There was a Zenith console television in our family room, the kind built into a slab of wood furniture that weighed more than the couch, and a good part of my childhood happened in front of it. That’s where I met Charles Nelson Reilly and Jamie Farr and Jaye P. Morgan, though I couldn’t have told you their names at the time. They were just the funny people who turned up on Match Game and Hollywood Squares and The Gong Show, the ones who could make the adults in the room laugh at something I was fairly sure I wasn’t supposed to understand yet.

Half their jokes went straight over my head. Chuck Barris would lurch around the Gong Show stage in that hat, half in the bag and fully committed to whatever bit had seized him, and the adults watching along would lose it while I sat there on the carpet knowing only that it was funny, not why. The gong itself I understood on its own terms, since a man getting yanked off a stage needs no translation for a kid, but whatever Barris and the panel were doing underneath all that chaos, I wouldn’t clock for years.

Stuart Brotman has a piece in TVNewsCheck about exactly these performers, the Professional Guests, the ones famous mostly for being themselves. His argument is that they were never filler. Each one carried a real act underneath the persona: a bit, a routine, the ability to walk into a crowded format and own three minutes without breaking it.

Reading it, I finally understood what I’d been watching from that carpet. Not celebrities killing time between commercials. Craftsmen, working a form so completely that a seven-year-old who didn’t get the joke still couldn’t look away.

Something like it has surfaced again on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube Shorts, the same instinct to build a persona out of being yourself on camera. But it feels thinner to me, less sophisticated and less original, more about filling the slot than mastering it. The jokes I missed back then I get now. Whatever Barris and that panel had, that calibrated, unhurried command of a room, I’m not sure anyone’s still being taught it.