It doesn’t happen as often these days, but there was a time not so long ago when, if an unimaginative comic was casting about for a laugh, or a movie script writer wanted to include a line about some dismal place where nobody would want to live, the go-to foil often was our fair city: “First prize, a week in Cleveland. Second prize, two weeks in Cleveland.”
The hilarity seems to have gotten its start in a running gag at our expense on the 1960s comedy show, “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” (It turned out that many of the jabs were written, ironically enough, by a native Clevelander named Jack Hanrahan).
Mistake on the lake. Gray skies. Burning river. Backward Midwestern hicks. People who had never been here picked up on it, and seemed to believe it, and we became a national punchline…