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The Telegraph (U.K.); Washington Post; Time magazine

‘Laugh-In’ Rose to No. 1 in the Ratings When She Was on the Show. The ‘Sock-It-To-Me!’ Girl Dies at 76

Sep 8, 2015  •  Post A Comment

She was “a bouncy, auburn-haired British actress who won overnight fame in the 1960s as the Sock It To Me girl on the hit television show ‘Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In’; she returned, albeit briefly, to the limelight in 1985 when she published an autobiography in which she told of her volatile relationship with her first husband Burt Reynolds, confessed to a string of affairs with members of both sexes and chronicled battles with drug addiction.”

So writes the U.K. publication The Telegraph, taking about Judy Carne, who has died of pneumonia at age 76.

Justin Wm. Moyer, in the Washington Post, says, “The joke now seems as cruel — and as difficult to explain to millennials — as it seemed hilarious in the 1960s: A young, lithe woman, often in a miniskirt or less, stands onstage. She announces that it’s ‘sock-it-to-me time.’ Then, she is hit with a bucket of water, or dropped through the floor, or otherwise clobbered in some form or fashion. Sure, Richard Nixon famously said the words — but he didn’t have his clothes ripped off.”

Carne was on “Laugh-In” from 1968 through 1970.

Says Time magazine in its obituary about Carne, “Though the publication of an autobiography, ‘Laughing on the Outside, Crying on the Inside: The Bittersweet Saga of the Sock-It-to-Me Girl,’ in 1985 briefly returned her to the spotlight — she launched a cabaret show in Greenwich Village and occasionally appeared on Howard Stern’s programs — she quietly lived out her last years in the English village of Pitsford alongside her pet dogs.”

Judy Carne book cover

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