Laugh-In football sketch. Alan Sues is the player. Dave Madden the coach.

Humor’s a funny thing.

Consider the joke that makes us roar with laughter today. Twenty years from now, audiences may hear it without even cracking a smile. Or consider the comedians we think are side-splittingly funny. Few will still be thought amusing a generation or two from now. Who now remembers Ed Gallagher and Al Shean, the headliners of the 1910s? Or Joe Weber and Lew Fields, the top comedy team of the 1890s? Or the most popular comedians of the late 1960s, Dan Rowan and Dick Martin?

Actually, many baby boomers will still remember Rowan and Martin, although their TV comedy program has been off the air for 40 years. Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In featured straight-man Rowan feeding lines to Martin, who responded with screwball responses that were a cross between Stan Laurel and Gracie Allen. This was followed by a wild assortment of unrelated skits and jokes. That formula may not sound so original now, but in 1969 and 1970, it was a breath of fresh air, and made Laugh-in the most watched program on television. It was, as a Post article put it, “Where TV Comedy Is At.”

Laugh-In was manic, relentless, and unlike anything we’d ever seen. It used nearly every comedy device known: short skits, one-liners, puns, slapstick, improvisation, and satire. Much of the show reworked ancient gags from vaudeville. It even offered a touch of burlesque with its leering close-ups of graffiti painted on bikinied women, most notably the then-sex-symbol Goldie Hawn whom the show turned into an overnight sensation.

But Laugh-In also brought innovations to TV comedy. It was the first show to fill an entire hour with comedy without a plot or theme. There were no singers, acrobats, or dance troupes—just comedians. And if the quality of jokes wasn’t all you might want, you couldn’t complain about the portion sizes. Laugh-In served at least 250 jokes every show.

We should add that these were not always ‘jokes’ in any traditional sense. One of the great laugh-getters—and we are not making this up—was the line “Sock it to me.” Just that. “Sock it to me.”

Celebrities lined up for the privilege of delivering that line on the show. Even Richard Nixon appeared in a September 1968 episode to speak it, though he stated it in the form of a question—“Sock it to me?” Hubert Humphrey, who was running against him for the presidency that year, declined an offer to go on camera and utter the phrase. And he lost the election, you’ll remember.

They Socked It To Us The Saturday Evening Post

The character of “Groucho” was born on the vaudeville circuit sometime in 1919. He bore a certain similarity to the Julius Henry Marx born October 2, 1890. Both were unpredictable and sharp-witted, but Julius was far more sentimental and anxious than his comedic counterpart. As his son wrote in an eight-part biography of “My Old Man Groucho,”

He’s a sentimentalist, but he’d rather be found dead than have you know it. And he’s a dreamer, although he likes to pass himself off as a disillusioned realist.

Arthur wrote the biography in 1954, when Groucho was the enormously popular host of the television show, “You Bet Your Life.” His father added to his son’s efforts by sticking in occasional footnotes.

If I’ve given you the impression that my father is a miser, I’d like to correct that notion at once. (“You’d better, or I’ll cut you off without a nickel.” Groucho) He’s one of the most generous men I’ve ever known. (“Now you’re talking.” Groucho)

Arthur recounted several key moments in Groucho’s career, including the day he abandoned his primarily musical act with “The Fourth Nightingales” and moved into comedy.

[They] embarked on a tour of the South and Midwest. Harpo was still singing off-key, Janie O’Riley was still missing the high notes, and least once a month they found themselves stranded without funds in some whistle-stop town. Somewhere during all this, they changed the name of the act to the Marx Brothers & Co. Presumably this was to hide their identity, but essentially the act was the same. They were fooling no one, and by the time they pulled into a place called Nacogdoches, Texas, they were prepared for a last-ditch stand.

Their first performance in Nacogdoches was at a matinee. It was a real honky-tonk kind of theater, with an audience of big ranchers in ten-gallon bate and small ranchers in five-gallon hats. In the middle of the act the audience got up en masse and disappeared through the front exit to view a run-away mule. My father and his brothers were accustomed to insults, but for some reason this one made them furious. When the customers filed back into the theater, all the Marx brothers wanted to do was get even.

A rough-house comedy bit evolved, with the Marxes, led by my father, flinging insults about Texas and its inhabitants to the audience. Since this happened over thirty years ago, my father is not very clear about details, but he does remember calling this Texans in the audience “damned Yankees” and throwing in lines that went something like:

“Nacogdoches…… Is full of roaches.”

If that’s a sample, perhaps it’s just as well that my father can’t remember any more. At any rate, he was launched on a successful career of ad-libbing. The audience loved the Marx brother’s clowning, and greeted the crudest insults and the most tired jokes with laughter.

