The Fernwood and the Gall

For a minute or so it might almost be Merv Griffin or the Tonight show. The host is professionally affable, the guests are the usuals: a loathsome child star and a piano player, a pompous research scientist, a frizzy-haired health-food nut. Then comes the perception that something is terribly awry--the piano player is in an iron lung; Fernwood 2 Night, the talk show to end all talk shows, is on and running muck. Something like a televised cross between radio's Bob and Ray and print's Mad Magazine, it is Norman Lear's newest and, so far, funniest invention.

In Fernwood, Ohio, the home town of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, the studio of WZAZ-TV is almost painfully tacky. Guests sit on a tattered pea-green sofa, plumped with lavender pillows held together by safety pins. In front of them are gumdrops, a plate of carrot slices and celery sticks stuffed with cream cheese.

Earth Gimble, the host, is a preternatural populist. Under a blond tuft of mustache, he sports the same smug smile for everyone, turning it off only when his sidekick, Jerry Hubbard, ventures beyond the bounds of propriety, Fern-wood-style. Gimble, played by Martin Mull, 33, is the best Lear character since Archie Bunker, and Hubbard (Fred Willard, 33), the dumber-than-dumb Edith Bunker of this most odd couple, is not far behind. Any comparison to Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon is, of course, purely intentional.

Now in only its fifth week, Fernwood has yet managed to offend almost everybody. A rawhide sampler:

> Mr. and Mrs. Tom Case appeared and demanded that their son be "Deprogrammed" and his mind washed free of "all that silly mumbo jumbo" some weird religious group had pumped into it. "He's 37 years old and he's still not married," wailed Mrs. Case. "They've just made a zombie out of him, kneeling down all the time, speaking in a foreign tongue." The son turns out, of course, to be a Catholic priest.

>Following an exhaustive, two-year study, Dr. Richard Osgood came on to announce some unsettling news: leisure suits cause cancer. It seems that perspiration causes the synthetic fiber of leisure suits to release a carcinogenic gas. Children who cling to Daddy's trousers may also be in trouble--but only if Daddy has sweaty legs. How did Dr. Osgood know? Why, he experimented with rats, of course, and to prove it he brought the rats out in their rat-size leisure suits. Unfortunately, Dr. Osgood had no solution, but he was testing leisure suits mixed with Laetrile.

> After being stopped for speeding down Main Street, Morton Rose was brought on the show to further the spirit of ecumenism. The producers figured no one in tiny, inbred Fernwood had ever seen a Jew and that seeing one would erase unfortunate stereotypes. "What tribe are you from?" asked Hubbard. "I'm originally from Toledo," answered Rose, eager to help. At that point Garth turned the program over to "Talk-to-a-Jew" and let the viewing audience into the act. "I'd like to know why Mr. Rose isn't wearing a beanie," said one woman sweetly.

> Susan Cloud, who runs Fern-wood's Butterfly Deli, flounced on to talk about vegetarianism. "I don't like to eat anything that under different circumstances might eat me," she explained matter-of-factly. Except for hamburgers, naturally, because, as everyone knows, "the human body requires burgers."

Along the way there was also a Vietnamese refugee, Mian Co Tiam, Saigon's former Minister of Parks and Playgrounds, who was plugging his new book, a hymn to America entitled Yankee-Doodle Gook. And a prim woman who reported that a blue man from outer space "had his way with me," stepping from a flying saucer and using a biblical beam of light. Quipped Garth: "The course he took with you, ma'am, would have to be called outercourse."

Outrageous? Not according to Norman Lear, who has grown rich and famous by turning cultural cliches upside down with his hits All in the Family, Maude and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. "Others perceive satire, lunacy, hilarity, idiocy, what they will in the show," he says, "but our intention is only to make people laugh." Adds Producer Alan Thicke: "When we deal with any kind of trouble area, it must be apparent that the people we are making fun of are not the people in the group but the people who have narrow-minded attitudes toward that group."

Fernwood's material is as close as the 7 o'clock news or the talk show on the next channel. Johnny Carson had a woman guest who worked for the San Diego Zoo; not to be outdone, Barth Gimble had one from the Fernwood Pet Control Center. Other talk shows have consumer advocates; Fernwood has one who starts out warning about rip-offs and ends up plugging the Wonderblen-der, which just happens to be made by Gimble's own company. But does art imitate life, or does life imitate art? Lear is not certain. After taping a sketch involving "hearing-ear" dogs, he discovered that such beasts actually exist.

If Lear is confused, pity the viewers. When Garth asked viewers to "Talk-to-a-Jew" by dialing 555-5624, many people did just that. (In Cincinnati, that turned out to be a nonoperative number.) In Los Angeles, a man was so intrigued by the Fernwood coroner's "no-frills burial plan" that he called KTTV for more details.

There are moments when the line between low-key satire of a boring subject and sheer ennui is too fine by half and Fernwood snores dangerously. But the show has a target as big as that bump in Black Sunday. And in Mull, a student of history and a painter turned comedian, Lear has a funnyman whose sense of timing is the best since Jack Benny passed age 39. The ratings, which I will decide whether the show will continue this fall, are not hi yet, but Fernwood is choice glazed ham among the summer leftovers.

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