Reasonable v. Raunchy

PROGRAMMING In the big playground known as network television, performers have always played patty-cake with the censors. Then somebody went and called someone a sissy, and suddenly every kid had to prove that he could be badder than the other kids. The result is that TV, once as strait-laced as a schoolmarm, is now offering daring new courses in the three Rs: race, religion and risque.

Employing the when-in-doubt-blurt-it-out thesis, the material has ranged from the reasonable to the downright raunchy. Two segments on the Tonight Show last week are a case in point. When Zoologist Desmond Morris complained that the Chicago Tribune had refused to print a review of his new book, The Naked Ape, because of its references to genitalia, Carson replied: "You discuss the fact that man is one of the primates. You talked about his penis. What other word could you use for that?" Morris pointed out by way of parallel that newspapers commonly use the word gun. "They don't mind printing a word describing something that shoots death, but if it shoots life, they won't have it."

So much for prudent explicitness. But then Carson brought out a female impersonator in an ape's costume who did a striptease that was not merely questionable but overly graphic. At one point, a bouquet of flowers sprouted from the ape's crotch.

Prime-Time Blue. The talk shows, by virtue of their late-night time slots, have always been determinedly naughty. Thus the chesty starlets, having nothing else to offer in the way of talent, feel that, to be invited back, they must devise new and more suggestive performances. On the same Carson show, for instance, Starlet Lee Meredith bounced out and did a bump-and-grind dance that all but singed the screen.

With NBC's new show, Laugh-In, starring Comics Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, the pitch for new blue cheer has moved into prime time. Their material, delivered in a nonstop barrage of sight gags, one-liners and blackouts, is alternately good, bad and just plain irreverent. Posing as a newscaster of the future, for example, Rowan reports: "With marriage in the church recently sanctioned, the archbishop and his lovely bride, the former Sister Mary Catherine, said: This time it's for keeps.' "

That remark got NBC a lot of telephone protests. Other efforts to bait the old taboos ran the gamut from clever to tasteless: "San Francisco has made an offer for the Queen Elizabeth. If the bid is successful, that'll give California the two biggest queens in the world. Naturally, a spokesman for Ronald Reagan denies this." Bawdy: Guest Star Robert Gulp explains his role as secret agent in I Spy, "I do a lot of undercover work," and girl replies: "Oh, don't you men ever think of anything else?" Ethnic: Negro tennis player to three white male players: "Anybody for a game of mixed doubles?" Silly: "Tinkerbell is a fairy." Topical: "The pill stops inflation." Or childish: "Of all the fishes in the sea/The one I like the best is bass/He climbs on all the rocks and trees/And slides down on his . . . hands and knees."

"Praying 71st." The performers who have benefited the most from TV's new permissiveness are a crop of young "ethnic comics" who, had they happened on the scene three years ago, would have been sentenced to hard labor in the nightclubs.

Pat Cooper, 38 (real name: Pasquale Caputo), tells of the trials of a "skinny Guinea" growing up with his Italian parents. On the Merv Griffin show recently, Cooper, in imitation of his father, roared: "If all the kids in the world go to college, who's gonna clean the fish!" Turning to moods indigo, he recalled the time that his father explained sex: "He says, 'I'm the farmer, and your mother she's the farm. And we got together; we plant a seed. And you became the flower.' I told this to my kid, and he says, 'My father's a queer.' "

Ron Carey, 32, bills himself as "the foremost Catholic comedian in the world." Looking like a defrocked Brother Juniper, he reports that the latest decree of the Vatican Council is that "priests have the right to tease Mormons." As a monk welcoming new recruits to the monastery's "Praying 71st," he barks like a drill sergeant, "Chins in, heads bowed and stand meek," then sends them off to the supply room "to pick up your basic soul-saving equipment, including one field Bingo set." His satire of TV cartoon shows features Super Priest, who is "faster than a second collection," and Wonder Nun, who "fights the oncoming bullets with her magic beads."

Trouble With the Pipe. Flip Wilson, 34, is a quart-sized Negro with a gallon's worth of gumption. There is no anger in his ethnic humor, just audacity. "Should I do any racial material?" he wonders out loud. "Why not? Why shouldn't I say to you, 'We've got to do something about the Indians'? The Indians aren't ready yet. The trouble with the Indians is that pipe. We know what's in the pipe." Commenting on race riots, Wilson quips: "I got this suit in Cleveland--right out of a store window." On the Johnny Carson show last week he portrayed a newlywed couple on their wedding night. She (wonderingly): "Oh Harry, are we really married?" He (leeringly): "You're going to find out in a minute when I get this shoelace untied."

If there is any need to complain at all about TV's new attack on taboos, it is not simply that the comedians offend; there will always be those who will find the mildest satiric needle offensive, but they are a predictable and perhaps oversensitive minority. The real question is how the taboos can be broken without bruising common sensibilities. That's when taste tells.

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