ALAN writes:

As another example of the kind of television entertainment that Americans found rewarding in 1959 in comparison to today, continuing from my previous essay, I offer the following:

This memory is from Tuesday nights in the midst of winter in the years 1958-1961. My mother was very selective in the matter of TV entertainment, but one variety program earned her approval and favor — and mine.

Many years afterward, Carol Burnett wrote, “…too few people remember what a fabulous weekly comedy variety show Garry Moore hosted…”  [Carol Burnett, This Time Together, Three Rivers Press, 2010, p. 48]

Indeed true. But I am one of those few. From the little man pushing a lawnmower in the opening scene to the unforgettable scene at the close, I remember it clearly and fondly. It was an hour-long variety program, filled with comedy sketches and highly-polished song and dance routines — and all of it in black and white. It never occurred to us for a moment that color could have made it better.

Garry Moore, who started out in radio, was a family man. He was not a fan of rock “music”. On his program, Christmas and Thanksgiving were not ridiculed or apologized for; they were honored and celebrated.  The George Becker Singers and the Ernie Flatt Dancers were top-notch.

His regular cast included veteran radio-TV announcer Durward Kirby and veteran stage actress Marion Lorne. Those names are now largely forgotten in the wake of the indescribable bombast, filth, and rubbish that Americans came increasingly to accept on their TV screens over the past sixty years.  But I have never forgotten them.

Carol Burnett was the fourth regular cast member, and the four of them “clicked.” All they needed were words and inflection to produce hilarious comedy sketches.

An example can be read in “The Trial of Mrs. Peter Piper”, transcribed from a 1962 show by Thomas Buckingham Thomas.

But the humor in that entertainment will be fully evident only to those old enough to remember the show and thus to visualize the four of them and hear their voices in memory, as I can and as I hope some of your older readers will confirm.  No one younger than that could possibly comprehend the humor in a script like this — because of the absence of what I call a naïve brain.

What I mean by that is this: The humor presented in “The Garry Moore Show” was innocent. It had no trace of anything else. There was no element of resentment, the principal element of what today is absurdly called comedy. All the humor was aimed at Garry, his cast members, and his guests.  There were no “messages.”

By contrast, what is called “comedy” today is drenched in filth. By design or by default, entire generations of parents have taught their children to believe that filth may qualify as comedy. They are unable — conceptually and metaphysically — to imagine anything different. Their ability to do so was short-circuited by generations of parents who never grew up to accept the serious responsibilities of parenthood but parked their children in front of TV screens instead because that is so much easier and requires no moral courage or discernment.  Ergo, with rare exceptions, their children are unable to appreciate innocent humor, and their children’s children are beyond hope.

In 1959, filth-as-comedy did not exist in the metaphysical world where most Americans lived and where television variety programs like “The Garry Moore Show” were created.  That was my world, my America, my kind of entertainment—and the early 1960s were its last years.

The show is purposely forgotten and neglected today because it pre-dates the 1960s’ assault on long-standing moral and philosophical standards of entertainment.  Nor is it compatible with today’s anti-life, anti-moral, anti-decent celebration of twaddle and vulgarity.  “The Garry Moore Show” was a concrete expression of joy in living by talented people who conveyed that feeling to their audience. And the Radical Left just cannot stand the thought that Americans achieved such things and were happy and proud to do so before the 1960s Cultural Revolution.

Decades after that show ended, Durward Kirby wrote that strangers would stop him on the street and say to him, “Why don’t you and Garry come back and give us some good old laughs and clean entertainment?”

He continued: Garry “and I realized at the time [1964, its last year] that the comedy tastes and appetites of the television audience were changing…..  I regret the type of entertainment which has been lost.  As proof, just watch the tube any night. Vulgarity is common, good taste is fast disappearing.   …. Our times were the ‘golden years’….”

[Durward Kirby, My Life….Those Wonderful Years, Tabby House Books, 1992, pp. 215-16]

Indeed they were the tail end of a golden age of entertainment in the early years of television.

Twenty years ago I was able to acquire portions of five such programs from 1961, through the kindness of a woman in Lockport, New York, whose husband had recorded them.  She is gone now, but I am eternally grateful to her for the chance to go back in memory to our warm living room on cold winter nights and sit there in memory with my mother to enjoy once again the entertainment that we had so enjoyed then.

If I were to choose one word to describe that program, it would be Class. At the close of each program and backed by an orchestra with a harp highlighted at several moments, Garry and all his guests would stand on stage in a line, arm to arm, sing a few lines of “Thanks for Dropping By,” and then bow slowly and in unison to the studio audience.  It was a classy and impressive way to say goodnight.

My favorite part of the program was called “That Wonderful Year.” To a ten-year-old boy, it was a miniature history lesson in which Garry Moore would stand by a lamp post and talk about events and songs from years that older viewers could remember but that occupied that mysterious and unknowable darkness from a time before I was born.  I can still hear the choral group singing “Do you recall or remember at all, that wonderful, wonderful year?”, backed by full orchestra at the close of that segment.  The years when we enjoyed “That Wonderful Year” have now become wonderful years from another moral-philosophical universe.

[Video samples of the Garry Moore show]

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