TV's Comedy Situation

 

Television.  How much of it do you watch?

I used to watch quite a lot of it.  That was years ago, though.  Back when television programming literally was accessible only via a television set.  You arranged your life to watch your show when your show was scheduled to be on, which usually was only once a week.  None of those programs were available online, because "online" didn't exist.  

The only TV "cable" we ever had...
the wire from our old rooftop antenna
still coiled in a closet behind the fireplace.

My family never had cable or satellite.  We started out with rabbit ears, then one of those spindly rooftop antenna jobs, and now a thin, tablet-shaped black plastic contraption.  Eventually, VCRs did help erode the hold TV schedules had on our lives, but while we still have one, I can't remember when we last used it.

Times indeed change, and the history of television proves it. 

It's mostly a relic from my Manhattan apartment days, but I still have my trusty, boxy cathode-ray JVC "Mastercommand" set in my Texas bedroom.  I bought it at a "Nobody Beats the Wiz" electronics chain store on Broadway, in Greenwich Village, when The Wiz was metropolitan New York's version of Best Buy.  It weighs a ton, but the thing just won't quit.  Maybe because I almost never turn it on!

My parents' TV lineage has been a different story.  They only owned three sets during their 50 years of marriage, and Dad bought each of them from Sears Roebuck, since that's where most people of their generation got their appliances.  Before he was married, my father fancied himself as something of a technophile, whiling away many Saturday afternoons in New York City's fabled Radio Row, where the World Trade Center now sits.  But after he got married and had kids, he and Mom didn't bother with television until my brother and I were in elementary school... and we'd come home asking them why all the other kids knew some "Mr. Rogers" who lived on "Sesame Street"!

Our first TV was a small black and white model.  The next one, after we moved to Texas, wasn't much bigger, but it was a color set.  The last one Dad bought was larger still, but no comparison to the enormous screens most people wanted.  And screen size used to be one of the metrics by which social strata was determined.

Mom and I got our first digital TV only three years ago, after a near-zero deep freeze forced us to go without power for almost 24 hours.  Our home's interior temperature sank into the low 50s - cold enough long enough, apparently, to make that Sears set set literally blow a fuse when I first turned it on after our electricity returned.

(For the record, my Greenwich-Village-vintage television came through that deep freeze just fine.)

The next day, a jovial neighbor across the street asked how we'd fared in our frigid weather, and I laughingly told him about our Sears TV literally emitting acrid smoke.  He invited me over and offered one of his many digital flat-screen models to - as he put it - at least bring us into the 21st Century!

Still, we hardly watch it.  At least, compared to the amount of TV we used to consume.  Mom reads a lot these days, after her daughter-in-law gifted her with a Kindle.  And I guess I've simply lost interest in the medium.  

It's not because I'm too sophisticated or high-brow for pop-culture entertainment, although I do think pop-culture standards have declined considerably since I was a kid.  Some might say TV itself has had a lot to do with that.  Since I don't watch any prime time television anymore, I wouldn't know if there's any good-quality prime time programming on it today anyway!  Maybe there is, but my priorities in terms of how I want to spend my time have changed, and television ranks quite low.

Not that I'm anti-TV.  I'm simply far more deliberate in my use of it.  For example, I still watch some of the classic old sitcoms on those re-run stations.  Sitcoms have historically been my preference for TV viewing, over dramas or game shows or reality shows, with an exception being my relatively recent affinity for Columbo, the 1970s detective show which itself can be quite droll.  I'll readily admit I like the comedy classics because they're not just humorous, they're familiar and nostalgic, two qualities becoming increasingly desirable in our increasingly confrontational age. 

Actually, though, on that score, we tend to forget how controversial some historical sitcoms were during the age in which they originally aired.  They seem innocuous enough now, but the themes they portray weren't universally embraced back in their day.  For example, social pecking orders - both by the wealthy and the under-educated - became a common satirical target on The Beverly Hillbillies.  And equal opportunity for women in The Mary Tyler Moore Show mirrored a major social upheaval for the 1970s.

I doubt it was ever considered controversial, but Hogan's Heroes has become my favorite sitcom.  My brother and I began watching when we were in junior high school.  You can imagine how many times I've now seen each and every episode, over and over and over again.  I don't watch it as much as I used to, but some episodes remain so funny to me, I can still laugh out loud, even while reciting their punchlines by heart.  

Granted, I'm a sucker for the type of slapstick banter Hogan's Heroes supplies in abundance.  Yet despite all its comedic appeal, there are distinct aspects about the show that separate it from the conventional sitcom genre.  For one thing, obviously, being set in a prisoner-of-war camp immediately presents incredible challenges regarding humor.  It takes a lot of creativity to consistently extract relevant content from that scenario to deliver six years' worth of humorous episodes.  

