COVER STORY

Verrry Interesting . . . but Wild

Richard Nixon? Making jokes on a TV comedy show with a bunch of weirdos? You bet, as they say, your sweet bippy. Everybody and his myna bird wants to make a cameo appearance on Rowan and Martin's manic Monday night affair. It is the smartest, freshest show on television. President Johnson, Igor Stravinsky and Jean-Paul Sartre have not yet appeared at the stage door, but if they do, they'll just have to get in line behind Marcel Marceau, Bing Crosby, Pat Boone, Dick Gregory and Jack Benny. And they will do anything once they get before a camera. Marceau in future programs will perform pantomime bits, but most of the other guests will utter senseless non sequiturs, or the reigning catch phrase of the moment, such as "irky perky!" and "Sock it to me!" Sammy Davis Jr., who last season turned his here-come-de-Judge antics into a rollicking miniballet, now reports that when he strolls through a Negro neighborhood, all the kids trail after him squealing the phrase in chorus. It would be only moderately surprising if next week J. Edgar Hoover popped onto the screen and said, "Here come de Judge!"*

Laugh-In was last season's biggest TV hit, and is already a solid Nielsen winner so far this year. But that alone would hardly be enough to draw such a motley assortment of celebrities to the show for $210 per appearance. What appeals is the program's extraordinary ambiance: it has an artful spontaneity, a kind of controlled insanity, emerging from a cascade of crazy cartoon ideas. In yet another TV season of pale copies, Laugh-In is unique. It features no swiveling chorus lines, no tuxedoed crooners. Just those quick flashes of visual and verbal comedy, tumbling pell-mell from the opening straight through the commercials till the NBC peacock turns tail. Often the first-time viewer can hardly believe the proceedings. Silly punch lines fly like birdshot. Childish name games produce outrageous amalgams of sound:

"If Shirley Temple Black had married Tyrone Power, she'd be Shirley Black Power."

"If Jan Sterling had married Phil Silvers, divorced him and married Robert Service, she'd be Jan Sterling Silvers Service,"

There are graffiti:

FOREST FIRES PREVENT BEARS

THIS IS YOUR SLUM KEEP IT CLEAN

JACKIE GLEASON TAKES SILICONE

There are off-color, high-school-caliber homilies:

"The snake that striketh at the jeet of the hunter is naught but a pain in the grass."

Absurd definitions:

"A myth is an effeminate moth."

And sniggering questions:

"Truman Capote: Man or Myth?"

Public Notices:

LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE CALL THE EYE BANK

GEORGE WALLACE YOUR SHEETS ARE READY

Fresh one-liners:

Spy: "It isn't that I wanted to work for the CIA, but I still have family in Washington."

Unbelievable two-liners:

Man: "How can I believe you, Elizabeth? That child doesn't even look like me!"

Woman: "You're looking at the wrong end, stupid!"

Ancient three-liners:

He: "I've heard plenty about your lovemaking."

She: "Oh, it's nothing."

He: "That's what I heard."

And passable four-liners:

Bartender: "Are you sure you're old enough to drink?"

Girl: "Of course I am!'

Bartender: "O.K , O.K., what'll you have?"

Girl: "A Scotch and wa-wa."

In short, along with genuine wit, much of the humor is terrible/funny or just terrible/terrible. A lot of the material would have seemed dated in New Jersey burlesque during Prohibition. Can they really mean it--using this sort of stuff on TV in 1968? Laugh-In's producers know bad jokes when they use them. There is an element of camp and reverse sophistication in this, reminiscent of making a cult of Charlie Chan movies and Captain Marvel comic books. Besides, the outrageous jokes are thrown into the machinery of the show to create contrast and surprise, and to give viewers a chance to catch up with some fast, good jokes that may have come earlier--or so the show's apologists rationalize it.

