Get it On, Bang a Gong

"From Hollywood! Almost live! It's THE GONG SHOW!"

Rejoice, dear hearts, rejoice! Strike up the Hallelujah Chorus! This is the blog entry you've been waiting for with bated breath (and some you need some mouthwash for that breath... seriously!)

You know, the 70's was an area that positively reeked of kitsch.  Then again, maybe that smell was just the leftover residue of some extremely aromatic extracurricular activities... Kitsch is the only way to describe this show.  It was like an amateur hour at Mabel's Bordello and BBQ Grill. I'm talking about that unique game show ("game show"?) called The Gong Show.  It WAS a game show, by the way, but only in the most absurd definition of the term.  

In case you kiddies, who were born after about 1975, never even heard of this show, I'll give you a brief description of it. The show was hosted by Chuck Barris, a producer of game shows whose credits included the creation of The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game.  One would not be too far off the beam to think that Barris and his "behind the scenes" gang might have been just returning from a trip to the top of the Big Rock Cocaine Mountain to allow this show to be foisted on the public.

What was the point of the show? Well, the show itself never really had any idea of it's point. Or, then again, maybe it did.  The essence of the show was a competition to get the outstanding prize of... get this... $516.32!  Even the prize was indicative of the kitschiness of the show. (There has been a rumor going around the internet that that was the going rate of a day's wages for extras in the Screen Actor's Guild, but in a book I am reading, Barris himself never really said where the inspiration came from, basically it was just an random number.)

To earn this phenomenal prize all you had to do was go on stage and (potentially) make a fool of yourself on national TV. Either that, or be (just barely, sometimes) of such good talent so as not to get "gonged"....

What's that you say?  What does "gonged" mean? Well, that my friends was the essence of the show.  Your primary judges of your talent were left up to three celebrity judges, three people who probably had no credentials to be judging talent in the first place....

I'm just kidding.  Of course, they had talent. They were active members in the film industry, weren't they?

There were many serious actors that served on the panel of judges. ("served"... sounds like they were forced into a jury duty, doesn't it...?)  Among those were:

 

Jamie Farr: 

One of the early frequent panelists, Farr had already made a name for himself as one of the stars of the T.V. show M.A.S.H. It was some of Farr's suggestions to Barris in the early days of it's production that helped transform the show from a wanna-be to a cultural phenomenon.

 

Jaye P. Morgan:

Another regular panelist, Morgan became more famous for her stint on The Gong Show than for any other endeavor she ever did.  She was also one of the catalysts for the show eventually getting cancelled (showing "nip" on uncensored broadcast TV can do that for you.

Arte Johnson:

Johnson's big claim to fame prior to this had been as a regular on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. But he was also a frequent voice actor in cartoons from the 70's.

Rip Taylor:

The over-the top persona who was synonymous with exuberance and flamboyance, what was a typical gay image in the 70's, Taylor always was one of my favorites, (whether today's crowd would consider him PC or not.)

 

With a rotating panel, one that included guest panelists who appeared irregularly, these panelists were the arbitrators of what qualified as "good" (or, possibly, just "good enough", as in some cases the winners were only barely better than anyone who got gonged on the same episode.) Sometimes the guest panelists just didn't, as they say, "get it" and would either bail on the show on their own, or in some cases, just not be invited back for a return engagement.

 

There were several contestants on the show who went on to greater fame in the real world.  One of them came on stage billed as as The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo (which later shortened their name to just Oingo Boingo). This is one act you just HAVE to see as it encapsulates the bizarre essence of the show in just one 3 minute segment. 

 

But there were also some acts that just barely skated past censorship.  At least at first. One such act was billed as "Have You Got a Nickel?" (also known in later years as The Popsicle Twins.) To describe this act would not give it true justice,  Fortunately, there is a clip of their Gong Show performance on YouTube, so I don't have to...

 

They didn't win, of course, but in the aftermath of the initial broadcast, the censors, who had initially approved of the act, came down hard and censored the act in subsequent airings, including the delayed broadcast of the episode as it made it's way across the nation that first day.

