Paul Lynn’s funniest moments that almost went too far. Picture the safest show on television. Bright lights, a friendly host, a giant board of squares, and a simple question any kid could answer. The host turns to the middle square and sitting there with a little smile already forming is Paul Lynn.
He just sits there, tilts his head, and delivers a single sentence that makes every adult in the room do a double take. >> How many men on a hockey team? About half. >> And for about half a second, the whole studio goes quiet because everyone heard two things at once. the clean answer the question was asking for and the other one the one television was not supposed to let through. Then the room explodes.
That was the trick that made Paul Lind one of the most loved faces on American TV in the 1970s. That was the trick that made Paul Lind so dangerous on television. He did not bring nightclub comedy into the living room by force. He hid it inside the safest package television had a family game show, a smiling host, a harmless question, and an answer a child could hear one way while every adult in the room heard another.
Paul Lind was not just slipping jokes past the rules. He was using family television as camouflage. Today, we’re going to walk through his funniest moments, the ones that almost went too far. We’ll start with the game show answers that slipped right past the rules. And we’ll end with one strange night of television that makes everything else look tame.
Stay with me for that one because it’s genuinely hard to believe it ever aired. Why one man could bend an entire show. In the 1970s, game shows were built to be comfortable. They were the kind of thing a whole family could watch after dinner without anyone reaching for the dial. Hollywood Squares was exactly that. Nine celebrities sat inside a giant tic-tac-toe board.
The host, Peter Marshall, read them a question, and each one gave a funny answer before the real one. Light, easy, harmless. >> Which star is it? Tom Deloy, Karen Valentine, Vincent Price, Suzanne Bette, Bert Reynolds, Carl Riner, Wally Cox, Hope Lang or Paul Lynn, all in the Hollywood Square. And here is the master of the Hollywood Square.
>> Paul Lind understood something more useful than the rules. He understood the costume the rules were wearing. Hollywood squares looked harmless. That was its power. A giant tic-tac-toe board, a smiling host, celebrities in little boxes. Questions simple enough for a child to follow. The whole show told America, “Relax. This is safe.
” Paul’s genius was that he never fought that safety. He used it. The cleaner the frame looked, the more dangerous one dry little answer could become. >> Opponents of fluoridated water argued that too much florine in a person’s system can cause an uncontrollable desire FOR SEX. >> HEY, CALLING A MAN. >> A pause here, a raised eyebrow there, a voice that stretched a simple sentence until it started to mean something it was never supposed to mean.
If you’ve never seen him before, here’s the easiest way to picture it. Imagine the most polite person at a dinner party saying something completely innocent, but saying it in a way that makes everyone at the table slowly turn their heads. >> Mr. Paul, please. >> Mr. Paul, what should you call the group of dancers in a ballet? >> Silly savages.
That was Paul every single week on national television. And once you learn to listen for it, you can’t stop hearing it. The center square trap. The middle square was supposed to be the safest seat on the whole board. >> Right in the center. Fall in. In the Wizard of Oz. In the Wizard of Oz. What was it that Dorothy had to do to get back to Kansas? >> Trying to remember what the Tin Man wanted.
IT WAS the seat they gave to the biggest personality, the one the audience already loved. So naturally, it was also the most dangerous cease to hand to Paul Lind. Here’s how a typical moment worked. Peter Marshall would read a question that sounded completely ordinary, the kind of thing you’d find in a children’s quiz, where you already expect a normal, sensible reply.
>> Then Paul would take a breath. He’d let the question sit in the air for a second, and the answer he gave would be technically about the question, but shaped just enough that every adult in the room heard a second meaning humming underneath it. Listen to that laugh. It doesn’t come instantly.
There’s a tiny delay first, maybe half a beat, while the audience catches up. First, they hear the answer. Then they realize what he actually meant and then they laugh almost like they’ve just been caught being in on it. That little delay is the whole engine of his comedy. Paul’s comedy wasn’t about delivering a punchline.