The visual humor is often more original than the verbal kind. True, the show's basic gag, endlessly repeated, is throwing a pail of water at an endlessly unsuspecting girl--as simple as Punch being whacked over the head or a clown being squirted with Seltzer water, and somehow disarmingly innocent. Periodically, a bikini-clad girl is shown dancing the boogaloo; then the camera moves in to reveal that the girl is painted head to feet with silly graffiti. Other sight gags are madly literal-minded or engagingly sly. When the announcer calls for a station break, the camera will switch to a trick film clip showing an elephant's foot squashing a TV station. When a commercial is announced, a man ostensibly from Allstate Insurance will cup his hands around a tiny house, saying "You're in good hands with . . .," and drop the house with a great shattering crash. In other sequences, a girl steps out of the shower, answers the phone, hands it into the shower and says, "It's for you."

Like many variety shows, Laugh-In features new talent--except that the talent is deliberately askew: a virtuoso on the kazoo, a birdcall impressionist, or an all-thumbs juggler. It was in one such segment, for example, that the show inflicted on a helpless nation that hitherto unknown dingaling, Tiny Tim.

Wacky, rapid-fire comedy is not new to TV. Indeed, Laugh-In's attack has touches of the late Ernie Kovacs, smatterings of early Sid Caesar and Steve Allen, and a-pie-in-the-face splat or two of Soupy Sales. But on Laugh-In, the calculated aim is to create a state of sensory overload, a condition that audiences nowadays seem to want or need. Blackouts, slapstick, instant skits pinwheel before the eyes; chatter and sound effects collide in the ear. Other TV variety shows can be dropped intact onto a theater or nightclub stage, but Laugh-In would be impossible anywhere but on television. For one thing, each show is stitched together from about 350 snippets of video tape. Some of them--a flash of graffiti, for example, or a mugging face--last only an eighth of a second. Executive Producer George Schlatter calls this "energy film," a technique that gives a kind of booster burst of speed to the show. Explains Dick Martin: "Nobody's going to appreciate everything on our show. But if one gag goes completely over your head, there'll be another along in a few seconds that cracks you up and leaves somebody else just looking and saying 'Humph!' "

The effect of the pace is almost subliminal. Ultimately, the viewer is totally involved, loses himself in a giddy, whirling world where the witty becomes indistinguishable from the wheezy. The show takes nothing seriously, least of all itself. When someone pops a hoary old vaudeville gag, the camera will cut to a wild-eyed Laugh-In writer shouting "Please! Stop me before I steal more!"

What keeps the mayhem from getting out of hand--but just barely--is the amiable kidding of Dan Rowan and Dick Martin. Rowan, 46, is the smoothie, the fluent straight man who presides over the show as though it were a state dinner. Martin, also 46, is out to lunch. Hands stuffed in his pockets, rocking on his heels and giving out with a har-de-har-har laugh, he comes on like the original good-time Charlie. Their patter runs in quirky, who's-on-first circles like slightly modernized Abbott and Costello. Dan: "How does it feel to have a few shows under your belt?" Dick: "Something shows under my belt?" Dan: "Maybe I should try another tack." Dick: "There's a tack under my belt!" Dan: "Hold it!" Dick: "But it may be sharp!"

Often Martin strolls on stage with the air of a guy who has just peeled out of a bar and is looking for a little action--blonde, brunette or otherwise. And Rowan, try as he may, cannot keep his partner's mind off sex. When he frets about Martin's frail appearance and advises, "For your own good, you should pick up some weight," Dick leers: "Shoulda been with me last night.

I picked up 118 pounds." Dan: "I don't want to hear about it." Dick: "It was for my own good too."

Five years ago, such mildly risque lines would have been scissored by the censors. But today, a new try-anything spirit is upon the TV industry. The Smothers Brothers put the first dents in the censorship barrier early last season. Then Laugh-In crashed through and went about as far as it could go without being arrested. By the standards of movies, books, theater, or even late-night TV talk shows, Laugh-In's new blue cheer is decidedly inoffensive. Still, the program is only half kidding when it announces: "NBC brings you Laugh-In in a plain brown wrapper."

