Friday, January 05, 2024
Obscurity of the Day: TV Laffs
The comics have always been determined to have a presence in every section of the paper except for maybe the obits, and the TV listings seemed like easy pickings. The viewers of the glass teat offer up endless fodder and the listings in the heydays of TV accounted for acres of unattractive dull newsprint, so it seemed like a natural. Many features planted their flags in the TV listings section, but none really stood out as the winner of the genre. Bil Keane's Channel Chuckles probably had the most papers, but it was no juggernaut by any means. Today for your prime time viewing pleasure we offer an also-ran feature, TV Laffs by Cliff Rogerson.
TV Laffs, which was also known under a slew of homophones such as TV Laughs, Tee Vee Laffs, Teevee Laffs, etc.*, debuted on July 1 1957** in a modest number of papers, distributed by Consolidated News Features. CNS was a small but long-standing player in the comics syndication game. There is precious little documentation of this syndicate, but the company was purchased by North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) in the 1930s, and thereafter the name apparently was used as just another imprint of that major syndicate. What I don't know is why certain features were assigned to that imprint as opposed to Bell Syndicate or Associated Newspapers, also owned by NANA. But I digress...
In 1960 the feature switched over to the McClure Syndicate imprint, which was also a NANA name by this time, and then in 1963 TV Laffs wore the brand of Bell-McClure Syndicate after those two divisions of NANA were consolidated.
For most of its life the TV Laffs panel offered one-off gags with no continuing characters. However, when United Feature took over Bell-McClure and therefore this feature, there must have been some meetings about the future direction of TV Laffs. As soon as the panel got its new syndicate badge, it changed to focus on a husband-wife team of snarky blob characters named Boobtoob and Cathode.The humour got a bit more slapstick, and newspapers seemed to respond positively for a while. But in the late 70s clients began to bail, perhaps because Rogerson's art was starting to look a little unpolished. United Feature seems to have dropped the feature in early 1980.
According to the E&P syndicate directories, something called Superior Features Syndicate tried to continue the panel from 1980-85, though finding examples is like fishing for trout in a goldfish bowl. Singer Communications, a constant E&P lister whose wares never seem to show up anywhere, offered a panel they called TV Laughs from 1983-1990, but they didn't offer a credit so I have no way to know if this is yet another attempt to sell Rogerson's feature or not.
* Cliff Rogerson was on the staff of the Long Island newspaper Newsday, and when this panel ran there it ran under yet another name, Telly Laughs.
** Source: Buffalo News
Labels: Obscurities
: 1/05/2024 8:50 AM : 1/05/2024 11:54 AM https://comicstriphistory.com/2018/07/02/obscurity-of-the-day-tv-tee-hees/
And Mark, you bring up a real serious obscurity. Showbiz was put out by NEAs weak weekly arm, but it ran (or was advertised) for nearly two decades. That one hasn't been immortalized on Stripper's Guide yet.
--Allan
