Comics on Playboy After Dark

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on July 17th, 2007

The DVD series, “Playboy After Dark” is currently flooding the culture. “Every show has been remastered to bring back the glorious quality of its original flavor,” dontcha know.

We accidentally ran into a clip of the Grateful Dead performing “St. Stephen” in the penthouse for all the sharkskinned and sequinned hipsters. It was ridiculous, even for 1969. The psychedelic, rock and roll equivalent of a hell gig. Perhaps only made bearable by the ingestion of copious amounts of lysergic acid and an AFTRA scale check which, when cashed, would finance the purchase of copious amounts of lysergic acid, with maybe a little bit of scratch left over for the purchase of an itchy serappe on the next trip to Tijuana.

One of our favorite bloggers, James Lileks of Minneapolis, got hold of a Playboy disc via Netflix and wrote a scathing review of Phyllis Diller‘s performance on the show. We feel for her. It was probably “Playboy’s Penthouse,” an earlier 1959 prototype that would pave the way for the later “After Dark” show.

You can tell she’s used to working for inebriates, because she keeps pausing and waiting for the laughter to subside, even though no actual laughter of sustainable quantity has arisen. Between jokes-– most of which are lame japes about airline travel, the comic’s equivalent of the break-glass-pull-handle emergency alarm, she mugs. This probably worked when she was on stage before a large audience, working in broad strokes. With the camera 12 feet away, the effect is different. She looks absolutely insane.

Ouch! We feel for Diller.

The Male Half can relate all too well. He can imagine a time, 30 years in the future, when a similarly snarky blogger gets hold of an installment of “Rascals Good Time Comedy Hour” on Ether Plasma Chip (or whatever recordable medium is all the rage in 2037) and delivers a devastating assessment of this curious creature with his jacket sleeves rolled up, delivering his now-quaint material to the packed, now-defunct comedy club somewhere in Northern New Jersey.

The Female Half perhaps will have more reason to cringe, as her turn on the Rascals show features a 22-year-old Skene delivering her material while clad in a cheerleading uniform!

The Long Tail has whipsawed back and stung Diller. Apparently, though, she didn’t suffer from her brief shot on the contrived cocktail party– she soldiered on to have a career for another 45 years or so. Not bad. Lileks concludes the piece by saying that Diller “fractured her back last week, and had to cancel a Tonight Show appearance to celebrate her birthday. Her 90th birthday. I don’t watch the Tonight Show. But I’d have tuned in for that.”

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