The fact that Time-Life has decided to release “Hee Haw” on DVD may mean that this DVD thing has gone too far.

What’s next, “My Mother the Car?”

Saying how bad “Hee Haw” is has become a criticism cliche. Too many critics through the decades have savagely deconstructed this corny country version of “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.”

Would-be critics at high school newspapers across the country grow up dreaming for a show as terrible as “Hee Haw” so they can let loose with the kind of vicious, decimating review that will hopefully knock the show into oblivion.

It will still sell

It’s pointless. The people who like “Hee Haw,” of which there were enough to keep the show on the air via syndication and reruns from 1969 to 1997, will buy “Hee Haw” on DVD.

There’s no telling them how bad it is. They don’t care. Some people just like “Hee Haw.”

For the uninitiated, “Hee Haw” is set in Kornfield Kounty (no, really, they call it that) and the players, including Roy Clark, Minnie Pearl, Buck Owens and other Nashville types, simply recite a series of bad puns for an hour.

Often the jokes are delivered by people popping out of a studio cornfield or laying about on a mock-up shanty porch.

Example: “I see in the papers that up in New York a man gets hit by a car every 30 minutes. I’ll bet he’s getting tired of that by now.”

Yeah, we know. It’s awful.

The true redeeming value of “Hee Haw” is the country music performances.

Loretta Lynn, in her prime, and Charley Pride both give top-flight performances in the show’s premiere episode. Roy Clark, if he’d just stop singing, is one of the finest guitarists his genre ever produced, and Buck Owens is pretty darn good, too.

The DVD, mercifully, lets country music fans jump right to the performance rather than suffer the jokes to get there. The disc also inexplicably allows people to skip to the just the jokes, though why anyone would do that is truly beyond comprehension.

It’s wholesome

What would really be worth $20 or more is a DVD collection of the great country music performances on the show, which include Jerry Lee Lewis, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash and all the finest from the last great era of country music.

“Hee Haw” earns some points for being mostly wholesome.

The worst one can expect from the gags is a hint of double entendre. So the kids can watch – if you really want to torture them – and not be horribly ruined by nasty gutter humor.

But making a kid today watch “Hee Haw” would be a little bit like putting a bar of soap in his or her mouth for cutting loose a curse word. They just might swear off TV and DVDs forever.

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