Word: hawing
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When the cast of the new CBS summer series, Hee Haw-a hillbilly version of Laugh-In-arrived at the train station to start taping in Nashville last May, the performers were paraded ceremoniously through town atop mule-drawn hay wagons. "We felt like such goddam fools riding down the main streets," recalls Co-Producer Frank Pep-piatt. "We thought there would be throngs to meet us, but we ended up waving to each other...
...response to Hee Haw seemed ho-hum in Nashville-the holy see of Grand Ole Opry and country show biz -then it seemed likely that the cast would be greeted anywhere else in America by bags of chicken feathers and cauldrons of tar. In a TV summer season stolen by Armstrong and Aldrin, the show's only acknowledgment of the moon was the crescent-shaped opening in its prime prop-an outhouse. Had the public outgrown that sort of thing? And would TV viewers be turned off by the program's shameless plagiarism of their No. 1 favorite...
...answer to both questions was no. In Nielsen audience figures published last week, Hee Haw finished first with a Sunday night average of 27.3 million viewers...
Candy Farmer. Like so much of TV, Hee Haw is a show that nobody likes -except the viewers. Newspaper critics reacted as if it were good reason to pull the plug on rural electrification. CBS, with unaccustomed humor, is running promotion spots replaying the show's most outrageous vignettes, with a kicker: "The critics are unanimous about Hee Haw-but watch anyway...
What the public is watching is gags lifted from tales as old as the Arkansas Traveller (ca. 1860) but spliced together with production as new as Laugh-In. On Hee Haw, the graffiti adorn not bikini-clad boogaloo dancers but Burma-Shave signs, and the routines occur not at cocktail parties but in cornfields. That is their natural habitat. One of the company announces, "I'm a farmer in a candy factory." "Whaddaya do?" asks a chorus of rural voices. "I milk chocolate." In another rib cracker, the straight man wonders: "Hey, Junior, how come I saw you eating...