How a Comedy Show Helped Elect Richard Nixon
Comedy has had a substantial impact on this year’s presidential election discourse, as evidenced by Kamala Harris’ recent Saturday Night Live cameo, Tony Hinchcliffe’s racist Trump rally jokes and, most recently, an endorsement from one of the supporting cast members of Newsradio (Andy Dick’s silence is deafening).
But this isn’t the first time that the worlds of comedy and politics have overlapped during a presidential election. In fact, it’s been argued that a TV comedy was responsible for helping elect one of the shittiest presidents of all-time: Richard Milhous Nixon.
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As any Boomer will tell you, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In was a freewheeling sketch series that paired the absurdity of the vaudeville era with the contemporary politics of the late 1960s counterculture movement. It was very much the hippie aesthetic packaged and sold for mass consumption. It also helped launch the careers of Lily Tomlin and Goldie Hawn.
One of the show’s running gags was to have cast member Judy Carne repeat the phrase “sock it to me” and end up getting doused with water or falling through a trapdoor.
In 1968, during the show’s second season premiere, one of the “sock it to me” sketches randomly featured Nixon, who at that point, was running for president against the incumbent Democratic Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
The cameo came about because one of the show’s writers, Paul Keyes, was a “close friend” of Nixon’s. According to some, Keyes thought that the cameo would help “soften Nixon’s humorless image and win him votes.” Laugh-In’s creator George Schlatter told The Hollywood Reporter that it was he who urged Keyes to invite Nixon because the show needed something big to open the season with. And Nixon would be a funny choice since he “defined square.”
They filmed the brief segment after a Nixon press conference; the future president performed six takes of “sock it to me” (he refused to say “you bet your sweet bippy”), confessing that “comedy is new to me.” When he was done, Schlatter grabbed the tape, “ran back to NBC like a bullet and put it in the next show.”
Unfortunately, in his desire for big ratings, Schlatter overlooked just how much the appearance might help the Republican candidate. “After the episode, I thought, what did I do? I made him into a nice guy,” Schlatter recalled. The producers even tried to offer his opponent a similar role on the show to even things out. “We decided to ask Humphrey to say, ‘Yes, please do sock it to me,’ but he wouldn’t do it. We followed him all over trying to get him.”
That may have been a slight strategic miscalculation on Humphrey’s part. Laugh-In was watched by “close to a third of U.S. households” at the time, and a number of political commentators have suggested that the Laugh-In cameo is what “made the difference” in the election, which ultimately went Nixon’s way by a razor-thin margin.
“Sometimes people say I helped get Nixon elected,” a chagrined Schlatter has admitted. “I’ve had to live with that.”
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