Is it just me or has half the population been replaced by pod-people? I keep having these “smeg” moments of “How could you possibly not know that?” My first such experience was when I was only 20 and an acquaintance of similar age had never heard of Abbott and Costello. How could you not have heard of the creators of one of the most famous comedy routines of all time. Probably, half of the readers now are asking, “Who the heck are Abbott and Costello?”

I blame this in part on cable TV. When I was a child before cable became so big, the local TV station would show Abbott and Costello movies on Saturday afternoons [and I listened to their old radio shows on Sunday evenings], as well as B&W Science Fiction B-movies. This is a thing of the past now, but I grew up on it. Do they even show Saturday morning cartoons anymore? What has happened to the world? At some point the networks stopped showing B&W programs altogether.

Thank God for youtube.com and DVDs for keeping this stuff available. But the problem with having only those forms of viewing is that you have to know that it is there to look for it. The chicken and egg problem. How do kids today discover Abbott and Costello? Someone, their parents perhaps, has to show it to them. When I was a child, I would turn on the TV and cycle through the five channels that we could receive (yes, we really only had 5 channels) and there you would find it on Saturday afternoons.

I’ve had people give me various reasons for why they do not watch old programs: “I don’t watch anything that is not in color,” “I don’t watch anything that is older than me,” or “I don’t watch anything that was made before such and such year.” I feel sorry for these people because they are missing out on a lot of good stuff. Yes, some of it is corny and outdated, but a lot of it is timeless gold: the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Bob Newhart’s comedy routines from the early 60s, Nichols & May, etc. I could probably go on forever.

I guess my son is very unique in this regard. He knew who Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd were at a very young age. When my son was in fifth grade, he and I did the “Who’s on first?” routine for his school’s talent show. I’m sure that not many of the kids knew what we were doing, but several of the parents came up and said how great it was and that it reminded them of the Abbott and Costello routine. My question here to them is: “Why are you not passing this enjoyment on to your kids by introducing them to the things that you enjoyed?”