STILL LAUGHING

Enjoyable memoir by “a ninety-three-year-old who still loves fart jokes.”

Schlatter had a peripatetic youth, winding up in a Missouri college on a football scholarship but then signing on to an opera company while falling in love with burlesque. “I learned what ‘shtick’ meant from the very best,” he writes, “which was useful when I ended up in Hollywood.” Given his desire to get into show business, it was almost inevitable that he would wind up in Los Angeles, and after an abbreviated stint in college there, he talked his way into a job at a talent agency, where Frank Sinatra took him on. From then on, Schlatter did a bit of everything, including producing a memorable TV special with Judy Garland and a fast-cut ad-lib hour with Art Carney and Jonathan Winters, “television without a net.” He then concocted Laugh-In, a partly scripted, partly ad-libbed show with a cast and guest list made up largely of unknowns. “The network suits didn’t audition or approve any of them,” he writes. “That would never happen today.” One was British singer Judy Carne, hired because she could “take a punch,” another the comic Arte Johnson, whose fortunes had flagged to the point that he was selling suits. Jo Anne Worley told good near-blue jokes, Chelsea Brown and Flip Wilson were pioneering Black comedians, and Tiny Tim—well, he was Tiny Tim. Schlatter takes justifiable pride in sneaking in “the first prime-time nipple on the air, kind of making me the Jackie Robinson of breasts.” On the other hand, he regrets bringing Richard Nixon onboard to utter the line “Sock it to me” after many grim takes, since it made Nixon seem hipper than he was. There’s dish aplenty and gracious appreciations, too, including Schlatter’s declaration that “giggly dumb blonde” Goldie Hawn was “the smartest member of the whole cast.” The book includes a foreword by Lily Tomlin and afterword by Hawn.

Lively notes on TV comedy by a master of the genre; a pleasure for fans.