Rant #1,872: Mad About This

I love to discover new things, picking up on things that I didn't know existed until I have discovered them.

So is the situation I faced when I discovered that the venerable Mad Magazine actually had a stage show based on its off the wall humor.

When I was collecting comic books as a kid, Mad was kind of an off the track magazine for me, one that I would buy occasionally.

When I bought it, I thought I was getting to be older. It was almost like sneaking Playboy Magazine into the house years later, but as a kid, who knew from that?

I knew that Mad Magazine was a bit racier than Superman or World's Finest, that is what I knew.

And it also cost more, and that is why I probably didn't buy more Mads.

Anyway, in my research for related recordings to "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In," I kind of stumbled upon the soundtrack to "The Mad Show," an off-Broadway show that ran in the mid 1960s for some 800 performances.

I thought I might have heard about this show way back when, but honestly, Broadway and off-Broadway didn't do much for me back then, and still doesn't, but anyway, I had heard that Joanne Worley was in the show, so ...

Yes, I found that it existed, and I pieced together the entire soundtrack from various sources on YouTube, and Voila!. I had the full soundtrack in place.

Of course, a soundtrack can't fully replicate what you see on stage, but based on that soundtrack, I found that "The Mad Show" was a very, very funny show, and certainly a template that the producers of "Laugh-In" used for their own show.

There is lots of off-the-wall humor in "The Mad Show," lots of double entendres and very funny satirical moments, much like was found a little later on "Laugh-In."

And there is Joanne Worley, as I mentioned, who was one of the cast members of the show. You can clearly see the beginnings of her characters on "Laugh-In" on this show, the loud, boisterous and very funny lady who made "chicken joke" a national catchphrase.

In the show, the pianist, who was played by Joe Raposo, who later went on to some fame as the composer of much of the music heard on "Sesame Street," gets beaten to death in each show by a rubber chicken.

Now, I don't know if that was applied by Worley, but certainly, that was the template that "Laugh-In" used with its chicken jokes and Worley's link to that catchphrase.

In "The Mad Show," there are jokes about the current taboos of the time, football, the relationships between kids and their parents, war, and, of course, sex. And it all is handled in such a lightweight style that you never flinch when these punches are delivered.

It is kind of a PG version of what could be said and done today if the show were staged in 2017 rather than in 1966.

Oh, and I forgot the rest of the cast, which included Richard Libertini, Linda Lavin and Paul Sand, actors who would become ubiquitous on TV through the late 1960s and into the 1980s.

And most importantly, I laughed at what I heard on the soundtrack. It was pretty funny, and very cleverly done.

Now that I know the show existed, and there is a legitimate soundtrack out there, I would love to add it to my collection. This was certainly the true, honest to goodness template for "Laugh-In," and I would love to have it in my collection, on LP or as I discovered, on CD, a format it was released in a few years back.

And I would love to see the show actually being executed. It must have been a hoot!