It was about letting the audience discover they had a dirty mind. He let you discover a second too late that you’d understood something you probably weren’t meant to. Scientists say that a small child will believe the story that the stork brought him easier than he will how it really happened. What do you mean really happened? And the best part, he never looked guilty afterward.
He’d just sit there with that calm, satisfied expression as if the naughty thought had been yours all along. Paul in >> Paul. True or false? Women smokers in Uganda traditionally put the lit end of the cigarette into their mouths. >> Don’t tell me what they do with her chewing gum. >> Once an audience learns to listen for that second meaning, even the most boring question on the board starts to feel loaded.
> 12 volts. Nylon is stronger than steel. But steel panties don’t turn me on. >> Which brings us straight to the answers that came dangerously close to the edge. The answer that slipped past the rules. Paul’s best answers had a strange kind of armor around them. If a parent walked through the living room and only heard the words, most of them still sounded completely harmless.
Nothing to cut, nothing to bleep. The sentence on its own was clean. >> Studies at the University of Wisconsin show that you’ll probably live longer if you love only one man or woman at a time. >> But it is all right to alternate. >> But comedy doesn’t live only in words. It lives in timing, in tone, in the half smile and the slow delivery and the exact moment he chose to pause.
Paul could take a perfectly innocent sentence and make it behave badly without ever giving the network enough evidence to stop him. There is a new bra on the market that squeaks in various musical tones. The hills are alive. That’s the real reason the title of this video says almost. He rarely went all the way over the line.
He went right up to it, leaned on it, and let everyone in the studio feel the edge. >> Does Anne Landers think there’s anything wrong with you if you do your housework in the nude? >> No. But I have to be terribly careful when I do my ironing. >> Watch what happens right there. The question is harmless. The answer on paper is harmless, but the room reacts like something just barely got away with it.
>> According to the book, An Encyclopedia of Fairies, who’s generally who’s generally better looking, a fairy or a pixie? >> Looks aren’t everything. >> Who’s generally better looking according to this book called Encyclopedia for Fairy? A fairy or a pixie? Better looking? Well, I’ll go for the fairy. >> The host smiles. The audience roars.
The show keeps moving because the show still looks innocent even after every adult in the room has understood what just slipped through. This is a kind of comedy that’s almost impossible to manufacture today. It depends entirely on the performer. You can’t write it down and hand it to someone else because the joke isn’t in the script.
The joke is in Paul. And there’s one more thing that made it work. He never seemed to be the one with the dirty mind. He’d deliver the line, then glance around almost surprised, as if the rest of us were the ones thinking something we shouldn’t. That innocent little face hiding a very sharp brain is where his whole career lived.
Keep that in mind because we’re about to watch him do it three times fast. The oneliners. This next part is where Paul becomes almost impossible to copy. We’re going to run a short string of his oneliners. The quick ones where the whole joke is over in a few seconds. >> In what state was Abraham Lincoln born? >> In what state? >> Mhm.
>> Well, like all of us, NAKED AND SCREAMING. WATCH HOW LITTLE EFFORT he uses. The line is short. The face barely moves. How many men on a hockey team? About half. >> The voice sounds like it has already looked around the room and quietly judged everyone in it. Then the punchline lands and the temperature of the whole show changes in an instant.
There it is again. That calm setup, that sharp little turn at the end. >> Why was Daniel thrown into the den of lions? >> For jaywalking in Jerusalem. >> Notice he never rushes. He lets the silence do half the work. A weaker comedian would fill that space. Paul trusts it. >> According to uh according to French chef Julia Child, how much is a pinch? >> $5.
>> But according to Julia Child, how much is it? Now stick with me. >> It’s just enough to turn her on. Here’s what’s really happening in moments like these. A lot of comedians wave a big flag that says, “Laugh now.” Paul did something sharper. He made the audience realize a beat too late that they had already understood the joke.
The laugh isn’t him being loud. The laugh is them admitting they got it. That’s a strange kind of power for one man to have on a clean, familyfriendly stage. He isn’t changing the questions. He isn’t changing the show. He’s changing what you hear. >> In the Bible, who is Naomi’s faithful companion tell? >> So, by this point, the pattern is clear.
