LIGHT'S OUT: It is hard to imagine a scripted television program from today lasting another seventy years, yet that's what Guiding Light did -- fifteen years on radio, and another fifty-six years of serialized, daily television drama before ending today. Guiding Light is the only soap I ever watched -- for a few years in middle and high school, as it was my mom's show as well -- and I still have vague but fond memories of the various combinations and machinations of Bauers, Spauldings and Lewises.
The causes of the show's demise (and the soap format generally) are obvious -- scripted dramas cost much more than talk shows to produce, and the stay-at-home television audience is not what it was for reasons of feminism and economics. But it's important to acknowledge that we are rapidly losing an American cultural form as unique as the Broadway musical, however silly and archaic this one may seem, and it is a loss.
Last night, Jen and I went to see comedian Jeffrey Ross do a reading of his new memoir, I Only Roast the Ones I Love. And beyond all the well-timed barbs (NSFW) at the random members of the audience ("Who dressed you for tonight, FEMA?" "You look like the son of Art Garfunkel and ... help me out here ..." to which the respondent offered Larry Fine) was a deep respect for the roasters of an earlier age -- Milton Berle and Buddy Hackett in particular. Ross fears the art of the tummler is dying, and while he's doing what he can to keep it alive and tell stories of the past, he had no real answer for the question of what those of us outside of the comic community could do to learn more about what made the Berles and Hacketts so memorable to them. There's no YouTube of them at their filthiest, sadly (though this ain't a bad joke) -- just the oral traditions handed down within the comedic community, and the sanitized versions from network tv of what they could do. The Borscht Belt is dead, and its comedians are on cultural life support.
[Incidentally, both Ross and I are reading the same book right now: I'm Dying Up Here, William Knoedelseder's book on the 1970s Los Angeles comedy scene. More on that later.]
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