Craving the Classics

After I got home from a four-mile run through the Springbrook Prairie Forest Preserve this morning, I turned on the television for a minute and got ensnared by "Totally 80's" on VH1.  This spectacle is an homage to the days when MTV actually played music videos, instead of featuring the escapades of drunken frat boys and skanks and glorifying teen-age motherhood.  They were playing some great videos from my own "golden age" and it was a lot of fun to see some of those classics, as well as some not so classic ones.  Huey Lewis, I'm talking to you.  Where's the apology you owe us all for ever making a record?

As I pondered the ill-begotten fame of Mr. Lewis and the classic music videos of the 1980's, I thought of another classic that I've been craving and getting my fill of lately.  This:

"The Bob Newhart Show" cast

To say I bust a gut laughing every time I watch "The Bob Newhart Show" would be a woeful understatement.  It is indeed a classic.  It is a master class in comedy writing that television writers today sorely need.  Newhart's straight man to the collection of crazies around him is brilliant.  While the sets and styles of this solidly 1970's program have aged, the writing, acting, and humor have not.  It is consistently funny, almost forty years later.

Thanks to a local TV station here, we get this classic program every night.  I'm not able to watch it every night but when I do, it makes me crave more of the classics, like this one.  I think one reason is the memories that it evokes for me of my father.  My dad wasn't much for television watching. Ever.  In those days, as a kid, we had three network channels, a PBS station, and one local channel that seemed to play the 1933 version of "King Kong" every dang Saturday.  But I do have memories of watching these programs with Dad: "The Odd Couple," The Jeffersons," and "The Bob Newhart Show."  What I enjoyed most about watching these programs was that my Dad laughed.  He really got a kick out of these shows.  I'm not sure I always understood the jokes then but it was great to watch him laugh and laugh with him.  

Today, I get the jokes and I love them.  It's been fun this week to catch a lot of the Newhart Show with the Boy.  We've laughed a lot.  It's been good.  Classics aren't such a bad thing.  Not at all.