In addition to the "actual" contestants, there was quite often, one of several backstage personnel who would appear on stage as "contestants". Not really contestants, they were basically just filler to extend the show to it's running time if the regular contestants part did not run long enough to make it a full length show. Although I have read elsewhere that they were already in the script beforehand, so maybe I'm wrong...

Favorite guest "contestants" would include:

The Unknown Comic:

Murray Langston, who would appear wearing a paper sack over his head with holes cut out for his eyes and mouth.

Usually introduced by Barris with something like this: "Here comes the prince of puns! The baron of boffo! The wizard of whoopee!  The Unknown Comic!" The Unknown Comic was the absolutely worst stand up comedian ever, telling stale old one-liners, and laughing at his own jokes. 

The genius of this lay in the fact that The Gong Show was a parody in and of itself. A stand-up act of this caliber would never have made it past the audition if it were for real.  But it works when you think of it in terms of it's residence in the Kingdom of Kitsch...

 

Larry and His Magic Trombone:

Larry Spencer, who would come on the stage with a trombone (or on occasion some other instrument) singing "Gonna play my trombone" to which the audience would respond "Whattya gonna do?" This would go on for about a minute of back and forth until Larry would actually try to follow through with his "threat".  And it would always end with the instrument falling apart. It wasn't always a trombone. On at least one occasion, he came out with a  xylophone, but the end result was pretty much the same.

And who can forget...

Gene Gene the Dancing Machine!: 

Gene Patton, who was a stagehand backstage for the show. Every so often would appear on stage in a green sweater and a flat cap and would come on stage doing a shuffle that, for all the world, now looks like a sped up version of Michael Jackson's moonwalk... (Maybe that's where M.J. got the inspiration?)  Gene Gene was a fan favorite.  

 

The show consistently ended with all the contestants appearing back on stage with Barris handing out a Golden Gong trophy (which to me looked like it would fall apart just as you put it in your mantle) and a check for the aforementioned $516.32 and a rain a confetti produced by a midget (played by Jerry Maren, one of the original munchkins in The Wizard of Oz.)

The wonderful appeal of the show was the fact that it never seemed to take itself too seriously. There were many instances where some of the acts that I saw were ones that I was screaming at the TV "Gong them! Please!", but not only did the act not get gonged, sometimes it actually won the day's contest...! Which just goes to show that even as much as I like to consider myself one of the top bloggers for pure cheese and quirkiness, there were others out there who, should they have ever decided to take this mantle, could have given me a run for my money.

Now, to be fair, The Gong Show had a special niche of devotees. And probably more than a few people who kept returning to it, thinking it just HAD to get better... (Those people, not only were they doomed to disappointment, bur were almost assuredly not getting invited to my house on New Year;s Eve.) Some of the naysayers of course were the critics, who just didn't understand the quirkiness.  I could list several such reviews, but one in particular sticks out for me: From Gary Deeb (whoever the hell that is):

"...Chuck Barris, a wretched character who has amassed a spectacular fortune by providing people with new ways to make jackasses of themselves."  _quoted from Gong This Book! by Adam Nedeff

(I guess Gary Dweeb must have dropped the "w" from his family name when he started writing...)

You are going to be searching the internet quite a while if you want to amass a marathon of this classic, since it is not available in even a "Best of" format on DVD. And, it is kind of hit or miss with what is available. But what is out there is a good encapsulation of what you would have gotten if you tuned in.  Most of my experience with The Gong Show was tuning in to reruns showing on afternoon TV. so I missed out on the fun first run.  (Damn rules about attending high school...) 

That' it for this reminiscence into what makes Quiggy tick. See you next time, folks.

Quiggy

Footnote: Much of the information on this post is as a result of a very informative book, Gong This Book: The Uncensored History of Television's Wildest Talent Show by Adam Nedeff.  Kudos to Nedeff for a very informative book, since YouTube only has a limited number of clips from the show, and no one has ever seen fit to release a collection of the show on DVD... :-(