Greetings and salutations Hivers. Today I thought we'd do another You Should Laugh More post.

Research has shown that laughter is good for us. It has all kinds of health benefits. Despite most of us knowing this, none of us laugh enough. Yeah, I know, being an adult is tough, and furthermore there is a lot of grim stuff happening in the world. These things may be true, but that just is all the more reason for trying to get a little laughter into our lives.

Today I want to take a look at Police Squad. If you've ever seen The Naked Gun with Leslie Nielsen, this is the show that led to the movies. It was hilarious. Many people call it the funniest show that ever aired on television. That praise may sound too high, but consider that the team behind the TV show had just made Airplane two years before, and that movie has gone on to be considered one of the funniest comedies ever made.

Just as Airplane has spoofed disaster movies, Police Squad spoofed police dramas. All of the actors played their parts straight. The humor then came from them unknowing doing stupid things which everyone seemed oblivious to or other zany things happening on the screen.

It ran on ABC in 1982 for only six episodes before it was cancelled. It got ok, but not great, ratings. The network decided it wasn't good enough. The only reason given was "the viewer has to watch it in order to appreciate it", which TV Guide referred to at the time as "the most stupid reason a network ever gave for ending a series". It may have been (badly) referring to the fact that Police Squad was packed with sight gags, so viewers had to watch carefully in order to catch everything. One has to remember that TVs at the time were tiny and often still in black and white only.

Leslie Nielsen himself gives this reason for the cancellation and seems to agree with it. Here's a clip he made years later about it.

At any rate, the cancelation of the show led directly to the first Naked Gun movie which we may not have gotten had the show continued, so perhaps things worked out in the end. What we are left with anyway is six amazingly funny episodes.

I'm just going to pick out some random clips

Guest Staring...

Every episode would announce a guest star, only for that guest star to be killed moments later. I think many many comedies later took this idea, but Police Squad did it first!

Another reoccurring gag which you saw at the end of that above clip was that the episode title that the announcer read was always different from the title printed on the screen. A small joke, but a funny one.

Freeze Frame

Every episode would end with a freeze frame. This was a fairly common way to end old police dramas. The lead characters would make some comments joking about the mistake that the bad guy did that led to his capture, they'd laugh, and the shot would freeze as the credits ran. Of course Police Squad just had to make fun of this police drama staple.

The Police Squad twist was that with the exception of the lead actors and maybe one or two extras, nothing else froze. This led to a lot of humor. The first one started normally. The fact of the freeze frame being the joke itself. But with future episodes it just became more and more zany.

Shoeshine Guy

Another reoccurring gag was that in every episode Frank would consult with a Shoeshine Guy who gave advice. I think they might have reused this gag in one of the films. The best part of this gag is after Frank leaves, someone from a completely different job comes and also asks advice.

Anyway, I'll just show the first one here. If you enjoy it, you can easily find the others on YouTube.

Name Confusion

This is a funny skit from one of the episodes. It expands on the name confusion scene in Airplane. This scene is great.

Crooked Poker Game

This clip has so many great lines.

ok, just one more.

Key Delivery

Again, some jokes that they later reused in the movies. Keep watching the clip for after he goes to get apartment. The phone call scene is great.

Anyway, that is all. Though this is a much beloved series, it may be increasingly unknown to younger people so I thought I would introduce it. If you liked any of these, you can find all six episodes floating around YouTube if you do enough searching. They have been released on DVD several times, so they may be on one of the streaming services as well.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku.

Posted using CineTV