And so the brothers were suddenly comedians…

And then, there’s the story of how the Marx brothers got their nicknames.

On one of their vaudeville tours, my father and his brothers found themselves on the same bill with a monologist named Art Fisher. Fisher’s hobby was giving people nicknames. A few hours spent with my father convinced Fisher that he ought to be called Groucho. The origin of “Harpo” [the harp-player] is, of course, obvious. “Chico” evolved from the fact that he was a lady-killer, ladies in those days being known as “chickens.” Gummo was so called because he wore “gum shoes” whether it was raining or not. Soon my father and his brothers found themselves using the new names in place of their real ones.

Although Arthur Marx is careful to show the difference between his father, Julius, and the character Groucho. Yet he also relates several incidents where any difference disappears. After the Marx Brothers had become celebrities, for example,

My father made his first extravagant purchase, a seven-passenger sedan that cost six thousand dollars. (“No, it was a six-passenger sedan that cost seven thousand dollars.” Groucho)

The car seemed as tall as it was long; it had window separating the driver’s compartment from the back seat, and it was loaded with nickel-plated trimmings. At one stage of his vaudeville career my father and his brothers had owned motorcycles, and traveled from town to town on them, sometimes transporting chorus girls on the handle bas. (“Sometimes? Always!” Groucho) But this was his first full-sized motor vehicle.

Chico was on the stage doing his piano solo when the new car was delivered to the stage door of the Casino Theater. Figuring that Chico would be on for another ten minutes, father hopped in the car and, dressed as Napoleon, went for a spin around the block. When his Napoleon sketch was due to go on, he was wedged in a traffic jam three blocks away.

“Chico had to play fourteen encores,” my father recalls. “And this was difficult, since he only knew three numbers.”

In his desperation to get hack to the theater, my father made an illegal left turn, and a policeman stopped him. One look at my father dressed as Napoleon was enough to convince the gendarme that he was a refugee from Bellevue’s psychiatric ward.

“But I’m one of the Marx brothers,” father insisted, “and I’m due on the stage right this minute.”

” If you’re one of the Marx brothers,” said the cop, “let’s hear you say something funny.”

“If you’re a policeman, let’s see you arrest somebody!” retorted my father. That line should have landed my father in jail, but evidently the policeman felt that only a Marx brother would have the nerve to say such a thing. He escorted Groucho back to the theater…

My mother never quite understood my father’s sense of humor. Her first warning of things to come occurred at their wedding, in 1919. The ceremony was to take place in her mother’s apartment in Chicago. They were turned down by five different clergymen before Jo Swerling, their best man, found a minister willing to marry a show-business couple.

My father showed his gratitude to the minister by heckling him all through the ceremony. Harpo can attest to this, because he was hiding behind a potted plant at the time, and was moving the plant around the room to make it appear to be walking.

Coming down the home stretch, relieved that the ordeal was almost over, the minister asked, “Do you, Julius, take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife?”

“Well, I’ve gone this far,” replied my father. “I might as well go through with it.”

Very few women would stand for that sort of thing, much less think it funny. My mother put up with it for twenty-one years…

He always felt fine when he took the family to a restaurant tor dinner. Then mother could count on him for jokes, especially if the headwaiter didn’t recognize him.

A page from the September 18, 1954 edition of the Post. "Fay McKenzie and Groucho Marx pull an old vaudeville routine on one of his wartime radio shows."

“Name, sir? There’ll be a short wait.”

“Jackson,” father would reply. “Stonewall Jackson. And this is Mrs. Jackson, and there are the little Jacksons.”

Mother would do a slow burn, knowing that his real name would get us a table immediately.

“Grouch,” she whisper, “Tell them who you are.”

“Why should I?” he’d reply. “If I can’t get in under the name of Jackson, then I don’t want to eat here. I don’t like restaurants where you have be a celebrity to get in.”

“Then you should have made a reservation,” she’d say. “You can’t walk into a restaurant on Thurdsay night without a reservation and—“

At this point we’d leave for another restaurant, or my father would tap the headwaiter on the arm. “My wife wants me to tell you who I am,” he’d say. “My name’s not really Stonewall Jackson. It’s Abe Schwartz, and I’m in the wholesale-plumbing supply business. And this is Mrs. Schwatz and all the little Schwartzes.”

If the headwaiter thought he was peculiar, the waitress, when we’d finally be seated, would consdier completely mad.

“Miss,” he might begin, glancing up from the menu, “do you have frog’s legs?”

“I’ll ask the chef,” she’d reply.