While some viewers complain that Laugh-In goes too far, it is perhaps because TV went nowhere for so long. Until a few years ago, it was standard practice on cartoon shows to depict cows without udders. Heavy breathing was edited out of TV movies, "suggestive positions" out of wrestling films. Kisses were limited to a few seconds, and terms relating to childbirth were forbidden. Not even a pause was pregnant. Even today, TV censors are still fairly nervous. Not long ago, says Comic Godfrey Cambridge, a National Educational Television censor refused to permit Cambridge to say "homosexual." When he protested, the censor compromised: it was O.K. to say "queer "

Why a censor will accept one line and not another is often a matter of metaphysical subtlety. Carol Burnett describes a hassle during a recent taping session for her comedy show: "I'm in a nudist colony wearing nothing but a barrel. An interviewer asks me what kind of recreation nudists have on Saturday nights. I say, 'We have dances.' He asks, 'How do nudists dance?' And I was to answer 'Very carefully.' Well, the censors didn't like that. What could we say? After some thought, they came back with 'cheek to cheek.' Well, the whole cast roared over that one, and that's the way we did it."

Often, Laugh-In has its own esoteric battles with the censor. "We're not trying to get a lot of dirty stuff on the air," explains Rowan. "About 90% of the stuff that's cut out of the script for being too blue, we take out ourselves. But our writers are normal, healthy guys, and they've got to have the freedom to throw anything into the pot. And then we discuss it." And discuss and rediscuss.

For example, the Laugh-In cast was taping a cocktail-party sequence at the NBC studios in "beautiful downtown Burbank."

Director Gordon Wiles: "O.K., let's tape it now . . . Roll tape! (Cast dances the boogaloo. Orchestra blasts two bars of rock music and chops off.)

Actor Dave Madden: "My fiancee just found out she's been taking aspirins instead of the Pill. She doesn't have a headache--but I do."

Head Writer Paul Keyes: "Held it! I think it should be 'Boy, does she have a headache!'" (Looks thoughtfully at NBC censor Sandy Cummings.) "Unless you think we could say . . . "

Censor Cummings (briskly); "Uh-uh."

Producer Schlatter: "How about 'At least she doesn't have a headache?'

Cummings: "But the implication is that she has got something else."

Dan Rowan: "Gee, Sandy, you sure get to the root of the problem."

Cummings: "The assumption is she's knocked up."

Schlatter: "How about, 'Well, at least she hasn't got a headache--but I do?' " (Censor nods approval.)

Wiles: "O.K. . . . Roll tape!"

Scattergunning some 300 jokes and sight gags per show, Laugh-In offers something for--and against--everybody. One week it pelts a Republican: SPIRO AGNEW . . . YOUR NEW NAME IS READY. The next week it zeroes in on the President: "Texas produced some great men: Sam Houston, Stephen F. Austin and Lyndon Johnson. Two out of three isn't bad." And the once risky subjects of race, religion and nationality are treated just as irreverently. "Who put the last seven bullets into Mussolini? Three hundred Italian sharpshooters."

The most topical digs are reserved for a cocktail-party sequence, featuring Laugh-In's regular cast of kooks, and a segment with hoked-up newscasts. On last week's show, for example, Rowan reported this bulletin of the future: "Vatican, 1988. The church today finally approved the use of the Pill. The announcement was made by Pope Le Roy . . . Junior. His father was not available for comment. His mother, the former Sister Mary Catherine reached at Gluck's Hillside in the Catskills, would only say, 'We like to think of the Pill as St. Joseph Aspirin For Children.' "

Stinging as some of the lines may be, the delivery is so whimsical, the targets so varied, that it is hard to be outraged by Laugh-In. Rowan and Martin take pains, in fact, to mask their personal views. The Smothers Brothers, on the other hand, tend to editorialize. Take, for example, this exchange, scheduled for their Thanksgiving show. Dickie: "We've come a long way since that first Thanksgiving dinner in Plymouth, when the Pilgrims sat down at the table with the Indians to eat turkey." Tommy: "Boy, I'll say we've come a long way. Now we're in Paris, sitting down at a table with the Viet Cong eating crow."