The question was clean. The board was clean. The whole show was built to be clean. Paul Lind was the one crack in the wall, the small leak where something a little more grown up kept slipping through. But why did it work so well? Why could one man bend an entire format just by tilting his head? That’s the part we’re getting into next, and it’s the key to understanding everything he ever did on camera.
The half second between innocence and trouble. Here’s the real reason Paul Lind worked so well, and it’s bigger than any single joke. Television in the 1970s was full of invisible rules. There were things you could not say out loud, subjects you could not name, jokes you weren’t allowed to explain too clearly. A family show had to keep the door shut on anything too adult because kids were watching, sponsors were watching, and the network wanted everyone in the room comfortable.
Paul built an entire career in the tiny space between what television was allowed to say and what the grown-ups at home could work out on their own. That space was small. It was a look, a pause, a stretched vowel, a single word said with just a little too much weight. But inside that small space, Paul could fit an entire second meaning.
And the genius of it was who got to hear what. A child watching at home heard a silly answer and moved on. An adult in the same living room heard the other version and laughed because the family show had briefly become their secret accomplice. Paul was not sneaking past television’s innocence. He was using that innocence as the disguise.
Think about how rare that is. Most comedy forces a reaction. Paul invited one. He’d set the trap, sit back, and let each person in the audience decide for themselves how much they’d understood. The more innocent ones could pretend they missed it. The rest gave themselves away by laughing. This is why his timing mattered so much.
That famous half second of silence before the laugh wasn’t dead air. It was the sound of an entire studio doing the math. Hearing the answer, then hearing what he meant, then deciding it was safe to react. He did not break family television. He used its innocence as camouflage. That one idea explains his whole style. He wasn’t loud.
He wasn’t crude. He wasn’t trying to shock anyone with bad language. He was simply the most graceful tightroppe walker on television. Always one careful step from falling and never actually falling. And here’s the part most people forget. Once you understand that trick, you start to see it everywhere he went.
Because Paul Lind didn’t need the center square to do it. He could carry that same dangerous timing into a sitcom living room, into a late night talk show, into a squeaky clean family variety hour, and near the end of tonight’s story, into one Halloween special so strange that people still argue about whether they really saw it.
So, let’s follow him off the game show board and watch him do it everywhere else. True or false? Watches with dirty pictures on the face were popular in Victorian England. Well, the big hand is on nine. >> The rare zingers. Before we leave the game show for good, there’s one more set of answers worth hearing. The rare ones. These are the zingers that didn’t make it into every highlight reel.
The ones where Paul pushed a little harder than usual. Now that you know what to listen for, these hit differently. You’re not just waiting for a funny answer anymore. You’re watching for the exact moment the second meaning slides in. Did you catch how close that one came? On a normal night, with a normal guest, a line like that might have been quietly trimmed.
With Paul, it sailed straight through. Partly because the words stayed clean and partly because nobody on that stage wanted to be the person who stopped the laugh. That’s a detail people miss about this era. The sensors weren’t the only ones protecting Paul. The host protected him. The audience protected him.
Even the format protected him because the whole point of the show was that the celebrities were supposed to be funny first and correct second. Paul just took that permission further than anyone expected. He turned a children’s quiz into a place where adults came to feel a little mischievous for half an hour.
And the show loved him for it because every time he leaned on the edge, the ratings leaned right along with him. But a game show gave him a safety net. The questions came to him. The format set him up. The real test of a comedian like this is what happens when you take all of that away and drop him into someone else’s story.
That’s exactly what a little show about a witch did next. >> Uncle Arthur. Uncle Arthur, you in there? >> Sam, what’s going on? >> I’ll explain to you in a moment, darling. the serving dish. >> I bet you’re right. >> Got you now, Uncle Arthur. >> Forgive me for not rising, but I’m up to my neck and work. >> Uncle Arthur walks into Bewitched.
