Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture

Ethan Thompson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415886383
• eBook ISBN: 9781136839795
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

In this original study, Thompson explores the complicated relationships between Americans and television during the 1950s, as seen and effected through popular humor. Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture documents how Americans grew accustomed to understanding politics, current events, and popular culture through comedy that is simultaneously critical, commercial, and funny. Along with the rapid growth of television in the 1950s, an explosion of satire and parody took place across a wide field of American culture—in magazines, comic books, film, comedy albums, and on television itself. Taken together, these case studies don't just analyze and theorize the production and consumption of parody and television, but force us to revisit and revise our notions of postwar "consensus" culture as well.

1
The New, Sick Sense

The Mediation of America’s Health and Humor at Midcentury

In a 1959 episode of Peter Gunn, real-life comedian Shelley Berman stars as Danny Holland, a stand-up comic who hires the detective because he thinks his wife is trying to kill him. Gunn quickly finds out, however, that the wife believes Danny is the one with emotional problems—that she fears he is going to kill her. Gunn consults a psychiatrist, who can’t tell him which person is lying, but we quickly discover that Danny is truly a “sick” comic. His paranoid delusions have led him to murder several men that he believed his wife sent to kill him. When Danny walks onstage to perform his routine for the last time, his head is overwhelmed with voices. He accuses the audience of being brainwashed, and tells them that they are laughing because they are told something is funny. Which is exactly what the audience does: Danny’s onstage breakdown meets with uproarious laughter. It’s unclear why the audience shows so much pleasure in Danny’s mental collapse. Is it sadistic enjoyment at the sight of a man who has become sick, who has buckled under life’s pressures? Maybe they truly find the few antisocial quips he aims at them funny. Perhaps they are indeed laughing because they are told he is funny, performing their proper roles as audience members. Whatever the reason, Danny the sick, murderous comic, leaves them in stitches.¹

However unsettling this Peter Gunn episode is to see now, the audience in the club should not be understood as a Twilight Zone-styled alternate universe, where people laugh at what is hurtful or even sadistic. Rather, the episode links popularly discussed concerns about mental health on both individual and national scales with debates about the social relevance and propriety of a brand of humor commonly called “sick comedy.” The episode portrays sick comedy literally, overtly connecting two postwar American preoccupations: humor and mental health. The audience, laughing maniacally, seems to signify that sickness is a widespread condition, not one existing only inside Danny’s—or any specific individual’s—head.

Television and film were key areas throughout the 1950s where concerns about what it meant to be normal versus neurotic were put into play. During the same time, a distinction between what constituted normal, healthy humor and what constituted sick comedy developed. The nation’s sense

1.1

1.2

1.3

1.4

Figure 1.1–1.4 Real-life comedian Shelley Berman walks onstage as fictional (and murderous) comedian Danny Holland for one final performance. Though he verbally and physically manifests his mental illness, his antisocial routine meets with unanimous laughter from the audience. (Frame Grab, Peter Gunn, “The Comic.”)

of humor seemed to be changing. Television and the popular press took note that a new type of humor was developing: comedy was simultaneously becoming more socially relevant and breaking more social taboos. But this changing sense of humor was just a component of a much larger concern: what constituted a normal, well-adjusted individual in the postwar era? Was this new, sick humor a response to the social pressures of conforming to those accepted qualities, or at least pretending to?

This chapter examines a variety of television shows, comedy albums, and newspaper and magazine articles to attempt to understand how comedy in the late 1950s and early 1960s functioned in the articulation of identity. Comedy as a privileged area for popular social critique grappled increasingly during this period with the postwar standard of “normal.” The “normal” of 1950s America was supposed to be unequivocally accepted as a great improvement over other recent “normals.” After the struggles of the Great Depression and prolonged sacrifices of World War II, the economy boomed and Americans looked forward to sharing in the prosperity. The GI Bill made college education and homeownership possible for more people than ever before, swelling the ranks of the middle class. Those who had been living with extended families during tougher times moved out, bought a house, and filled it with the latest consumer goods—the television set foremost among them. The nuclear family was born, and with it, a particular version of the American Dream. For middle-class men, happiness and fulfillment were to be found through a reliable job, a wife and kids to come home to, and a hobby or other leisure activity for staying productive even during “down” time. Despite having entered the workforce in large numbers during the war, women were expected to go back home and find their happiness and fulfillment within it. The role of the middle-class woman as housewife was recast not as servant catering to husband and children, but as queen of her house in the suburbs and of the consumer wonders within it.