“No. You’re not supposed to say that,” father would explain in a patient tone. “When I say, ‘Do you have frog’s legs?’ you’re supposed to answer, ‘No, rheumatism, makes me walk this way.’ O.K., now let’s try it again. Miss, do you have frog’s legs?”

Her face would go blank. “It isn’t on the menu. I’ll have to ask the chef.”

“Now you’ve spoiled it. We’ll have to start all over aga—“

“Grouch,” my mother would interrupt, “this girl is busy. Who do you waste her time with such foolishness?”

“It’s not foolishness. It might come in very handy to her someday. Supposing vaudeville comes back and she wants to get up an act. Look at the shape she’d be in with this sure-fire material.”

At the risk of sounding traitorous, I suspect that the comedy was a way of drawing attention to himself, without actually revealing his identity. He had a fixation about not wanting to get any special privileges just because he was a celebrity…  At the same time, he couldn’t reconcile himself to being unrecognized. So he made himself conspicuous by other methods. (“Take it easy with that probing. If I want to be analyzed, I’ll go to a psychiatrist.” Groucho)

Groucho Turns 120 The Saturday Evening Post

So when my cousin Phil told me about his three
days in Las Vegas, I believed him. It sounded like a movie, but it happened to him.

It starts like this: Phil is a junior executive at a big company in Chicago. One day his boss called him in and told him he was going to represent the company at a trade show in Las Vegas. Pretty exciting feather in his cap. He’s single, got a nice little apartment, and just bought a luxury car. He’s doing well—very well.

So, he packed his fine Italian suitcase, which he bought with bonus money his firm gave him, stuck $400 in his wallet, and took off to Sin City, deciding to drive and see a little of the country.

In Denver, he found a book called Beating the Games 
in Vegas. He stayed up most of the night reading it. As he got in his car in the morning, he decided that his game would be “21.”

He detoured to visit Provo, Utah. He liked the name—Provo—there was something about it that made him smile. While there, he found a book that appealed to him as much as the name Provo. It was simply titled Moe on 21. “The book,” the cover said, “will make you a winner at the table.” Phil memorized nearly every line in the book. He arrived in Vegas early in the morning, got some sleep, went to the trade show, checked in and shook some hands, then went to the casino. He got a hundred dollars worth of $5 chips, then strolled along the 21 tables, watching players and reconnecting each of their “moves” to what “Moe” had written. Most of them, he found, obviously did not know how to play the game.

Phil sat down at a table and put a $5 chip in the card box. He won immediately, doubling his bet. He then lost six hands in a row, picked up his remaining chips, and left the table. “Dealers can get hot,” Moe had written. “Never forget, it is gambling.”

Phil played some more and won back his losses. This went well into the night. By 3:00 a.m., he was ahead. Now he sat alone at a table, just Phil and the dealer. He was 
soon joined by a seedy, elderly man with a soiled tie at half mast, badly in need of a haircut and shave, with two $100 chips. He pushed them into play. His face card was a six. 
He asked for another card and turned over his hand. He 
had 26. He busted out.

Phil couldn’t resist giving this unfortunate man some advice. “The dealer had a five up,” he said. “You shouldn’t 
hit on 16.”

The man looked at him in disgust. “How do you know?”

“Here, in this book, Moe on 21, by Moe,” said Phil.

The man nodded. “I know,” he said. “I am Moe.” He got 
up and started to walk away, but then turned to Phil. “Sometimes,” he hesitated, “you gotta forget what the book says and just play a hunch.”

The next day, Phil went back to the trade show, but all he could think of was what Moe said after going against his own advice. Phil had reread Moe’s book, and there it was, in bold print: “DON’T,” the line read, “PLAY HUNCHES! 21 is a game you can win if you play it right.” But this, obviously, wasn’t true. Moe looked like he was done, broke, busted. Why was he now playing a “hunch?” Because it’s more exciting. That was what Phil decided.

That night, Phil went back to his room, got his stash, which had grown substantially the previous night, and went back to the casino. He stopped at a roulette table. “Provo,” he said to himself, “five letters.” He took his entire pocketful of $100 chips and put them on number five. The wheel went round, and the silver ball hopped and spun and landed on his number.

He now had more than $5,000. He walked to the 21 tables. He played only hunches, and by midnight, he’d won $96,000.

But things started to change. At 3:20 a.m., he counted his chips. He had just about $10,000 left. He’d lost. He was tired and hungry.

He scooped up his chips and turned to leave, then collided with someone and the chips flew to the floor. “I’m sorry,” a voice said. And there, helping him pick up his chips was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Gladys and I’m clumsy.” She handed him the rest of the chips and he smiled at her.

“I’m starving,” he said. “Would you like something to eat?”

