Hey there, GenX here, first became conscious of Fonzie around age 4 and grew up in front of those boxes until around the mid-aughts, when I finally jettisoned all dish/cable services and went straight Internet.

I spend more time than I oughta, thinking about the specific experience of Television in its historic milieu, and wondering if there is really an equivalent thing anymore. Essays upon books could be written about the sociological aspects, like, when you would go to work, a discussion of the previous night’s episodes of popular shows would be a way of creating bonds with your coworkers; this mechanism no longer exists, unless you and your coworkers can all find daily entertainments that you agree on, which is way less certain than a TV show was, when TV was the rule.

Anyways, you’ve probably seen humor of one kind or another about Infomercials, which ruled the overnight cable stations, hawking spray-on hair, food processors, horrific beer brewing machines, etc. But before commercials became show-length, such products were already being advertised in the usual commercial breaks. Along with the Ginsu knife and weird S&M Weight Sets, selling nostalgia to the WWII generation was big TV Commercial business back then, and the primary form of that in the 70s and 80s was recording compilations featuring pre-Rock’n’Roll artists who seemed just awful to my Kiss-fan eyes and ears, but I wish I had every one of those compilations and commercials available to me now.

I’m infodumping, sorry. But it really fascinates me, how this stuff evolved, cause in the 70s you’d see the compilation was available LP, Cassette, or 8-track. By the early 80s, 8-track was dropped, and by the early 90s it would generally be CD or Cassette. But somewhere in there, probably early 90s, Videotape sets of early TV comedians became a thing, and that’s where I learned about Red Skelton, whom I never saw on any comedy history shows or anything, that I can recall. Just a mid-level funnyman from old times.

Never saw any of em, but I expect if you’ve got a taste for naive 50s comedy, and are able to enjoy it on its own terms (at least, where it’s not insanely racist or misogynist - expect both on anything from that era, just sayin), find yourself a VHS and give it a watch, while thinking about the people in your family that you might have known, who were around in the 70s or earlier. Nowadays, that’s what I get out of watching old stuff like that - I think about the Great Grandparents and Grandparents that I grew up with, laughing at people like Peter Sellers, and it feels like hanging out with them again, a little bit.