Revisiting Normal

Car 54: When Laughter Was (Mostly) Innocent

I have often said that when I was a boy in the 1960s, it seemed that the world was beginning to shake under our feet. There were the political assassinations, the music growing angry and sometimes lewd, hard drugs seeping into our backwater town, the war in Vietnam, enemies in Russia and China committed to destroying us, the Catholic Church in upheaval, and the first divorce ever on either side of my very large family.

The Era of the Zany

You might think that humor in such a time would grow sour and bitter, but for the first six or seven years of that decade, it was not so. Instead, we enjoyed a brief flourishing of the zany—the crazy, the half-mad, a world of happy, imaginative...