Hee Haw

Remember growing up and on Saturday nights in the 80's watching reruns of this on my local "CBS" station at grandpa and grandma's house. "Hee Haw" was feel good fun as the jokes were funny with laughs and really corny and the skits were parodies of country life and rural living at it's good old best! Also the music guest were always top of the line which helped move the show along so well and the staples and main players were the now late greats Roy Clark, Buck Owens, Minnie Pearl, and Grandpa Jones! Always they put on good performances with their country talent! Overall this was syndication classic, in some areas even today from time to time you might catch reruns on digital cable TV.

First, I haven't seen any Hee Haw in years but I remember watching it every Saturday morning whether in color or black and white as a child in New Jersey. Not exactly, Hee Haw country is it. Well, I liked the show and watched it whenever it was on. Of course, the writing wasn't great but I loved watching Minnie Pearl and gained my first taste of country music. This was all before modern country music which sounds more like pop music of the 1980s. Anyway, Hee Haw appeared to have a family type show where the jokes were silly and stupid but there was always room for one more. The cast was always large and I even miss their stupid humor to this day. I remember Lulu and some of the stupid skits that even SNL would toss out. In real life, the cast and crew were like family and the show was like a reunion for all of them. Sadly, the show's cancellation was an end of an era in television history.

Even though I'm not a big fan of country (the closest I will get to liking country is by listening to The Eagles or the Byrds), I have to hand it to this show. It managed to survive the infamous Rural Purge of 1971 and became a television institution. This show had to be one of the corniest (no pun intended) in the history of television and it in many ways it was a countryfied version of Laugh In. However, this show had a loyal following and it managed to show that Country music was still popular no matter how old Fred felt.

This show lasted nearly a quarter century, but even that hardly seems enough. I'm not that big a fan of the stuff that currently passes for country music, but I love the older stuff. Many of country music's biggest legends guest starred on this show, and several others were regulars at one point or another. This was the last of the successful variety shows on tv and by far the most successful country music show on television. It's doubtful that we'll ever see anything like it again. It's a shame that this show is currently off the air- I don't think you can even catch reruns nowadays. Hopefully, Hee Haw (or at least the early seasons) will eventually become available on DVD. I certainly hope so.

This show proved you should never underestimate cornball. Sure, a lot of hicks watched the show (I come from a long line of ridge-runners myself), but they alone didn't keep "Hee-Haw" on the air for all those years. Many people with otherwise sophisticated tastes have low-brow senses of humor. This is why people are still watching "The Three Stooges" and "Benny Hill" after all these years. "Hee-Haw" was ALL cornball, slapstick, T-and-A and great country music, and people ate it up. Much of the show's appeal also came from its fair amount of satire (remember Charlie's radio show on KORN?) and the cast members' unerring ability to laugh at themselves, though viewers never got the impression that anyone felt demeaned by it all. Which is a hell of a lot more than you can say for TV these days.