The Mute Button

Now that everyone has a smartphone, no one cares about remote control.

The remote control used to be a powerful object. Couples fought over it. Some televisions would not operate without one, necessitating a trip to the local Radio Shack for another “universal remote”. Dads would exact a stranglehold over the remote, and moms would hide it on purpose, feigning ignorance while secretly enjoying the resultant frustration.

Some people of a certain age will tell you that the remote control was desirable because it was the divining stick with which one surfed their way across the cable-bloated channel spectrum. (Pre-Internet, one “surfed” TV channels.) True, the holder of the remote did select the channel to be watched, but there was a more important function of the device.

MUTE. The power to make them STFU.

One of my very favorite shows is Mystery Science Theater 3000. Not just for the humor, but for the subconsciously soothing tone of the program; Joel Hodgson and Mike Nelson’s soft voices, and the white noise of videotape hiss. It had the warm feeling of a Sunday morning kids’ program, after a sleepover in pajamas.

Well, bear in mind, that when MST3K originally aired on cable in the early 90s, every few minutes the vibe would be obliterated by the bullhorn voice of legendary magician Penn Jillette, five times louder, screaming “COMing up NEXT on COMedy CENTRAL!!! STRIP MALL!!! WITH!!! JULIE BROWN!!!” He was always backed by a horrific, atonal music bed, which sounded like a bunch of assholes bellowing “DAHN DAHN DAHHHH!!!! (FWEET-FWEET-FWEETY-FWEET!!!)” I’m not exaggerating. You can still find snippets of it on YouTube, wherever the uploader couldn’t trim it off. Some incompetent assclown at Comedy Central (there were/are many) thought to himself, “how do I market comedy programs? Ah yes, with SCREAMING, OBNOXIOUS ASSHOLES!” You know, the kind of oafs that ruin comedy shows with their braying.

Penn Jillette is great, but he was also cast as the carnival barker in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He’s not the guy you want to make people hear seventy times a day, at top volume. That voice is meant for hooking rubes.

Not only would Comedy Central hawk a slate of abrasive, short-lived programs, they would bombard you with whatever snake oil sponsor they’d corralled from some shady business convention. Hooker-biting huckster Vince Offer promoted his execrable Underground Comedy Movie, an amateur comedy porn so unfunny, it doesn’t even get viewed on YouTube. Girls Gone Wild and its steel-drum/WOOOOOO!!!! cacophony would make constant appearances, thanks to Joe Francis, the first man to make the act of women exposing their breasts hateful and unpleasant. Hostages disrobing at gunpoint are more arousing than the Girls Gone Wild. Hey- do you enjoy guilt-ridden arguments with your spouse thanks to a fucking commercial? Comedy Central gave you a daily divorce.

I come from a generation where it’s considered rude for a TV to be blasting away. That’s something our grandparents did, because they couldn’t hear the goddamn thing anymore, even at full blast, and the neighbors are piping carbon monoxide into the house. A lot of you grew up with South Park, which is no different tonally than the awful ads, so you don’t know the difference. Family Guy is more akin to the “old style” of TV audio, and has a much wider musical spectrum (50-piece orchestra). I love Family Guy, but here’s the thing- I often mute the opening song.

Sometimes the show uses songs I can’t stand, and commits to playing them in toto, and the mute button is again called upon. However, at this point in time, I’m clicking a volume indicator on a computer screen. There’s no tactility; we used to grind our thumb into that soft rubber mute button, as though the pressure intensified the action. “YEEEEEAAAAHHHH,” we’d scream through clenched teeth. “TAKE THAT! SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Doing this on a laptop screen or smartphone would be much, much more expensive that it would on a $10 remote. And remotes were plentiful in the 90s; once, after muting an ad I particularly despised, I cracked the remote in half like a breadstick, spiked the remains on the carpet, and strode out of the room as though it was some sort of gesture of triumph.

Before remotes, we had to physically get up and walk over to the television set, and turn the dials with our fingers. One dial turned the set on and off. When you first turned the TV on for the day, the cathode ray tube inside would go “F-TOONK”, crackle, and in about 20 seconds the image would be fully congealed. Sometimes, the tube would turn on “funny”, with a flickering or malformed picture, which necessitated an open-handed smack on the flat side of the idiot box. This fixed it; hitting the side of your TV made it work properly. That’s where that comes from. That’s why guys hit monitors and consoles in frustration. It has to be unlearned, and it used to work.

There was no “mute” then- the volume knob was the one that turned smoothly. Whomever was closest to the TV got the job of muting and changing channels when necessary or requested. If you really wanted to make your family miserable, you could crank the volume and literally rip the knob off and run away. You could throw it into a pond, and grandpa would have to use his pliers to turn the volume down, because no one would think to pull the channel knob off and use that temporarily. This would result in your TV privileges being revoked. Big deal. TV kinda sucks. I mean, Mork & Mindy was a popular show.

In the 80s, remotes were such a facet of modern life that there was a game show called Remote Control, on MTV. I know, it’s hard to believe, but it’s true. Ken Ober was the host, and the gag was that he was a TV-obsessed shut-in who ran the show out of his basement. When contestants lost, wacky devices like ejecting chairs made it look like they were offed. Adam Sandler used to make appearances, and it had a very weird suburban-creepy atmosphere. Colin Quinn was the co-host, and once, he put on sunglasses and a leather jacket, and claimed he was David Sanborn. Ken Ober kept repeating “You’re Colin!”, and Colin would mutter “I’m David Sanborn” in reply. I still think that’s completely hilarious.

Colin Quinn is one of the funniest guys in the business of funny, and Remote Control was a great show. There was also a girl named Kari Wuhrer who pulled many, many boys through puberty. It was a different time, when MTV was watchable…

…for the most part.

See, once upon a time, there was The Grind. It was the network’s whitebread answer to Soul Train, and spotlighted what was at the time called “club music”; C+C Music Factory, Bell Biv Devoe, MC Hammer, Taylor Dayne, EMF, and their awful ilk. Normally, it’s the type of thing I’d avoid entirely. But with the aid of the mute button, I was able to appreciate the true gift of The Grind:

The upskirt shots of hot dancing girls.

The Grind was even more reliable than Club MTV for this. A cameraman would roll up on some juicy girl jiggling in the crowd, catch a worms’-eye view of luscious orbs barely contained in a tube top, and linger until a director cued him to move on. In standard definition, everyone looked beautiful and alive. These were stolen moments, not exacted documents.

There was a freedom in it. It’s only a glimpse of a girl you couldn’t meet or track down if you tried. She was dancing in front of the camera because she was enjoying herself, not because she was trying to become a superstar, or tease somebody for money. And don’t be fooled- everyone looks better on standard definition television, so it might be the best she ever looked. She could’ve gone on to become an astrophysicist or an axe murderer. It’s moot. She gave the world a glimpse of something private and wondrous at a time when that was truly meaningful.

I mean, it was pre-Internet, you did what you had to do to glimpse tits.