If you're on television or in films, you influence the culture.

For better or worse, I have the dubious distinction of having coined the word hippie.

Although whoever took it and ran away with the change the meeting on me, it didn't mean the guy with long hair and a buffalo bill jacket and sandals smoking pot.

It just meant anyone who was by nature hip.

The word hip itself comes from the black urban culture subdivision, jazz musicians and then people hung out with black jazz musicians such as Why jazz musicians or the lives of black jazz musicians, the Children, the people who live downstairs.

They constitute a very tiny minority that were authentically hip, most of them black, but some of them equally hip.

And while white Lenny Bruce, for example, was hip, where's Bob?

Hope is a great comedian, but not hip.

So, uh, anyway, I used to use the word in the same way they would use words like Sicky.

Somebody who was sick was a sicky.

Somebody was hip, was a hippie, and but it somehow it got distorted.

Suddenly, in the sixties, the whole youth generation wanted to be hip.

And even guys of 47 52 who should have known better, I guess, had so little sense of self importance or identification that they suddenly began wearing their sideburns long because young people were.

Some of them began to do what I called it the baboon haircut with, you know, the gray sideburns and the black curly hair on top of the chains and stuff.

And I always thought it was done when the 52 year old guys tried to dress like the 18 year old guys.

It was, let him dress like they used to really did.

Sometimes it made sense.

In the case of George Carlin, it made sense.

George or suits like this many times on my show is a guest.

I always loved it to work.

And then he was away once for about three weeks and came back as a hippie three war.

Levi's now and grew a beard and talk during here, and he got with the sixties very early.

Although he was a little older than people he was entertaining.

How did you see the sixties coming?

What did you define as that?

Well, I used to make fun of the hippies.

Of course, comedians make fun of everything.

I mean, even a relatively square comic, like, say, Bob Hope, and we all love him.

But nobody would ever call him, you know, hip in the senses.

I say that the Bruces or George Carlin it.

So all of us used to, ah, put on, you know, long wigs and flowered shirts and do a hippie sketch.

You know, two hippies at home or hippies as parents, or if he's on bicycles or whatever the heck the idea of the sketch might be.

Hippies delivering the news.

Uh, somehow we saw them as a figure of fun.

I guess that implies a certain distancing and a certain contempt.

It's out here.

I was, on the one hand, one of the idols, and not because I'm great.

I'm not, but because I was on TV and they were 18 years old.

They like me a zone 18 year old today might like.

David Letterman had nothing to do with the quality that shows like he's representing us, but again, since he's used to make fun of them, and I used to make fun of them and even the square of comics because they were so different from the conventional, you know, the Brooks Brothers look, or the guy that works at the bank or the guy that works for the I.

R.

S or whatever.

It was quite a new culture, and there was some good things about it and bad things about it.

The part of the part of hippie dumb that I felt at home with was the part that was, to an extent, authentically hip.

In other words, if it spoke the language of jazz musicians like just little things, like calling somebody man, you know, a man, What time is it that I felt at home with?

Because I've been doing that since I was 16 and first got into jazz in Chicago, was a musician.

That's the way jazz musicians communicating.

No jazz musician ever ever tried to be hip.

He just Woz.

That's the word was defined by the way he acted.

If he doesn't get into that, then that would have been part of being him because he did it or she did.

But, uh, the part of it, as I say, that we didn't feel comfortable with her.

I I didn't was the I hate to use cliches, but I'll use the one that sounds like there's coming out of your mouth.

Laid back, Uh, the the goofing off part, the part that hey, I don't care if I work or not.

I mean, I'm you know, somebody's gonna lay some bread on me.

My my dad gave me $800.

I'll sell my surfboard, and I don't have to work for six months, Pops.

I never dug that.

And I don't think the fact that I came out of the Depression has anything much to do with it.

Asai used to say to some young people when I would discuss this Do you really want your brain surgeon to be that kind of a guy?

You want him to have dirty fingernails and long hair and say, I'm sorry, baby, I don't feel like operating on this cat's brain today.

Can you bring him around Thursday?

No.

Ex Sorry.

We can't.

He'll be dead by then.

Oh, do you really want your dentist to have, you know, a guitar pick in your mouth instead of the tools of his trade?

Do you want the guy that works out your taxes if you're paying any to be that disorganized and that goof offi.

And of course, the answer in every case, if honest would be Certainly not.

Nevertheless, I think I should smoke a lot of pots and I should sleep with any woman I want.

And if she has a baby, Hey, that's her problem.

And all of that, I thought was irresponsible and still do, because it is earlier suggested.

This, I guess, would be true in front of the Nazi Party or the Communist Party.

There's always something good in anything.

Even if it were 98% evil, you could still talk about the 2% S O to talk about what was good.

In the hippie movement, however hazily defined around the edges, there was a sensitivity to nature.

In some cases, it was drug induced.

I vote no on that.

In other cases, it was just really appreciating how beautiful chrysanthemum is.

It's a slow explosion of nature's color.

Isn't the sunset beautiful thing?

French thinker once said.

If the sun set only once every 100 years, God, would we appreciate it.

People would sell tickets.

They put chairs up on top of their houses.

It's coming in three days.

Daddy, come on up and we'll city and they would weep watching the sunset.

It wouldn't be any better.

It's on something that was last Tuesday, but because it was rare, they would love it now who pays attention to anything much?

So that element of hippie dumb was good.

Let's smell the flowers, you know, slow down and smell the flowers, even things that became cliches like Tomorrow's the first day of the rest of your life that, in a kind of a klutzy way, tried to express an important thought.

Appreciate, appreciate nature in its specific and that element of it.

Any sensible person should appreciate if that could have been combined with MME.

Or Social Responsibility, who could have criticized anything of the hippie or sixties culture?

But unfortunately, there was much more to it than that.

Once people discovered that certain kinds of natural or men made narcotics drugs had fascinating effects.

Are we talking about getting high?

You could do that with four scotches.

I'm talking about something that never happens with alcohol and does happen with certain drugs, religious visions, for example, now.

Why?

If we assume for the moment there is a God, why he personally she's black.

But anyway, why?

He decided that some people would have profoundly meaningful moving religious experiences for the first time in their life.

After these, you know, smoked whatever.

You'll have to take that up with him or if it was the accidents of nature, isn't that pretty wild?

But it simply was the case.

Not everybody who used drugs in the early sixties was in it for dumb reason.

Some people were seriously looking for spiritual enlightenment, and you have to be sympathetic to that desire, whether you approve or disapprove of the means of achieving it.

If they did so, as is always the case with anything human and riel, it is all characterized by the most intricate and staggering complexity.

So that answer is like, This is good or that's bad.

They're almost always very wide of the mark.

One of the problem factor is, uh, that has led to the present absolutely disgraceful, deplorable.

Even tragic condition of American education, with leading to American ignorance, grew out of the sixties attitude.

In some cases, it was OK, like that moment in The Graduate, where Dustin Hoffman is discussing what he might do after he gets out of school.

And this purposely square actor playing the square character says, I have a suggestion for you in one word.

Plastics.

Ah, marvelous, dramatic and symbolic moment.

It was okay with me.

I wasn't interested in plastics or working in a bank either.

You know, I wanted to swing, so I I felt that the hippies and I were on the same vibrato re level there.

But ah, that only goes so far.

So in school, if it was a matter of saying, I don't care whether I pass or not.

So what?

What do we have to know about European history anyway?

At that point, they were wrong, and we're now seeing the result of that.