“Sock it to me?!?!?!”
How did this happen?
This moment is a trivia question, a history book staple.
But I never really knew what it meant.
“See, Richard Burton has nothing to gain by coming on our show.
” “Well, no, I wouldn't say that.
Look what it did for Richard Nixon.” On September 16th, 1968.
Richard Nixon did a cameo on Laugh-In,
and supposedly he changed American politics.
But I think that to understand it, you need a lot more context.
You need to know what this show
actually was, the forgotten truth about how Nixon ended up there.
And only then can you figure out what happened
when Richard Nixon decided to say: “Sock it to me.”
I think we're good now.
Hi there. Okay.
So I think the first question is what the heck was Laugh-In?
I mean, I know that Nixon appeared on Laugh-In, but I didn't really know what
Laugh-In was.
“The following program is brought to you in Living Color on NBC.
Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In.” I apologize to my baby boomer viewers,
but I had no idea when I came across this piece
of trivia in books or on websites.
And I think it's really important to understand
just how weird this Richard Nixon cameo was.
And let me tell you, Laugh-In was freakin weird.
I went deep on it.
I read two Laugh-In books in a college library,
and I watched so many crazy episodes of this show.
Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In aired a pilot episode in 1967
and was picked up for series in 1968.
Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, they were an old comedy team
who headed up this very youth focused 1960s show.
It ran for six seasons, but that actually undersells what a huge success it was.
This is Laugh-In’s spin off magazine.
This thing sold 300,000 copies
a month in 1968 and 1969.
Laugh-In was the number one show in the country, period, number one.
It had a 31.1 rating, which basically means that a third
of all television owning homes in the country were watching it.
It made Tiny Tim a national figure overnight.
This is Tiny Tim.
(Funny falsetto singing) “A
tisket, a tasket.” It was so popular
that Reverend Billy Graham showed up on this deeply irreverent show.
“Well, I'm very happy to be here, Dan.
As a matter of fact, many of my people advised me to
come on tonight because they said this show didn't have a prayer.”
So that's the popularity.
Let's talk about the content.
“I forgot.”
Huh?
I'm trying to discuss the content on that.
“Palmetto.” Those are all real cutaway gags from Laugh-In.
And they had exactly as much context as I gave them.
It consisted of incredibly short scenes that didn't necessarily
relate to each other.
A Family Guy cutaway away would be right at home on Laugh-In.
And so what's the content actually like politically?
Laugh-In was most frequently compared with the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
They were both variety shows.
But I find it kind of helpful to imagine the difference between,
say, Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert.
They're both willing to make political jokes
about like Donald Trump or whatever, but you would only call Colbert political,
and it would be the same for the Smothers Brothers.
In the middle of all that is sock it to me.
Basically, this is what would happen.
And so all of that is key to understanding
just how weird it is that Richard Nixon ended up being in a Laugh-In cutaway.
But the even more interesting thing is how it came together.
Can we do a little dialog scene between one Phil and the other Phil?
I don't know of any funny
variety show style jokes, so can you just say that's rich?
Oh, that's rich. (Rich, depressed laughter)
I think the natural
first instinct when you see Nixon do a cameo on Laugh-In
is to imagine some media handler pushing him into a cameo.
And that is totally not the case.
That's what you need to know about a man named Paul Keyes.
“(Mumbling) The President said he wanted to speak to me.”
This is Paul Keyes
in the obituary The Boston Globe printed in 2004.
He was a big producer on Laugh-In and very unusual for Hollywood in 1968.
He was a conservative.
He met the future president when Nixon appeared on the Jack Paar Show,
which was kind of the predecessor/merged with The Tonight
Show.
From there, Nixon and Keyes
became actually really close friends, like really close.
The Nixon tapes happened
after Nixon's Laugh-In appearance, but it shows how close they stayed.
“Sir?” “Yes, sir.
Well, yes, sir.” “Well, how did your program rate?” “Well,
we beat everything in sight.” And look, this article shows
that they vacationed in the Bahamas together.
They went on fishing vacations together for a decade, at least.
Keyes served as Nixon's entree to Hollywood
and his ad hoc media adviser and his close friend.
And eventually he was on the Nixon payroll.
He's even got comedian Jackie Gleason to endorse Nixon.
“Our country need Dick Nixon.” Keyes’
Nixon ties weren’t harmless to the show.
Later on, star Lily Tomlin said that she left in part
because the Laugh-In/Nixon connection was too strong for her political views.
But the reason it all happened wasn't because Nixon's
advisers told him to try to appeal to the youth vote.
They told him not to go on the show.
It was because Nixon had a close friend
that he went on and he said:
“Sock it to me?!?!?”
He still
barely works.
I started researching this video because I made a video about Bill
Clinton's appearance on Arsenio, where he played the saxophone.
And I realized I knew nothing about Laugh-In.
Now I know how truly radical it was for
a couple of reasons.
First,
Laugh-In was a more popular and unusual show
than I had ever realized.
And second, I think what we called
the start of celebrity presidential politics.
It's misunderstood.
“You always have a job on our joke
wall!” I think we like to imagine big changes
in media and politics as being super calculated evolutions.
But sometimes they can just be personal flights of fancy.
“Okay, well, you deserve a lot of credit.
” “Thank you sir.” “God love you.” “Than you.
Yeah.
” “So do you, for other reasons.” “If you'd like to go to Florida,
you're welcome.” “Thank you, sir, but I have to get back.” “Okay.
Bye.” “Thank you.
” “Thank you sir.”
And Richard Nixon trusted his friend enough
to believe that he wouldn't actually sock it to him.
“I don't think we could get Mr.
Nixon to stand still for sock it to me.”
All right.
Thank you for watching.
If you haven't been here before, this is a personal channel where I post
personal videos, history videos, stuff like that.
This video was actually inspired by an exchange
in the comments in that Bill Clinton video that I mentioned.
And I realized, yeah, just knew nothing about Laugh-In, about
why Nixon actually showed up on the show.
And so that's kind of what I'm trying to do with this.
“What really happened” playlist is take all these
predigested moments and analyze
what was really going on at a human scale, political scale, whatever.
So do you have any ideas for stuff that I should look at for that?
I'd love to know in the comments, otherwise I'd appreciate it
if you subscribe and join me for the next video.
And until then, I'll leave you with
a Laugh-In cutaway joke to close this out. “Peter Sellers.”