What the two shows do have in common is their audience: both draw the majority of their viewers from the 12-to-18-year-old bracket. "We've got that wonderful generation of kids that no one else has been able to reach," says Laugh-In's Director Gordon Wiles. "LaughIn entertains all three generations enough so that nobody leaves. And you have no idea how many parents come back into communication with their kids, just sitting on the sofa and laughing at the same show with them. Nobody else is reaching the teens and subteens. That's why we go for a tremendous amount of hip, on-the-nose, topical humor."

Downright touching, this notion of parents and children bridging the generation gap while watching some old vaudeville skit in mod undress. But Wiles may be a little too sanguine. Quite a few unenlightened parents of subteens still feel that Laugh-In is not exactly a substitute for The Flying Nun.

Now that the Laugh-In format has been proved, everyone else is trying for more of the same. Says Bob Finkel, executive producer of the Jerry Lewis and Phyllis Diller shows: "We've been forced to change our style. Our old form is archaic, oldfashioned. To stay alive in this business, you have to be cautious because you can be hurt, but once a show makes a hurdle like Laugh-In has, everything changes."

The most obvious changes are shorter skits, more slapstick and, above all, racier material. You Can't Do That on Television!, the pilot for a new series recently shown on ABC-owned stations, was a blatant copy of Laugh-In, but it was so intent on being shocking that it forgot to be funny. Still, the imitations seem to prove that the medium has caught up with Rowan and Martin's notions of what TV comedy should be. "The day of the highly polished show is over," says Martin. "We use the medium for what it's for--visual comedy. The greatest punch lines are in Punch and The New Yorker. A picture, a one-line caption . . . bam! That's how we do Laugh-In."

Adds Rowan: "It's important to have waited, as Dick and I did for a long time, to do in our business what we felt should be done. Not just another situation show, but the sort of show that changes the TV picture, that every now and then says something. That's satisfying, and it makes a whole lot of the dues paying worthwhile."

Rowan, the son of a carny worker, began paying his dues at four, dancing a jig and singing The Wearin' of the Green on the plank stage of a touring carnival. He was born in Beggs, Okla., a way station along the carnival route. Orphaned at eleven, he was raised in a Colorado orphanage, hitched a ride to Los Angeles after graduating from high school. At 19, he landed a job as a junior writer at Paramount Pictures-When World War II intervened, he enlisted in the Air Force and flew P-40s in New Guinea. He was shot down there in 1943 and was severely injured in a crash landing. After that, he lived out the rest of the war behind a desk.

Back in Los Angeles, he entered acting school, where he met and married Phyllis Mathis, a runner-up in the 1945 Miss America contest. Meanwhile, he drifted into the used-car business, eventually opened a foreign-car lot with a friend. He recalls: "I had a sizable bank account, a nice four-bedroom-and-den in Van Nuys . . . but I was restless." Hankering for show business, he sold his interest in the agency in 1952 and, at the suggestion of a mutual friend, went to meet a displaced comedian who was interested in working up a nightclub act. The confrontation plays like a bit from Laugh-In:

(Rowan enters Herbert's cocktail lounge in Studio City, Calif., sees the bartender who is eating a banana )

Rowan: "What's with the banana?"

Bartender: "You ever eat here?"

Rowan: "No."

Bartender: "Well, if you'd ever eaten here, you'd know what's with the banana."

The bartender, naturally, was Dick Martin. He had come to Los Angeles in 1943 from Battle Creek, Mich., deserting a job on a Ford assembly line "with the lunch box, sandwiches, apple, cupcakes and all that." At 22, while working nights as a bartender, he began moonlighting as a writer for a popular radio show called Duffy's Tavern.

In 1946, shortly after seeing Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in a nightclub, he met an out-of-work actor named Artie Lewis. "Hey!" cried Martin, "let's get up an act. We're the real Martin and Lewis. We'll use our own names. Let those other guys use their real names and bill themselves as Crocetti and Levitch." Sure enough, they persuaded a theater manager to rig his marquee thus:

Dick MARTIN & Artie LEWIS

The "real" Martin and Lewis worked for three weeks before they were heckled out of their partnership. (Lewis is currently working as a bit actor in TV and movies.) Martin tried again, this time with a young comedienne named Betty Miller. They portrayed Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks, leaping around the stage with swords and shouting "Aha!" This unpromising career gave out in less than a year, Betty got married and Martin went back to real-life work, tossing drinks and eating bananas at Herbert's.

