Hey, You Guyyyyyys!

How else can you start a post about The Electric Company?

This week, one of our local PBS stations re-ran "The Electric Company's Greatest Hits & Bits", and purely by accident and dumb luck, I found out it was on--before the fact. The Electric Company was a six-season television show produced beginning in 1971 by the Children's Television Workshop, the same people that brought us Sesame Street.

It was an educational program designed to teach kids to read, and it featured some amazing people (Rita Moreno, Tom Lehrer, Zero Mostell, Bill Cosby, and Gene Wilder, to name a few) and some who went on to have amazing acting careers such as Morgan Freeman. Freeman's "Easy Reader" character (who reminds me now of WKRP's Venus Flytrap...) was classic.

I do recall that at the time it wasn't my favorite TV show--I liked Zoom much better--but it was one of the very few TV shows we were allowed to watch before dinner and so that was okay by me.

I haven't watched the entire program yet, but I was struck by several things in the part I've seen.

1. Having not thought of the program in years--and I do mean years--20, maybe?--I was blown away by how many of the sketches I remember. The Adventures of Letterman (narrated by Gene Wilder) still cracks me up, and Easy Reader was even funnier watching it as an adult. "I'm the plumber. I've come to fix the sink." Tee hee.

2. The show really was hip. They were so cutting-edge (though it looks so dated now!) I'm sort of surprised my mom was hip enough to be hip to what was hip in the early 1970s.

3. I'm guessing that a fair amount of my life-long love of reading, words, and wordplay came from this show. The sketches are funny and used a repetitive style, along with silly words and actions, to drive home their educational points.

4. Kids who are exposed to ideas, information, and humor "above their level" will rise to that level. Joan Gantz Cooney, founder of the Children's Television Workshop, commented that at one point in the early days of the show, they worried that kids "wouldn't get it", but decided to carry on, which was definitely the right choice.

Her comments made me think of my own and my friends' experiences with Monty Python's Flying Circus. Everyone I know who loves Monty Python discovered them at an early age--too early an age, probably. We got the slapstick and Vaudevillian aspects of the comedy, but the finer points, such as "The World Forum", a sketch of a quiz show involving Che Guevara, Karl Marx, Vladimir Illych Lenin, and Mao Tse-tung answering questions about English Premier League football were completely lost on a teenage American kid.

Lines like "Help, help, I'm being repressed!" were irresistably funny, though I'm not sure we knew why exactly. We just knew it was silly humor; I doubt we realized it was ironic humor. But we understood that it was cool and "mature" (in its immaturity....) and anything that concerned our parents was fine by us.

I think if you give kids slightly more than they're ready for, they'll take what they can and build upon it, as long as they're being entertained. TV that is dumbed-down is insulting and so much of what is spoon-fed to kids is terrible quality. The friends we recently went away with mentioned before we left that their 7 year old son was suddenly fascinated by Monty Python. M. laughed, saying, "There's no way he understands what it's about, but it makes him laugh." He particularly likes the witch scene in "Holy Grail". So, we brought some of our Flying Circus DVDs to the mountains with us, and A. sat as enthralled as the adults in the room, laughing right along with us, and looking at us curiously when a joke was above his head.

But he will get it. He'll grow into it. He's a smart kid.

I've been thinking so much this week about the impact this one silly little TV show (back to Electric Company now...) had on me and that it's sort of funny I didn't realize it until now. It's humor I want to share with my nieces and I hope they'll grow to love words as much as I do. And once they've watched and loved The Electric Company, I can't wait to turn them on to Monty Python.