From the beginning, there were segments of the population for whom achieving this version of the American dream would prove more elusive. Desirable or not, for them the dream simply wasn’t equally accessible. Though many African-Americans had experienced greater social freedom as veterans serving abroad, back home racial discrimination remained firmly entrenched. Biased loan and development practices effectively segregated the new suburban communities by excluding homeowners who weren’t white. The Levitts, whose Levittown, New Jersey, is considered the prototypical postwar suburb, publicly refused to sell to blacks for two decades following the war.²

It wasn’t long before even those with access to the dream began to identify its more nightmarish elements. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique balked at the oppressive claim of popular culture (and advertising in particular) that women should be satisfied with staying at home and mastering their consumer goods. The book popularized social criticisms that would become early strains of feminism and helped trigger the women’s movement. Almost from the moment the war ended and the postwar period began, men, too, expressed disaffection for this prescription for a normal, happy life. That disaffection is what bred sick comedy and Danny Holland’s onstage breakdown.

Often, it was the new postwar “normal” which was understood to be sick in popular culture, as comics, artists, and writers took aim at subjects ranging from politics to child-rearing to bureaucracies—in short, the American way of life. Such potentially culturally subversive comedy can be documented as far back as one cares to go, but it was in the postwar period, particularly during the late 1950s and early 1960s, that it was built into the structure of the emerging medium of commercial television. Television was hungry for content; the networks needed to fill up their expanding programming schedules as well as find ways to make that content relevant to viewers. When a significant proportion of those viewers became critical of the cultural institutions of life in the suburbs and working for the organization, or at least began to feel uneasy and dissatisfied with them, television and American comedy became critical of them as well.

This does not mean that the presence of sick comedy on television was simply a reflection of what audiences already thought and felt. Nor does it mean sick or socially relevant comedy simply functioned as a safety valve, relieving pressures so that some larger social “explosion” wreaking radical change wouldn’t take place. Whether or not political or socially topical humor was subversive is not inherent in the comedy itself, but depends upon individual interactions with the media texts. Criticism of one’s culture, even at this early point in postwar America, wasn’t necessarily a deviant act. One just needed to make appropriate criticisms in the appropriate places with the appropriate terms. Cultural criticism was at times an accepted sort of popular diversion, integrated into cocktail conversations, comics, and The Reader’s Digest. The new, sick humor of postwar America is best understood in dialogue with other forms of social and cultural criticism at the time, which were eminently concerned with the changing psychological nature of American life. The articulation of normal health and humor took place through a variety of popular culture materials, and the documents I draw on cluster around the period of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In particular, I will examine how comedic texts mediated concerns about mental health and humor. Thus, this chapter is not just about classifying and writing the history of a different style of comedy or cultural mode, but thinking about how behavior, words, beliefs, attitudes, and individuals—not just comedians—can be labeled deviant, maladjusted, or sick. But this is not just a documentation of discipline by an abstract governmental or corporate “them.” I also ask why such deviance—to be mad or sick—held such popular appeal, making financial successes of albums, magazines, television shows, novels, movies, and even sociocultural studies that interrogated the postwar “normal” and suggested it was something to be shunned, not emulated.

REPRESSED LAUGHTER: AT HOME AND ABROAD

To understand the term “sick comedy” and understand how that comedy became a popular form of social criticism, it is necessary to look at other ways in which American humor was described in the postwar period. One major theme in the discussion of comedy in the popular press from 1950 to 1962 made comedy a matter of national concern by speculating that a national sense of humor could be constructed to oppose the essentially humorless communists. “The stern, unsmiling faces of Malik, Mao and Malenkov are the outward signs of an inner attitude toward life,” posed Richard Armour in The Saturday Evening Post. “The sourpuss is as much a trade-mark of communism as the hammer and sickle.”³ This characterization of the communist temperament was not a postwar invention. American pop culture had already suggested that this overly serious demeanor was symptomatic of an ideology that valorized sacrificing personal happiness and gain for the betterment of the larger community. In 1939, for example, Greta Garbo starred in Ninotchka, a film directed by Ernst Lubitsch and written by Billy Wilder that suggested its overly serious communist protagonist was so consumed by ideology that she was incapable of experiencing pleasure. This distinction between the demeanors of capitalists and communists became more acute in the 1950s as the pursuit of happiness and pleasure was increasingly tied to material consumption.

