Season: 2 (The Sonny & Cher Show)
Episode: 26
Guest(s): Ken Berry, Betty White, Flip Wilson
CBS Air Date: January 21 1977
Also aired: TV1, GetTV, Sonny & Cher TimeLife
Opening Song: “My Cherie Amour” (Video)
Cover of Stevie Wonder (1969)
They come out of the same panel again like they did in the previous episode. This must be some kind of private joke. Cher seems very feisty in this opening (and closing) and she sparkles. She wears a beautiful blue and white halter top with matching slitted skirt. Sonny wears a light-blue ruffled shirt. Cher’s hair seems a bit crimped in the back. They seem pretty playful.
Opening Banter: Sonny keeps holding her hand and Cher says, “read it or give it back.” Sonny wonders why they don’t come on stage and kiss anymore since they used to be married to each other. He says they always shake hands. Cher responds that they shook hands a lot when they were married too.
This is truer than the joke. They’ve been shaking hands on stage, it appears, since they broke up secretly at the end of 1973, quite a while before their marriage officially ended.
Sonny says that even on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson the guest and host kiss. Cher says, “Be my guest. Go kiss Johnny Carson.” Sonny says, “I’m sure the viewers would understand” and the audience claps, wanting to see them kiss. He says it’s absurd to think there’s anyone in their homes who would care if we kissed. Cher says, “I know someone at my home who would care if we kissed. Sonny protests, “Come on Cher, Everyone knows how wild you are. What’s a little kiss?…We all read the fan magazines. We know what you’re doing…skinny dipping with Elvis and Colonel Sanders.”
Cher complains that the tabloids are ridiculous and when she visited the doctor’s office recently, she read about herself having affairs with Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds, and David Sole all at the same time. Sonny asks, “What were you at the doctor’s for, pep pills?”
But then Sonny agrees about how ridiculous the tabloids are and quips, “remember when they used to say we were getting a divorce?” (Slyly siding with their occasional validity. Cher then defends herself, saying “If the truth were known, out of this team he is the weird one.” Sonny mocks surprise and shock. Cher then tells the story about how Sonny once sent their housekeeper to the market for pigmies (Yikes!) and another story about how he put Chastity in blackface and in a closet to surprise Cher when she opened it. (Chastity in a closet, another unintentional foreshadowing of their future in tabloids.) Sonny says he’s not weird but playful and he likes to make people laugh.
Skit: A kind of male takeoff on the movie All About Eve or Carol Burnett’s Funt and Mundane skits (which is itself a spoof of the stage stars Lunt and Fontanne). Ken Berry is the understudy to stage-star Sonny’s Pepper (of the team Salt and Pepper). Sonny never misses a performance and it’s the 5,000th Broadway show so Ken Berry has resorted to trying to sabotage Sonny. They injure each other back and forth into wheelchairs until the female half, Salt (Betty White), steals the end of the show. My notes say Mr. Cher Scholar liked how the scene was shot but it’s not nearly as funny as the Carol Burnett skit on the same theme with Vincent Price.
Cher Solo: “The Way We Were” (Video)
Cover of Barbra Streisand (1973)
Cher sings the song with pigtail looped braids sitting in an array of big yellow carnations with ferns hanging in the back. Cher wears a white country dress with big, brown detached sleeves. This look is very anti-glamour with soft makeup and simple earrings. She really belts it out at the end.
Channel 86 Cutsey News: The whole cast participates with newsy names like Gary Glib (Sonny), Doreen Dum (Cher), Larry Letcher (Flip Wilson), Vera Vain (Betty White) and Sam Snoop (Ken Berry).
– Sonny plays a carpenter for the White House bathroom of President Jimmy Carter. He puts a crescent moon cutout through the bathroom door, because, you know, Jimmy Carter is supposedly used to an outhouse and uses the Congressional Record for toilet paper. These jokes are no better than the awful one-noted Gerald Ford jokes. Political humor was pretty heavy-handed on these shows.
– There’s a joke about President Carter being unable to talk because peanut butter is stuck to the roof of his mouth. Flip Wilson plays Geraldine working as his new appointment secretary and she’s testing the new hotline phone and accidentally calls the Kremlin instead of the president’s brother, Billy. Flip Wilson as Geraldine can make anything funny. “I will come through the phone and break your face, honey!” she tells Leonid Brezhnev. She gets the star in my notes here.
– “Teaching Carter Talk” has Betty White, also part of the White House staff, teaching Cher (wearing her common secretary look with the big glasses, a hair bun and a blue suit) how to “talk Southern.” Cher talks very precisely as a secretary and she practices her drawl. At the end, Cher and Betty White sing “Carolina In the Morning” (1922, from the Broadway review The Passing Show of 1922). There’s a joke about how peanut wine goes best with chicken. Oy.
Vente Nove: Cher interviews the Italian film director about his new movie, The Postman Always Rings Twice, which incidentally I just watched last week for the first time, the Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange version (how serendipitous is that?). I don’t know how it took me so long to watch this movie considering my friend Coolia’s number-one celebrity obsession is Jack Nicholson and I’ve seen many of his movies with her. In any case, as I was watching it I couldn’t stop wondering when this skit was going to come up in the show recaps I’m doing (and it’s pretty freaky that it came up in the same week!)
It was a great movie and this is one of my favorite spoofs of the show, this one referencing the 1946 Lana Turner version. Cher tells Vente Nove that the movie has already been done 30 years ago, (the steamy Nicholson/Lange version wouldn’t come out until 1981). Vente Nove says the movie had been stolen from an idea he had when he was three years old and so he’ll just change the title to “The Postman Always Knocks Because The Bell, She Don’t Work-a-Twice.” They review break-away bottles with Luigi and we find out Vente Nove has been writing his own accolades.
When Nove yells for the Luigi to “Roll it!” Luigi sends out six hoola-hoops (the recurring gag of rolling it). Cher plays Lana Turner as Cora in a tight, glamourous white dress and head wrap. Sonny sneaks in with three or four Vente Nove cameos. Ken Berry plays Cora’s ancient husband, Nick. Flip Wilson is brilliantly cast as a befuddled Frank who Cora seduces into killing her husband. Lots of double entendres. (At one point Cher counts out 12 with all 10 fingers and her breasts). I find Cher’s over-acting very funny here. Betty White plays the insurance agency for the policy on Nick and she catches and arrests Frank.
Concert: “Let It Be Me” and “Bring It On Home to Me” (Video)
Cover of Gilbert Bécaud (1955) and Sam Cooke (1962)
Sonny & Cher covered “Let It Be Me” on their debut 1965 album Look at Us. One of my favorite duets of theirs. They also covered “Bring It On Home To Me,” another great song, on their 1966 duet album The Wondrous World of Sonny & Cher. They’ve never performed either of these songs previously on their variety shows. Cher wears a black leotard with fur ruffles below the knee and boots. She also wears a disco headband and garage-door blue eye shadow. She almost looks too modern now for the show. In this concert segment and the last one, they’ve been using a framing-device that’s kind of cheap looking.
IGUB: Cher fusses with Sonny’s suit threads and digs into his pocket and pulls out his scarf. He retaliates by goosing her. They sing “I Got You Babe” and walk off.
Thanks to Jay for the official run-down on this episode. The TimeLife version cuts out Cher’s solo of “The Way We Were.”
Highlights: Sonny & Cher talking about the trials and tribulations of the tabloids, the great Postman Always Rings Twice skit with Flip Wilson.