Nine days after they met at Herbert's, Rowan and Martin, in rented tuxedos, were on the stage of a Los Angeles nightspot. They got a few laughs but no pay. Gradually, playing lead-in for strippers like Narda and Her Doves and Dreamy Darnell, they worked up from one-meal-and-two-drinks jobs to $450-a-week dates. "We were raw," recalls Martin, "but we looked good together and we were funny." As they moved on to better clubs, headline comics such as Milton Berle took a liking to the young team and opened their joke files to them. By the early 1960s, they were headlining the mink-lined caves of Miami and Las Vegas.

In 1965, NBC signed the team to host Dean Martin's summer replacement show, and their success brought several offers from the networks to star in a situation comedy. But Rowan and Martin were determined to fashion their own show, based on their vague notions of a "cartoon humor approach." At length, they talked with George Schlatter, who was an independent producer at the time. Schlatter, foaming enthusiastically with zany Marx Brothers ideas, struck the comics as just the man who could help them put their show together. And together, they worked up their format. They tried several titles: Put On, The Wacky World of Now, On the Funny Side of Life, Straight Up and Turn Left, High Camp. Then they hit on Laugh-In and pitched the show to the networks.

"At first," says Schlatter, "everybody turned us down. Nobody could identify with the show. There was no guide through this maze of wildness." Then NBC Vice President Ed Friendly pronounced himself so impressed with the show's possibilities that he quit his job to form a production company with Schlatter. Finally, at Friendly's urging, NBC gave the go-ahead to shoot a one-hour pilot of the show.

Inauspiciously, the network slipped the show in at midseason 1967 as a replacement for the slumping Man from U.N.C.L.E. CBS's Lucy and Gunsmoke, two top-rated shows sharing the opposing time slot, never knew what hit them. Within twelve weeks, Laugh-In leaped from 48th to fourth place in the ratings and tripped off with four Emmys as the most successful program of the season. What brought that success was not only the partnership of Schlatter, Friendly, Rowan and Martin, but the group of bright, young, remarkably versatile comics who people the show. Among the regulars:

> Judy Carne, 29, from Northampton, England, played cabaret revues in London before coming to the U.S. in 1961 to star in the short-lived TV series Fair Exchange, The Baileys of Balboa and Love on a Rooftop. A spunky little pixie of a girl, she is the one forever getting drenched with water when she cries "Sock it to me!" Since she is presumably a little wiser now, the scripts go to elaborate lengths to get her to utter the deathless phrases. Now, when she appears as a geisha girl and says, "It may be rice wine to you, but its saki to me," kersplash!

> Arte Johnson, 39, from Chicago, is described by Martin as "the man with a thousand faces, which makes bed check difficult after some of the cast parties." Johnson, who used to do TV commercials and cartoon voices, makes as many as ten complete costume changes each show. He appears as a double-talking Russian, a freaked-out Swede, the German soldier ("Verrry interesting"), a dirty old man and a guru ("Man who speaketh with forked tongue should never kiss a balloon").

> Goldie Hawn, 22, a former chorus girl from Tacoma Park, Md., is the resident dumdum who takes all the verbal pratfalls. In the thick of quick exchanges, she will giggle, shake her haystack pile of blonde hair and say in a little meowing voice: "I forgot the question." At first, her fluffs were a case of misreading the cue cards. Now they are part of the act, as when she bites her lip and chirps: "I don't like Viet Cong because in the movie he nearly wrecked the Empire State Building."

> Ruth Buzzi, 28, from Wequetequock, Conn., plays Gladys, the man-hungry frump in the hairnet and ratty sweater--a character she developed when playing the spinster secretary in a summer-stock production of Auntie Mame. A graduate of 20 cabaret revues, she excels at song-and-dance numbers but is guaranteed to break it up when, as Gladys, she confides: "I never go out with soccer players. I hear they're not allowed to use their hands."