The employment of a sense of humor as an essentially American characteristic typifies much discussion surrounding controversial humor in the postwar press. When some comedians would subsequently be criticized for being too political, or potentially subversive, the response along these lines was that humor was a type of free speech, and that people should enjoy the right to laugh. In such a climate, it may be difficult to imagine that humor could subvert American culture, which was assumed (through the Bill of Rights) to have the capacity to contain dissident humor just as it tolerated disparate political viewpoints.

In humor, as in politics, one could go too far, of course. But when sick humor became dangerous, it wasn’t because of any direct political content, or even because it upset a mainstream sense of good taste through bodily humor. Sick humor was deemed to be dangerous or subversive when it proposed that core American values and the American way of life were to blame for that very same “sick-ness.” Sick comedy became culturally potent when it suggested the sick and the mad weren’t aberrant characters, but what all Americans were inevitably heading toward. In the meantime, sick comedy implied, they were only pretending to keep themselves together, performing those social roles they were expected to in order to be considered normal.

Belying the reputation of the humorless commies, in a 1952 column in The Saturday Review, Richard Hanser wrote that the millions now living behind the Iron Curtain were finding out that humor was one of the few weapons they had in the struggle between freedom and oppression.⁴ Though the press and the airwaves could be censored for subversive content, regulating what people said amongst themselves was more difficult, and it was on this level that political jokes could circulate as “the only means by which the slave-citizen can express, however furtively, his defiance of his masters.” Hanser gave examples from Rumania, Russia, and Poland, and especially pointed out the body of anti-Hitler Flüsterwitze—whisper jokes—that had proliferated under Nazi rule. The problem wasn’t the nature of the Soviet people, but those people who enforced the communist ideology.

Hanser noted that the Third Reich had not collapsed because people made irreverent cracks about it, and nor would communism.

But there is no way of estimating how many deluded Nazis and Fascists had their eyes opened, how many blind believers had their faith shaken, how many timid dissenters were strengthened by hearing a satirical, searing story that cut through the pretensions of propaganda to the truth of the matter.⁵

The political joke was an enemy of totalitarianism, said Hanser, because it was a symptom of opposition and a lack of the unthinking reverence that totalitarianism demanded. With other areas off-limits to oppositional speech, the political joke both evidenced the resiliency of the people under totalitarian rule, and provided a release for the frustrations of living under such restrictions.⁶

Though Hanser prescribed “Wit as a Weapon” to be used against totalitarians overseas, sick humor emerged as a stateside psychological response to repression. The changing American and Soviet senses of humor weren’t so much at ideological odds as they were both responses to stifling social forces. Though communist totalitarianism was usually constructed as the antithesis of the American way of life, a number of popular critiques during the 1950s pointed to the stifling nature of postwar suburban and corporate citizenship. John Keats’s The Crack in the Picture Window lambasted suburban developments for destroying the American landscape to make way for row upon row of anonymous boxes. Additionally, while the academic critics of the Frankfurt School, fresh from fleeing Nazi Germany, theorized that the mass media standardized consciousness, more widely read books such as Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders popularized the notion that advertising manipulated minds and desires through unseen mechanisms. For a time, both the high-flown language of academics and down-to-Earth language of popular culture seethed as an opposition beneath the sheen of postwar life. Not only were scholars writing about what postwar culture was doing to national and individual psyches, but lots of people were reading these critiques of the contemporary culture, and many more were aware of them. The same forces applying pressure to be normal, to conform, to be productive, evidently encouraged an interrogation of what “normal” meant.

These works tied the experiences of what were said to be prototypical individuals working for large corporations and living in the suburbs with a change in psychological nature on a national scale. In particular, William Whyte’s The Organization Man gave a name to a cultural figure that would reappear in many venues, from novels to movies to television and popular magazines.⁷ The organization man didn’t just work for the organization, he belonged to it. Even when home in the suburbs, his leisure played out through other organizations such as the Lions Club or PTA. The term “organization man” came to describe the con...

Table of contents

• Routledge Advances in Television Studies
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The New, Sick Sense
• 2 What, Me Subversive?
• 3 The Parodic Sensibility and the Sophisticated Gaze
• 4 Ernie Kovacs and the Logics of Television Parody and Electronic Trickery
• 5 Black Tie, Straightjacket
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index