Forgotten television shows: volume two

As promised, we here at Battling the Current will continue in our retrospective of the forgotten television shows that changed our lives. Today’s entry…

You Can’t Do That On Television

(Otherwise known as proof that Canadians are funny.)

If you were a kid growing up with cable in the mid-80’s this was required daily viewing. I mean, if you ask anyone who grew up in Chicago in that time frame and asked them what they watched growing up here would be the answer. “I watched Bozo in the morning before going to school and then watched G.I. Joe, Transformers, He-Man and You Can’t Do That On Television after school.” It was just a rule. Everyone turned on Nickelodeon every afternoon and watched. Didn’t matter that you were seeing the same episode for the hundredth time, you watched.

Everyone remembers the green slime. If at any point in the show one of the actors answered a question with the words “I don’t know” they had green slime poured over their head. And there was always the one smarmy kid who reveled in the fact that he could always trick everyone else into saying it. This would go on for weeks at a time and when he finally got hit you actually cheered.

But man, there were so many inspired comedy bits on that show. You had the locker gags. The set was just a row of lockers and the actors would just pop out of them and tell really bad jokes for like five minutes. It was like the cool junior high that you didn’t attend. Then there was the firing squad bit. It was never quite explained why a twelve year old would be standing in front of a firing squad in some Banana Republic (the nation, not the store) but they would always figure out a way to make the last request joke funny with the fat commandant always getting shot in the end. And the diner! Running jokes about rats in the food! Now that was comedy.

I’m serious in saying that I probably picked up most of my sense of humor and a lot of my writing style from this show. There was a lot of slapstick and bizarre sketch comedy but a lot of emphasis on being clever and witty. It was noncomformist, no plot, no overall purpose to the show. They broke down the fourth wall. You knew they were all actors, they would show the backstage and talk about their pay but you also knew that it was a show. It was post modernism for ten year olds. It was that first step you took in learning about the absurdities of the world and that the only way to deal with them was to learn to laugh about it. Monty Python for kids, that was the show in a nutshell.

Here is the amazing thing. I’m sitting here with my hair slowly turning gray and I can recite entire sketches from a show that I watched more than half a lifetime ago. I can tell you that the major cast members were Christine, Lisa, Kevin, Alison, and of course Alanis (who went on to become much more famous talking about a guy (Dave Couler actually) and a theater but that’s another story). There are entire years of my life that don’t contain as many memories as I have of this show.

Most people probably never knew this show existed. But for a few of us out there, this is where we learned what comedy was all about.

Coming up in our next installment: Night Court, otherwise known as the comedic genius that is Richard Moll.