Even in the 60s, you had to make light of dire situations – or go insane.

No secret, being around in the 1960s meant watching, listening and witnessing a lot of bad news. Conflicts, protests, riots, toppling of governments, the draining of human resources and a general feeling of suffocation in the midst of the routine traumas which visited the world on almost any given day.

Very often, the only way to cope with all this pessimism was to see the humor (however slight) in it – recognize the catastrophic blunders for what they were and know, somewhere in the recesses of your mind that all would work out. Or as John Lennon often said: “if it doesn’t work out in the end, it’s not the end”. Heaven help us in our anticipation of brighter days.

There were times when mass media, that bringer of doom, gloom and body bags, occasionally would take a brief respite and tour the world of the absurd – the ironic – the patently ludicrous and we would feel the nudge of comfort that we were all in the same boat.

This episode of the long-running talk program The Open Mind assembled a group of skewed observers of mankind and offered some insights and maybe a few solutions to this puzzle we were desperately trying to make sense of.

The witnesses consisted of Jules Feiffer, Marya Mannes, Paul Krasner, and Milt Kamin; a group of notables known for sardonic wit and razor-sharp solutions to the state of the World, most of whom are largely forgotten now but would give anything for their return.

For the hour the segment ran, the group raked irony over the coals, posed inane hypotheticals and made herculean proclamations – all in answer to the madness that was grinding along in front of us, each and every day. It was laughter in a gallows sort of way, as everyone knew solutions could never be had with the snap of a finger.

To get some insight on where the world was in the late 1960s, this Open Mind program from 1967-1968 (no date label on the box, sorry) offers at least an absurdists assessment of just how much terrible news was to be had for no apparent good reason and how a break from it was downright therapeutic.