So, they ate and talked. She said she was in the carpet business in Oregon. No husband. No boyfriend. Just taking a couple of days off on her own. They walked up to his room, and she poured them a couple of Scotches from the mini-bar. … He woke up two days later with a terrible headache. His $10,000 in chips were gone, as were his credit cards, cash, and car keys.

Leaving the hotel that day, he walked through the casino, and there was Moe, clean-shaven and wearing an expensive suit, a pile of $100 chips in front of him. He saw Phil and smiled. “Sometimes you play hunches,” he said. “And sometimes you go by the book.”

Phil went back to the convention and borrowed money from a friend to get home. “I did great,” he told me. “I went to Vegas in a $60,000 Cadillac and went home in a $600,000 Greyhound bus.”

Phil told me that someday he was going to go back to Vegas, play it by the book, and maybe run into Gladys again.

But then he met Blanche, who works in human resources at his company, and they fell in love and decided to get married. He asked her where she’d like to go on their honeymoon. She’d already thought about it.

“I’d like to go somewhere,” she said, “where there are bright lights, great shows, and gambling.”

So they went to Atlantic City.

3 Days in Vegas The Saturday Evening Post

Several years ago my wife and I rented a house that had, attached to its hindquarters, a screened-in back porch. Though it was our vacation and we had made ambitious plans for the week, the pull of the screened porch proved too great, causing us to scrap our agenda and spend our days reclining in twin hammocks, reading, beyond the reach of the horseflies and mosquitoes.

Over the next few years, I revisited that pleasant porch many times in my memory, recalling the cool breeze circulating around me, the gentle throb of the evening crickets, the sweet iced tea within arm’s reach, the book tented upon my chest as I slid into a nap.

Winters rolled into springs and springs into summers. I turned 48 and felt the press of time, my life half spent without a screened porch to show for it. Then last spring, I phoned a builder, who walked around the house with me, studying it, looking for the obvious place to attach a porch.

“How about we build on a front porch?” he said.

“Wouldn’t work,” I told him. “We’d have to chop down my wife’s magnolias. She’d skin us alive.”

“We could always come off the kitchen,” the builder said. “Tear out this wall here, put a door there, move the garage over there.”

He stretched out his tape measure, punched some numbers into his calculator, and quoted a figure that was more than we’d paid for the house. Why is it that whenever I hire a builder, no matter how small or large the project, it inevitably involves the depletion of my entire savings?

By then, I had painted myself into a corner. Believing the porch’s cost would be modest, I had begun buying porch furniture and stacking it in our garage—a rocker, couch, swing, tables, chairs, a fan, a lamp by which to read, one sign forbidding the use of cell phones, and another sign prohibiting the use of dirty words, such as Congress, incumbent, Republican, Democrat, or Tea Party.

I’m a simple Quaker minister and have to watch my expenditures, lest I become the subject of gossip and speculation. Quaker ministers are granted wide latitude in theological matters, but have to toe the line when it comes to simplicity. There are Quaker porches and Episcopalian porches, and I am expected to know the difference. I thanked the builder, an Episcopalian, and sent him on his way.

Later that evening, my wife and I were discussing our prospective porch, and she suggested I build it. There was a time I would have tackled a job like that with confident enthusiasm, but that was several explosions ago, and I’ve grown more timid over the years. The phrase, “I’ll build it myself” has become codespeak for “How about I screw it up so bad we’ll spend twice as much paying someone else to fix it?”

A few days later my friend Dave Helton came to visit. Dave is a human encyclopedia, able to dredge up, sort out, and spew forth arcane bits of data on any topic related to the home.

“Why don’t you just hang mosquito curtains on your breezeway?” he asked. “People down South use ’em all the time. You put ’em up in the spring, take ’em down in the fall. Cost you a couple hundred bucks.”

I went online, entered the words “mosquito curtains,” and landed on a company in Georgia, owned by a man named Kurt, who, despite once having a job on Wall Street, looked reasonably trustworthy. I phoned Kurt, told him the dimensions of our breezeway, read him the numbers on our credit card, and four days later the UPS man delivered our mosquito curtains. Kurt had predicted it would take two hours to hang the curtains and thoughtfully included directions, which I ignored, adding several hours to the installation time. After hanging the curtains, I transferred the rockers, couch, swing, tables, chairs, fan, lamp, and signs from the garage to our breezeway. It was a tight squeeze, but I shoehorned them in.

There is much concern in our country these days about our national debt, climate change, and health care. My plan of action is to sit many hours on my porch this summer, drinking sweet iced tea and not thinking about them.

My Porch Plan The Saturday Evening Post