Then there's the complication of being set not in America, but Europe, with an international cast to boot.  Then consider how its second-most-powerful leader among the prisoners, Sergeant Kinchloe, is played by a Black actor, Ivan Dixon.  That alone represented a particularly bold statement for the show's era, spanning 1965 to 1971.  Werner Klemperer, who plays Colonel Klink, was a musician in real life, but he was a classically-trained violinist, not a rock star.  Hogan's Heroes had numerous reasons to end up being a flop.  Yet it didn't then, and hasn't today.

While I don't have a favorite Hogan's Heroes episode, one of them does strike me as particularly compelling.  And it all comes down to one key line, which surprisingly, isn't spoken by lead characters Hogan or Klink, but by Kinchloe.  For a show so reliant on whimsy, the scene is stark, and void of humor, yet it becomes satisfyingly uplifting.

Episode 11, from Season 3, was written by Richard M. Powell, and named "Is General Hammerschlag Burning?"  Kinchloe finds himself thrust to the forefront as a childhood acquaintance of a Black chanteuse now working in wartime Paris, who has managed to secure the trust of the city's Nazi commander.

Although she personally loathes him and his cause, this chanteuse doesn't want to jeopardize the protection she receives from Hammerschlag.  Still, she's piqued by Kinchloe's sudden re-entry into her life, and especially what she considers his naive dedication to the Allied cause.  She is so ambivalent towards the Allies, and Americans especially, because she and Kinchloe are people who Americans haven't historically respected.  How could a Black American risk his life for a country whose society had treated them the way it had?  And how could he expect her to do the same?

Kinchloe's logic makes her think, and convinces her to cooperate:

"You don't understand us... Hammerschlag, you can understand... So just ask yourself a question: Do you want to spend the rest of your life in a Hammerschlag kind of world?"

That's a heavy line for a sitcom, right?

On a lighter note, I can report that I do have a favorite sitcom theme song.  It's a cappella jazz, technically; the airy, poignant "Angela" by Bob James for Taxi, floating along while an iconic Checker cab crosses New York's 59th Street Bridge from Manhattan into Queens.  The combination of such dreamy music with the rhythmic cadence of the bridge's passing structural trusses tends to be mesmerizing, especially in the afternoon sun.  

While its tune hardly fits the typically bubbly sitcom style, in a way, it still scores (get the pun?!) as sitcom theme music because of its irony:  That idyllic tableau I described totally contrasts with the real New York City taxi experience, which almost always is jarring, gritty, and hardly mesmerizing!

For a sitcom theme song with words, I like the far more energetic "Movin' On Up" by Ja'net Dubois and Jeff Barry for The Jefferson's, a show whose early episodes also featured the 59th Street Bridge during its theme song, but with the Jefferson's yellow Checker cab leaving Queens for Manhattan's fabled Upper East Side.

Okay, so I have a fondness for the city of my birth.  At least when it comes to sitcom music.  If you think about it, however, many of the most popular and influential sitcoms were set in New York.  I Love Lucy, for example, literally invented so many standards still used in the modern sitcom it's almost boring today.  Seinfeld, whose incredible writing turned otherwise ordinary experiences into catch phrases.  Then there's The Odd Couple, which like New York itself, is something of an acquired taste.  I started watching The Nanny while living in Gotham, and quickly realized that while a lot of acting was going on, those spandex outfits and gaudy bling worn by Sylvia and Grandma Yetta were not "artistic license".  They literally were what I'd see plenty of grandmothers wearing when I'd go shopping with my aunt along 86th Street in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge!

One of the last grand shows from the "golden age" of sitcoms is Frasier, which isn't set in New York, but features two main protagonists who fancy themselves as being urbane enough to be cosmopolitan snobs.  With fiendishly witty dialog presented in articulate cadence, and irrepressibly goofy subplots rippling throughout the series like earthquake fault lines, Frasier celebrates satire.  It ran from 1993 to 2004, ending 20 years ago, yet in many ways, the show has hardly aged.

I'm particularly fond of at least one scene and one entire episode from Frasier that are timeless in their creativity.  My favorite scene is actually a wordless one-act play from the episode entitled "Three Valentines" and features Niles, superbly embodied by David Hyde Pierce.  It's been years since I've personally ironed anything, but watching Niles try to meticulously press his dress pants (but start a small inferno instead) is five minutes and thirty-something seconds of sheer comedic delight.  Incredibly, Pierce spends all that time - and it flows by so quickly - with hardly any dialog of any kind, save for some impromptu grunts and exclamations.  He ends up presenting a master class in wordless acting that epitomizes the art of unadulterated humor.

My favorite full episode is Frasier's attempt at reproducing a vintage radio theater who-done-it, in "Ham Radio", written by David Lloyd.  I've already told you how much I enjoy slapstick comedy, and this particular show overflows with it.

Almost every other line is a punchline.  Right down to a dyslectic participant in Frasier's on-air shambles of a production who emotively fires off her one and only line:  "Look out - He's got a NUG!"

Think about it, relative to how a dyslectic person suffers from an unfortunate speech impediment.

Ahh... like most good comedy, it gets me every time!

And I got another pun in there too, didn't I?  "Firing off" a line...  

See how humor gets to me?

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