Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Dirty Old Man

Arte Johnson was one of my favorite Laugh-In characters, but finding good HQ pictures of him in character is difficult. As I was readying this one for use as one of my avitars on Facebook, I asked a passing offspring to identify the character pictured. Offspring had no idea.

It struck me that although channels like Nickelodeon have rebroadcast many of the old Laugh-In shows and our kids may have seen them while they were growing up in the 1970s - 1990s, they probably didn’t appreciate the topical humor of the sixties. It’s probably true that anyone age 55 and younger has little appreciation for this terrific comedian and for Laugh-In. Too damn bad…that means the humor of my avatar will be lost on most folks.

Very interesting. 

Adios



3 comments:

Jetski said...

I had almost forgotten this bit. Still as funny as anything I've seen since, maybe more so. You've got a wonderful thing going here, sorry so many of us are stick in the muds, but please, please keep it coming. Fabulous.

Anonymous said...

Arty Johnson came to my mind once again this summer when I was riding my bike around Lake Estes with the grandkids. I went around a corner too slowly, got caught in some gravel and down I went, in slo-mo, just like Arty. Alas, I fractured my radial head and had to wear a cast and stay out of the studio for a month -- a blessing in disguse, since I retreated to my fiber studio and finished a couple of big quilting projects.

Gus said...

Hmm, your comment reminds me of an EH girl I once knew whose extensive vocabulary occasionally sent me to Webster's or Funk & Wagnalls, seeking further knowledge to better understand what in the hell she was talking about.

So, thinking of one's head in a cast, I first wondered how that might look, then how that might affect one handcraft but not the other, and finally, where the heck was your helmet? But I did look it up....and discovered further knowledge!

Now, as it often goes, one thought leads to another and in this case it leads to a FB friend, an outdoorsy sort, about 10-years younger who I never knew at EH though he graduated from there and went on to distinguish himself with a Yale BA.

Most recently he has become an Anura rider and plans to ride to the west coast sometime in the future. Ol' Gus thinks he's nuts but, Ol' Gus has a large capacity for accepting people as they are, nuts or not. Now, I believe that Anura can't do an Arte Johnson so, I wonder why he feels the need to wear a helmet...but, he does--one of those little flat jobs that are very likely useless for much of anything other than looking cool...or, maybe absorbing a little noggin bump at the end of an Arte Johnson.

...but, we ain't talkin' about that kind of a head, are we?