Yuk Among the Yaks

Comic Dick Cavett is a menace. That low-key, gracious approach should fool nobody. He is a cool operator who plans to sweep the American housewife off her feet before she has a chance to sweep the floor. Hosting a new 90-minute daily talk show called This Morn ing on ABC, he has plunged into that grey Sargasso Sea of morning game shows and reruns, and already he's making steady, perceptible waves of laugh ter. There is something vaguely immoral about one-liners at 10:30 a.m., but Cavett has no respect. Amid all the yak, yak, yak on daytime TV, he has snuck in a genuine yuk. And mean while the breakfast dishes are stacking up in the sink like poker chips.

The threat would not be so dire if he were charming just any old house wives. But according to the television flackery, they are "today's younger, more sophisticated homemakers," those "recently deposed go-go people," those Green Berets of the broom brigade.

And it doesn't stop there. Cavett claims that he also draws a good share of night watchmen with insomnia. Just two weeks ago, he brags, a letter poured in.

It was from a 58-year-old housewife.

She confessed that her go-go had gone years ago, but wondered if it was all right for her to watch anyway. And last week there was a letter from Cavett's idiot cousin Clarence. He is the simp who lost his job at the St. Louis Zoo after he decided to run the place on the honor system. Recently, reports Cavett, Clarence registered his own feeble protest to the Viet Nam war. He boiled his draft card.

Clinging Power. Lest anyone get the idea that This Morning is a kind of hangover from the Tonight Show, on his premiere Cavett brought on as his first guest Master Builder Buckminster Fuller (TIME cover, Jan. 10, 1964). "I'm only 72," said Fuller. "You don't look a day over 70," said Cavett. When the talk got more cosmic, Fuller suggested that in future centuries women would revert to wearing fig leaves. Cavett asked: "What is it about fig leaves. Do they have some peculiar clinging power?" Fuller: "They are relatively large and durable . . ." Cavett: "And washable and 90% Dacron."

Last week Cavett interviewed Comic Pat McCormick, who discussed the possible effects of a steel strike on the California Christmas-tree market. Cavett is still too innocent to prevent a veteran pitchman like Art Linkletter from wresting the show away from him and giving a 15-minute spiel for a new game he helped invent. But in defense, Cavett, a former gag writer, can fall back on old material. Once, he said, when he was out of work, he used to write dirty jokes for kids to use on Linkletter's TV House Party.

If Cavett is not stopped before he gets more practice, this Nebraska citybilly, this con merchant in a Brooks Brothers special, this yahoo Yalie, this literate, witty guy, is likely to become a national habit. And then who is going to wash all those dirty dishes?

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.