> Henry Gibson, 32, from Philadelphia, broke into TV in the early 1960s by masquerading on talk shows as a shy, effete poet from Alabama. His portrayal was so convincing that a Birmingham newspaper ran glowing stories about him. On Laugh-In, the short, wispy-voiced comic still recites his nonsense poems, but more often is seen as the stuffy parson: "I'm all for change, but a loose-leaf Bible is going too far."

> Jo Anne Worley, 30, a farmer's daughter from Lowell, Ind., is a former cover girl--on the back of Mad magazine. She served as a standby for Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly! in 1964, became a favorite on the talk-show circuit with her mugging antics and raucous, snorting laugh. A tall, buxom brunette, she will cry, "When you're down and out, lift up your head and shout: I'm down and out!' "

Off camera, Laugh-In is an extension of the purposeful chaos seen on screen. On any single day, ten or more shows are churning towards completion. The process begins with a "concept meeting," attended by Rowan and Martin, Schlatter, some of the show's 14 writers and key production personnel. The group may decide to do a satire on the machine age (aired last week) or the fourth estate (the concept this week). The writers are then led back to their cages. Later, the various elements--a silly dance, a special skit, cameo spots--are entered into the growing script. By this time, those elements are so confusing that Head Writer Keyes keeps track of them on 3-by-4-ft. cards, divided into several columns. As the writing team assigned to the specific show begins to deliver its drafts, the bits and pieces are switched around on the chart until a basic sequence is determined.

The group keeps meeting at regular intervals. Usually, it takes some time before they get down to work:

Schlatter (referring to notes): "We've got a thing that worked the other night, and I think we ought to run with it. That line from the alligator wrestling bit, 'Blow in his ear and he'll follow you anywhere.' It went through the studio like wildfire Let's keep it going. (He turns page.) The scripts are getting funnier and tighter all the time . . ."

First Writer (with mock modesty):

"Now that's not our fault, George. You can't blame that on us."

Schlatter (continuing): "We've got plenty of subject matter in every day's newspapers. We've done body freezing; that's old stuff. I think we ought to take another look at transplants."

Fourth Writer: "D'ja read in the papers where they took parts from one woman and transplanted them into four different people?"

Fifth Writer: "Yeah, poor girl should pull herself together."

Third Writer: "Hey, you could have a convention of people who got parts of her." (Delivery boy enters with beer and sandwiches. Schlatter pays the bill, pauses to compute tip.)

Sixth Writer: "Want change for a dime, George?"

Second Writer: "Don't be silly. His tip was, 'Be sure to look both ways before crossing.' "

Schlatter (continuing): "We can expect to see a resurgence of criticism on ethnic jokes"

Eighth Writer: "Yeah, let's lay off the Polish jokes a little. And listen, we've got some jokes coming up that'll be a little touchy with the censors. So when you hear them in the taping, don't laugh or you'll blow them."

Fourth Writer: "Well, that's the way the horse flies."

Seventh Writer: "That's the way the Spanish flies,"

Second Writer: "Oooh, this is the way we're supposed to beat Lucy?"

Apparently, yes. As the script takes shape, Wiles and Schlatter begin to toss out soft comedy lines and beef up others. Soon the final draft--having grown to 235 pages, or about three times as large as the customary script for a one-hour comedy show--is ready. The cast gathers around a table in the studio for a read-through. After two days of casual rehearsal, they head for the stage for two twelve-hour days of taping. The only audience present consists of staffers, office boys, secretaries, members of families. The laughter on the show is canned and carefully metered out to exploit each line.

In the party atmosphere that pervades the set, new ideas are constantly added as the show moves from printed script to video tape. Jokes and ideas for skits are solicited from the nonwriting staff and anyone else who happens by. The twelve-year-old daughter of a production consultant, for example, specializes in graffiti (her latest contribution: LASSIE KILLS CHICKENS). On taping days, the writers are everywhere, feeding lines on the set, in the halls, dressing rooms, offices and wardrobe department. Periodically, the cast members try out impromptu bits on one another, often walk before the camera and say the first thing that comes into their heads. Recalls Sammy Davis: "I was looking forward to appearing on the show. Joey Bishop was going to be on, too. But when we went into rehearsal, I was handed the fattest script I have ever seen in my entire life. It was about four inches thick, and I said, 'I didn't come here to do Gone With The Wind.' They said, 'Don't worry, do what you like. You can ad lib and come back to the script whenever you like'--and I did." So did Bishop.

