The Merv Griffin Show popped up on my Amazon Prime as a viewing option so I downloaded a handful of the earliest shows for nostalgia’s sake. It turned out to be an interesting portal into a world in transition. On the one hand there’s Merv celebrating the hits of Frankie Laine. But then there’s Phil Spector coming on wearing his “LSD glasses,” which Merv promptly tried on.
The first episode features Phyllis Diller. Forget the tight five comedians used to prepare for Johnny Carson. Diller performed 12 minutes of standup for Griffin and then also paneled. It didn’t age well. The next episode featured Richard Pryor. This was the sweet Richard Pryor. He’s still essentially imitating Bill Cosby. It does hold up. And it turns out Pryor had been on the show two weeks prior. They urged him to take a trip to Puerto Rico to relax, but he went to Buddy Hackett’s New Jersey home instead. Spector is also on the show. We should leave the diagnosis up to Phineas but I will opine he is showing serious borderline personality disorder. He is trying to act hip and experiences things as attacks instantly, such as questions from Eartha Kitt, who confesses she doesn’t know who he is. He can’t answer a simple question from Griffin, either. Maybe it’s the result of drug use. Spector is on the show a month after The Beatles released “Revolver,” which starts a seismic shift in the culture. He casually describes the glasses he’s wearing as LSD glasses. I wonder if LSD was still unknown to the public at that time? It was unknown where I grew up in rural Nevada until the late 196-s, but we were always years behind everyone else. Spector cracks some joke about having beaten up Pryor and Pryor, I think, is genuinely hostile to him and not making a joke. Then Dick Gregory comes out and does a comedy set that has aged okay. Gregory sits down and talks about the riots and how they reflect perceived abuse by police, sounding much like Black Lives Matter of today. It’s almost embarrassing to the country how he has to make such a simple plea on television. It’s a nice tribute to Griffin that they let him make it. And it is interesting to hear Gregory make a simple, eloquent plea compared to the shoutfests we have on television news and talk shows today. (Note: Idris Elba should play Dick Gregory in a biography.) There’s something odd about the pacing of the show. For instance one guest seemingly takes forever to come out and greet everyone else on the panel, spending a few seconds to chat with a couple of them, and then he sits down and Griffin throws to commercial without even asking a question. Oscar Levant makes an odd appearance, then they come back from commercial just so he can say goodbye and walk off stage. And they go to commercial again. Plus Griffin has some guests sit at the desk with him and others sit on the chairs to the side. Oh, and a little Arthur Treacher goes a long way. By the way, episode 5 has Merv entering through a door at the back of the theatre. I recognized then that it was being filmed in The Ed Sullivan Theater. Griffin prefaces Carlin’s appearance by saying he was doing material with a political edge for the first time. So maybe this was another moment of transition, as Carlin is becoming more political. The routine itself was mostly meh. Griffin had Carlin do his Indian sergeant routine, which I must have seen but I did not remember. It was funny. While visiting Spain in 1966, Griffin filmed an interview with astronaut John Glenn, who said we were expected to get a man on the moon by 1970. Redd Foxx had a strong appearance as well. I'm going to check out other episodes. I think there's probably some gems here. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
