 These viewers, by the hundreds, are referring to gags shot at various times during eight decades. Do they really yearn for the strife-torn days in the 1960s, the tense period surrounding 9/11, or the other unpleasant times in between?
In 1961, dad shot a piece in which patrons at a diner were squirted by a grapefruit. "So nice when people could be normal and interact with each other," a woman wrote 60 years later. About an overgenerous hand-sanitizer dispenser, a man commented, "The '90s when things were better." I shot that segment in 2014.
That same year we ticketed pedestrians for "walking too fast in a 2 m.p.h. zone." One viewer asked recently, "Can you imagine trying to speak like that to people today?" Of course I can.
Dad and I were both convinced that while fashions and hairstyles changed over time, human nature remains essentially the same. There is, as others have noted, a relativity to nostalgia. I prefer to believe that no matter how we recolor our past, Carly Simon was and remains right in her 1971 hit "Anticipation": "These are the good old days."
(c) Peter Funt. This column originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.
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