Episodes
Each episode followed a somewhat similar format, often including recurring sketches. The show would start with a short dialogue between Rowan and Martin. Shortly afterward, Rowan would intone: "C'mon Dick, let's go to the party". This live-to-tape segment comprised all cast members and occasional surprise celebrities dancing before a 1960s "Mod" party backdrop, delivering one- and two-line jokes interspersed with a few bars of dance music (later adopted on The Muppet Show, which had a recurring segment that is similar to "The Cocktail Party" with absurd moments from characters). The show would then proceed through rapid-fire comedy bits, pre-taped segments, and recurring sketches.
At the end of every show, Dan Rowan turned to his co-host and said, "Say good night, Dick", to which Martin replied, "Good night, Dick!" (varying a bit from the Burns and Allen old-time radio show). The show then featured cast members opening panels in a psychedelically-painted "joke wall" and telling jokes. As the show drew to a close and the applause died, executive producer George Schlatter's solitary clapping continued even as the screen turned blank and the production logo, network chimes, and NBC logo appeared.
Although most episodes included most of the above segments, the arrangement of the segments would often be changed, so that the audience couldn't predict what was next.
The show often featured guest stars. Sometimes the guest had a prominent spot in the program, other times the guest would pop up in short "quickies" (one- or two-liner jokes) interspersed throughout the show. While the guest was available, other bits were recorded, and would be added to other episodes of the series.
Read more about this topic: Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In
Famous quotes containing the word episodes:
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)