If you’ve never seen Bewitched, here’s all you need to know. It was a gentle 1960s comedy about a suburban husband named Darren who married a witch named Samantha and spent every episode trying to keep her magic and her relatives from turning his ordinary life upside down. Paul Lind played Uncle Arthur, Samantha’s troublemaking relative, and the moment he walked into a scene, the whole room got a little less stable.
On the game show, the questions came to him. Here, there were no questions. There was just a tidy little family home that wanted to stay calm. And Uncle Arthur arriving like a punchline that had decided to put on a coat and ring the doorbell. Watch what he does to the scene. Darren wants order. Samantha wants peace.
And Uncle Arthur just keeps nudging and teasing and bending the mood until the entire household is reacting to him. He doesn’t need a magic spell to cause chaos. His timing is the magic spell. This is the same trick from Hollywood Squares, just wearing a different outfit. On the game show, he bent a question. Here, he bends a room. People have to respond to him before they’ve even figured out what he did.
And that’s the thing about a performer like this. He didn’t change to fit the show. The show had to change to make space for him. A quiet family sitcom suddenly had a live wire in the living room and everyone else was left playing catchup. So he could rule a game show. He could hijack a sitcom.
But there was one stage in America where the host was famous for staying completely in control no matter who sat down beside him. And in 1976, Paul Lind walked onto it. My question was to you. Peter Marshall says, “Paul, can you get a pound of feathers out of a goose?” And you said, “I got him in there, didn’t I?” I’ll >> I’m glad you remember.
>> And I fell right off of the couch. >> The One Night with Johnny Carson. For 30 years, Johnny Carson ran the most important desk on American television. The Tonight Show was where careers were made, and Johnny was the calm center of all of it. He had a gift for handling wild guests.
He always knew exactly when to laugh, when to wait, and when to gently move things along. So, when Paul Lind came on in 1976, it was a fascinating match. Two masters of timing, sitting a few feet apart. With some guests, the danger is loud. They come in hot. They interrupt. They fill the room. Paul’s danger arrived quietly, dressed in good manners.
He didn’t need to take a single shot at Johnny. He only needed to take a normal question and answer it in a way that suggested there was a trap door hidden under the floor. Now, watch Johnny in a moment like that. He’s not losing control the way he might with a rowdier guest. He’s doing something more interesting. He’s measuring the line.
He isn’t trying to rein Paul in because he doesn’t need to. Paul brought his own stage with him. And Johnny’s only job was to sit back and watch him work. That was Paul’s quiet power. He could make the most composed host in the country laugh and do math at the very same time. And this is the version of Paul that longtime Tonight Show fans remember best.
Not the game show character, the real conversationalist sharp enough to keep up with Johnny himself in the one and only time the two of them ever sat together on that famous couch. But late night came with a little more freedom. The audience was older, the hour was later. The leash was longer. The harder challenge was whether Paul could carry that same edge into the most wholesome corner of television there was, a bright, smiling family variety show.
He could and it might have been funnier there. >> No, you’re dingy. >> Dingy is a Hindu word meaning small boat. Dingy is also an American word describing a person who sails one. If you plan to spend a lot of time on the high seas, it’s best to have a wide seat and a flat bottom. That also goes for your Danny. >> The cleanest stage in America.
The Donnie and Marie show was about as wholesome as television got. Two young smiling siblings, bright musical numbers, sparkly costumes, and a stage designed to be safe for absolutely everyone in the family. Which is exactly why Paul Lind was so funny, standing in the middle of it. He looked like he belonged there.
same friendly face, same familiar voice, and then he’d open his mouth, and the whole squeaky clean set would suddenly feel a few degrees less innocent than the costumes suggested. This is the contrast he needed. The brighter and cleaner the surroundings, the funnier his dry little remarks became. On a stage full of sunshine, one calm, knowing line from Paul felt like it had wandered in from a completely different channel.
and it never felt mean. That part matters. He wasn’t there to spoil the party. He was there to be the one guest who quietly understood that the party was a little ridiculous and to say so gently in a way the adults could enjoy while the kids kept singing along. This is also why so many shows kept inviting him back. He was a guaranteed jolt of energy who never actually crossed into something a network would regret.
