Judy Carne

“Say the line, Bart!” exists for a reason. For those who don’t remember, this is a season five Simpsons reference. By that point, the show was trying to stretch from what it had been with season one, developing characters a bit and playing games with itself. Bart gets a job on The Krusty the Klown Show, wherein he is the “I Didn’t Do It” Kid. It’s a whole thing, and at the end of the episode they play on the fact that various of the characters are known for catch phrases. Lisa, always to me the most relatable character, responds with, “If anyone wants me, I’ll be in my room.”

Relevant to that, Judy Carnes was best known as “The Sock It To Me Girl.” For two seasons of Laugh-In. She’d do a bit, she’d end with “Sock it to me,” and she’d get doused with water or similar. Small wonder she called it a “big, bloody bore.” She was a talented dancer. Not a bad singer or actress. And week after week, the same old thing—and there, on the same show, was Goldie Hawn, sparkling and vivacious. Carne left the show and was blamed for “splitting up the family.” Even though she felt they weren’t making it worth it to her to be there.

I don’t know when the drug addiction started. It can’t have helped her career, certainly; she was arrested multiple times on possession charges and spent time in prison. She’d had a bitter divorce from Burt Reynolds even before she started on Laugh-In; frankly, I couldn’t get onboard with the praise when he died because I know too much about his history with women. Apparently, Carne identified as bisexual, but the era was not kind to women in relationships with women; one of the things that has aged poorly about Laugh-In is its attitude toward gay people.

I further don’t know if it’s the drug issues or the sexism or what that dampened her career. She barely did any movies. Her TV career mostly fizzled in the ‘70s. She doesn’t appear to have done much on the stage. She did write an autobiography, titled Laughing on the Outside, Crying on the Inside: The Bittersweet Saga of the Sock-It-To-Me Girl, but that was in the ‘80s. (Burt Reynolds tried to stop its publication.) She did the twenty-fifth anniversary of Laugh-In. But that’s not a lot of career, and no one talks about what else she did.

I found a conservative website that’s trying to claim her as an icon because she supported Barry Goldwater, but that’s all I know about her politics, and one endorsement does not a lifelong political stance make. She lived quietly in Pitsford in Northamptonshire for the rest of her life. Whatever the cause, she’s all but forgotten now. I’m not even sure how many of you have ever seen an episode of Laugh-In, which I only have because Nick at Nite played it for a while decades ago. One catch phrase, however, does not a life make.