You Bet Your Sweet Bippy!

1968.

January 22, 1968.

Forty-eight years ago today, on the National Broadcasting Company's network of television stations across the United States of America, a comic phenomenon was born.

I was pretending to do my 5th grade homework, but I was actually watching the premiere of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. It ended up running for six seasons, inspiring the subsequent creation of Saturday Night Live (SNL producer, Lorne Michaels, was a writer), birthing the careers of Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin (among others), and adding enough catch phrases to the American lexicon to choke a yellow-slicker-wearing tricycle-rider.

You bet your sweet bippy

Look that up in your Funk & Wagnall's

Here come da judge

The Flying Fickle Finger of Fate

Sock it to me

Verrrrrry interesting

The show did all those things, and made such an impact, and hardly anybody reading these words remembers, and man oh man...am I older than dirt or what?

And that's the truth. Pbbbbt!