He was the perfect amount of trouble, enough to feel exciting, never enough to do any real damage. At least that was true on a normal night. But there was one night that wasn’t normal at all. One night where the trouble wasn’t only Paul, where the entire show seemed to forget where it had left the rule book. And honestly, it has to be seen to be believed.
>> How about a little chamber music? >> A little chamber music? Oh, that would be nice. But um where are the musicians? >> Locked up in a little chamber. But I can summon them. Oh, they make such very soothing quiet dinner music. You’ll love them. We call them kiss. >> Oh, not unless you brush your fangs. >> OKAY, BOYS.
PLAY SOMETHING A LITTLE PEACEFUL FOR MR. LIND. >> The night television almost went too far. The Paul Lind Halloween special. On October 29th, 1976, ABC aired something called the Paul Lind Halloween special. And even by the standards of 1970s television, this thing feels unreal. Let me just describe the guest list because it sounds like a dream someone made up.
You had Paul Lind as the host. You had Margaret Hamilton, the actress who played the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz, showing up as a witch all over again. You had comedy greats like Tim Conway and Betty White. You had Florence Henderson, America’s favorite TV mom from the Brady Bunch. You had Donnie and Marie. And then walking into this gentle family Halloween hour in full makeup and platform boots, you had the rock band Kiss making one of their first big appearances on American network television. A wholesome variety special,
Witches, the Brady Bunch Mom, and a rock band in white face paint all in the same hour at prime time on a major network. Look at the tone of it. It’s campy. It’s strange. It’s a family show wearing a Halloween mask and winking at every adult in the room. And Paul Lind is the perfect center of it because his entire career had been built on that exact wink.
This is the part modern viewers can hardly believe. A network family special somehow held Witches a Rock spectacle variety show silliness and Paul Lind all in one place. and he tied the whole strange package together with that same calm, knowing smile. And this is where the title of tonight’s video grows bigger than any one joke. On Hollywood Squares, it was Paul bending a single answer.
On Bewitched, it was Paul bending a single room. But here, for one full hour, it was as if the entire show went as far as Paul’s punchlines usually did. It’s a perfect snapshot of what television was back then. In some ways, it was cleaner than what we have today. No harsh language, nothing truly crude, and in other ways, it was far stranger and far braver than people remember.
The 1970s could put a beloved children’s TV mom and a costumed rock band on the same Halloween stage and treat it as the most natural thing in the world. That mix, wholesome and wild at the very same time, is the exact feeling this whole era ran on. And nobody embodied it better than the man at the center of it, smiling like he knew a secret the rest of the country was only beginning to catch.
>> Anything bring tears to a monkeykey’s eyes. Learning that taren swings both ways. $600 for Vicki here. According to the food editor of the Dallas Morning News, what’s the best reason for pounding meat? How loneliness. The last look at the center square. After all the specials, the sitcoms, and the late night couches, the picture that stayed with people is still the simplest one. Paul Lind in the center square.
A question, a pause, and a smile that meant far more than the answer ever did. That little seat in the middle of the board became his stage. The board was small. The joke never was. Here’s why his comedy still feels alive today, all these years later. The clothes are dated. The sets look like another world. The laugh track sounds like it’s coming from a different century.
But that half second still works. The question lands. Paul tilts his head. The voice curls around the answer. And for a moment, everyone watching has the exact same thought. Did he really just say that? That was his gift. He made the edge feel graceful. He made the slightly forbidden feel warm and funny instead of cheap.
and he quietly revealed something very human about all of us that people love to act shocked almost as much as they love to laugh. So the next time one of his clips drifts across your screen, don’t just listen to the line. Watch the room. Watch the host fighting to keep a straight face. Watch the audience hesitate for that one tiny beat before they let themselves laugh.
That pause is Paul Lynn’s real signature. It’s the sound of television almost going too far and deciding every single time to laugh instead. If you remember watching him the first time around, I’d love to hear it. Tell me down in the comments which Paul Lind moment made you laugh the hardest and which one you still can’t believe they let him say on
