Once at a fancy church wedding for an exalted church person, my wife and I were sitting in one of the back pews. The master-of-ceremonies announced that so-and-so had come so many thousand miles to pay honor to the bride by singing at the wedding. The church was packed with hundreds of people and we sat shoulder to shoulder, ready to listen. The music started and the singing began.

She was flat. She was off. She was terrible. And we all sat there like stone monkeys, not moving an eyelash, not looking around, with pleasant expressions frozen on our faces. After all it was church, the Lord's house, and this was Christianity at its finest.

In the pew ahead of us was a line of young adults and slightly older adults, ages fifteen to perhaps twenty-five. They sat before me and didn't move a muscle. I marveled at their control. I didn't dare look at Carol sitting beside me. I stared at the backs of the heads ahead of me and let my eyes drift upwards to the ceiling, here, then there, waiting for the song to be over.

And then it happened.

Ahead and to my right, her name was Luanne. She turned around for a moment and glanced back at me. It was a terrible mistake. I lost it. Carol lost it. The entire pew of people ahead of me lost it. We were dying right there in church and there was nothing we could do about it. Shoulders were shaking, heads were bobbing, hankies were out covering mouths and catching the tears running down the cheeks. There was nothing we could do. As long as the song went on, and there were several verses, we died a thousand deaths, gasping for air and mercy.

My dad tells a similar story. Once when he was much younger,he went to a funeral with an uncle of mine. They did pretty well during service until the speaker began talking about pillows and feathers. Something set my uncle off and once he started he took my dad along with him. There was nothing they could do to get it stopped. Dad was terribly embarrassed, but my uncle was inclined to make things worse once they got started.

Preferable to embarrassing moments are the times when it is just plain funny. I have had those moments too.

The other day I was sitting at table in our cafe with some friends. One of them began telling a story about students where he teaches. Suddenly I found myself laughing. It was a little bit strange. I realized that over the past several years, I had forgotten how to laugh. I had become so somber and serious about things that I hadn't actually laughed at any thing for years. It was a strange experience. I actually had to gasp for breath because I was laughing so hard. I found laughing at something funny to be refreshing.

The event started me thinking. What happened to funny? When I was a kid we used to watch Ed Sullivan on TV. I remember watching the singers, dancers, variety acts and the comedians Ed used to have on his show. I remember lying on the living room carpet laughing as the comedians did their shticks. We knew how to laugh as a nation of people. Friends, mother-in-laws, marriage, life,death, debt, good times, bad times, it all went into the hopper and came out as laughs. But then one day it changed.

When did it change?

I think it began in the late 1960's. As a nation, we began to lose our faith and hope in things. The Vietnam War, political misdeeds and assassinations, mistrust, lies, divorce, immorality, and a hundred thousand other calamities took it out of us and turned things cynical, sarcastic and bitter.

If I had to pick critical TV shows which either re-defined or reflected the changes in the American sense of humor and life, I would choose these:

The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour

Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In

MASH

All In The Family

You might throw the Cosby Show into the fray but I think it maintained good family steadfastness and hope throughout the seventies in spite of what was happening all around it.

In the later seventies, the several sit-coms which came after the above shows were mostly clones and spin-offs of All In The Family. We can thank Norman Lear for it. After the seventies came the dreadful materialistic eighties and nineties and beyond. Man has lost his soul and our nation has created a new identity of death for itself.

To be sure there have been moments of comic genius and there certainly has been no shortage of comic talent, but somehow funny without bitterness or the sardonic has been in short supply. Red Skelton is gone. Today we laugh, but we laugh without hope and we laugh without faith. Without hope or faith, there only remains death and despair, and so humor has gone black and fatal.

I wish we could go back to the land of funny. But I am afraid we cannot. I think that life is a series of one-way gates and you go through a gate and it closes and one cannot go back. One can only go forward.

Our nation passed through a gate some years back and now we can only go forward. We are finding that we cannot get back to what we once had.