In the winter of 1987, Johnny caught a winter bug that caused him to miss a week of regularly scheduled shows. While home sick, he discovered the newest phenomenon on cable: The Home Shopping Network. He came back to work with videos he'd made of the channel in its early phase, complete with pitchmen and women offering to "toot toot" a horn to encourage buyers.
The "Tele-Scam" sketch made its debut in February of that year and repeated several times over the next few years, with Johnny and Teresa Ganzel playing the Art Fern-like shills, selling elaborate prop pieces, like a "cubic zirconium" ring the size of a tennis ball, and a "pet branding set" that even included a little plastic branding iron ("Flipper") for your pet fish. On that first run, the bit was climaxed with a "Jamie Farr Orange Juice Squeezer." This was a bust of the erstwhile Captain Klinger's head, with an old fashioned squeezer on top. It was rigged so that when you twisted an orange half in the squeezer on top, juice would drip out its enormous nose.
It was hilarious. Siskel and Ebert were guests that night, and they begged us to sell that prop to them. Nothing doing; each subsequent time we did that sketch, we finished with Jamie Farr -- and it never ceased to get a big laugh.
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