A Funny Thing

There he was, hovering pale and jittery, like an image that persists for a second after the set has been turned off. Jack Paar was back, on an NBC television special, "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the White House," a catalogue of droll film clips and skits about politics.

It was not quite the same Paar. All work and no play made Jack. Now that he had been retired for a year, the high-tension lines had dropped from his face; he looked younger, fitter, less neurotic--and less in tune with the times. He was obviously nervous and his timing was off. Still, because he was Paar, and because he has not forgotten how to put together a program with flavor, if not taste, the hour had more laughs than a week of canned comedies.

In his rambling opener, Paar twitted the Vice President: ("it's like being a travel agent for a Zeppelin"), knocked L.B.J. ("I get the impression that when the President speaks he is speaking under our heads"), and then excused himself from partisan politics: "I am like the little old lady who said: 'I never vote; it only encourages them.'"

In a surefire segment that required about as much daring as kicking a dog around, Paar showed familiar film clips of campaigners working themselves silly: Thomas E. Dewey with citizens dressed as cavemen, Indians adopting Coolidge, John F. Kennedy kissing a baby, and a wanly smiling candidate ascending in a balloon bearing the immortal legend: SCRANTON'S ON THE RISE.

"Funny Thing's" funniest things happened when Paar kept himself offscreen. Elliott Reid did an inventive impression of an entire convention, including chairman, delegates, Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley and the BBC. An old newsreel showed Bess Truman hopelessly trying to christen an airplane--bopping the nose a dozen times until a technician took pity on her and hammered the bottle apart. And in a technically adroit sequence, famous faces were shown orating silently as the sound track played Tony Bennett's rendition of If I Ruled the World. It began with Johnson, moved to Goldwater, then to such notables as Nixon, De Gaulle, Batman and Paar himself.

Paar, who has seen better nights, was nonetheless a welcome sight. His only reverence is for irreverence, and perhaps his timing was not so bad after all. As networks warm up their dreary summer reruns, Jack looks less in need of seasoning and more in need of a season.

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