The cameo tapings are made with an eye for economy as well as variety. The average Laugh-In show costs $170,000 to produce. To save money, each cameo guest is given perhaps dozens of one-liners to recite. Those gags that are not used on one show are preserved on tape, along with an assortment of skits and acts, for use in future shows; they are numbered and filed in a "joke bank" under such headings as "Joke Wall" or "Cocktail Party."

Producer Schlatter, who is in charge of these tapings, also acts as referee and muse. Burly, bearded, he sits atop a tall stool in the studio, juggling phones, flipping through scripts, arguing with the censor and, occasionally, pinching the behind of any girl who is careless enough to stray within range.

Another temptation Schlatter & Co. are unable to resist is the chance to cash in on a pile of merchandising arrangements. A new Laugh-In magazine is selling at the rate of 300,000 a month. The first Laugh-In record album has sold 125,000 copies in three weeks. A rather third-rate Laugh-In comic strip is running in 60 newspapers. Soon there will be Laugh-In jogging outfits, Laugh-In water pistols, Laugh-In graffiti wallpaper and Laugh-In fortune cookies.

All this, in addition to their income from the show, will earn Rowan and Martin about $500,000 each this year. For Martin, the success is translated into the appurtenances of the swinging life--a hilltop pad, heated swimming pool, steam bath, a den filled with electronic gadgets and a black El Dorado and a yellow Corvette.

Once married and now divorced, Martin is only slightly less the gay debauchee that he portrays on screen. Much of his social life is standard Hollywood--"a dinner party at Jean Simmons' and Dick Brooks', or over to Lucy's or Dean's house to watch a movie." Otherwise, he divides his time between golf and "lady people." His handicap in the former is twelve; he scores high, too, with the latter. He prefers to entertain girl friends at his place, spurns all invitations to meet a lady person on her home grounds. "I mean, who needs it--the apartment with the bullfighter posters, and the door made into a coffee table, and the old Kelvinator with the ice trays."

Rowan, who was divorced in 1959, lives sedately with his second wife, Adriana, 26, a former model, in a spacious three-bedroom apartment overlooking the harbor of Manna Del Rey. The garage below houses four cars (a Mercedes-Benz roadster and sedan, an Austin-Healey and a Corvette). Berthed at the dock out back is a 35-ft. ketch, Aisling (Gaelic for dream spirit), on which the Rowans spend most weekends. "These signs of success," Rowan says, "are nice things, appreciated and prized. But you know, more important and more rewarding than any of these things is doing your own thing and having other people say, 'Yeah, baby! Go! Get it on! Hey, that's funny! That's good! I forget what was bugging me while I'm watching you cats!' "

What bugs Rowan and Martin is how long they will be able to sustain the breakneck pace of Laugh-In. At times, the novelty of the show threatens to wear thin. Some of the jokes are too inside; some of this season's new bits, such as the recitation of old, out-of-context punch lines and the "Fun Couple" sketches, fail to work. Says Rowan: "When you take on a show that doesn't fill time, that doesn't come on with singers and dancers as a copout, that is nothing but comedy material--the well cannot remain constantly full. Eventually, we're going to run through this group of writers, and perhaps another group of writers. But how long can you keep it up?"

Pondering that for a moment, Rowan concludes: "I don't see a long future for the show--but then, I didn't see it as a series, either." He smiles wryly. "It is obvious that a show such as this cannot be done."

* A phrase first used by a Negro vaudeville veteran, Dewey ("Pigmeat") Markham, to introduce a series of blackouts (Judge: "Have you ever been up before me?" Defendant: "I don't know--what time do you get up?"). Pig-meat himself is now on Laugh-In.

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