crews to cover Vietnam---and shippped back film of just how poorly the war was going for us, graphic film showing American teenage soldiers on stretchers minutes after having been shot or shredded by a grenade or land mine, it amplified two things---one, that it was getting harder to find someone who didn''t know someone who'd lost a loved one (usually an 18 or 19 year old) to the war----and two, that the generals had been lying in their statements about American gains and Viet Cong losses.
Gallup (the polling company) put public opinion on the war onto this graph about 25 years ago:
As you can see, it was early 1968 when the tide turned and more people believed our involvement was a mistake than didn't. And there were seven years left before we were out.
Put that together with the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the riots in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention, and as GDBY2LV rightly notes, campus unrest up to and including the May, 1970 deaths of four student activists at Kent State and yeah---it was wild in the worst possible way.
Could be. Another factor is how old they were at the time. 1968 was 56 years ago. The 40-year-olds whose kids were coming home in body bags are 96 now, if they're still alive.
Like GDBY2LV, I was right on the edge of being drafted. The final draft lottery was March 12, 1975---and they were calling my year, they just didn't get to my number. For perspective, I just turned 68 last week.
I missed it by three years (64 in a few months). Years later (after I'd already been in the Volunteer Navy for two enlistments) I asked my parents if they were ever worried about the draft and their oldest son (me) back in the day. My mom said she cried at night thinking about it every year as the war went on. My Dad, on the other hand, a strict and bristled Korean War vet, said while he worried about it, he "knew" I'd be fine. He had dreams me becoming some kind of highfalutin' Army officer... yeah, Army and Marines would be the last two branches I would've considered... Navy won me only because they were the only ones who'd guarantee me being a photographer. Look at me now -- a retired Navy Photographer with 34 years service behind me working as a video producer for the City of Waco!
I wonder how things would have turned out if my dad had survived.
Not to get too heavy, but Dad died nine days before my ninth birthday. Jack Hagerty was a great guy and he enlisted in the Army the day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He would have done it the same day, but it was Sunday, and the recruiting office was closed.
He was 24.
They shipped him off to the South Pacific. Somewhere in his first tour, he contracted malaria and damn near died between there and the hospital in San Francisco where they nursed him back to health and then sent him back where he came from.
When his tour was up, he re-enlisted. Why? "Because there's still a war."
And he got malaria and damn near died a second time.
And if the war had still been going on when his second round was expiring, he absolutely would have re-upped for a third.
I suspect that, had Dad lived, waiting around for the draft lottery wouldn't have been an issue---I probably would have been expected to enlist in advance and report to boot camp a day or two after graduating high school.
The thing that I wonder about is, with more years of Dad's influence, would I have been as eager to do so as he was?
Could be a lot of it. Young teenagers just don't care about that stuff ever. Both my mom's parents fought in the big war. When she was a teenager and her older brother was in Nam, his wife and baby lived with my mom's family of younger kids. No one even mentioned the war; it was like some kind of unspoken jinx to mention him being in harm's way or the war not being admirable.
Reminds me of a situation. I have a work mentor who was a pacifist, draft refusing peace-nic (excellent person). He also speaks loudly and proudly against nuclear weapons and the bombs we dropped on Japan. His dad was a Marine in the pacific, stationed on Okinawa when we dropped the bomb and ended the war. I casually told my mentor once, "you might not be here if we didn't drop the bomb." He didn't like that. Interestingly, the Marine dad didn't care at all that his son didn't want to go to Nam. Never held it against him. But the mom was really embarrassed.
That's a tricky situation philosophically. You might find someone whose immediate answer is "Better that I had never lived than 100,000-plus people die, not to mention the suffering of those who survived the initial blast", but that would just mean they'd thought deeply about it before.
There were a lot of retired military who had issues with our involvement in Vietnam. Military history shows land wars in Asia are largely unwinnable (too many countries, too many borders to defend, too many non-official authority figures).
Plus, it wasn't like WWII in that we hadn't been attacked. This was another "police action" like Korea, but one that escalated far beyond its original parameters. Don't know if this fact has come up in what you've been reading and watching, but the United States never declared war against North Vietnam nor the Viet Cong.
Having refreshed my memory on all the above, I think Dad probably would have gravitated to "duty to Country" for his son, but he was also smart enough to understand that this wasn't the same set of circumstances under which he enlisted and risked his life.
