'All in the Family': Failed Political Theater

Cafe Society
1

I was talking with my wife and daughter about the Charlie Hebdo attack and gave my views (noted elsewhere) about the offensive and seemingly racist cartoons they publish.
Daughter: Why would they do such a thing?

Me: Because they didn’t like what the paper publishes.

Daughter: No, why would the paper go out of their way to offend people?

Wife: Some people just like to be offensive. It’s like Archie Bunker. My father and uncle loved him because he was saying things they believed. My aunt told me that when I had more life experience I’d understand that better black people, like the Jeffersons, should stay among their own kind and try to improve them, not move in around white people.

Me: So Norman Lear failed in his mission to change the thinking of people like your family?

Wife: He probably cried all the way to the bank.

That is, in fact, something I never liked about All in the Family. Lear believes he is a good man, steeped in the 20th century US liberal tradition, and Archie was supposed to be an obnoxious lout so over the top that viewers looked at their own attitudes, saw the similarities, and made changes where needed. However, in many, many cases people saw a kindred spirit, someone whose popularity supported their way of thinking, and pushed the show to the top of the charts. It was an example of Poe’s Law that backfired, reinforcing the very things it tried to change. It did not eliminate Archie’s way of thinking; AITF is still popular in reruns and there is an entire political movement fielding candidates who sound like Archie Bunker, or worse.

Part of the failure was because most people are not introspective and rarely or never question their way of thinking. You cannot change their thinking with parody because the smart ones recognize you are making fun of them and dig in their heels, and the dumb ones, like my in-laws, think you are agreeing with them. Much of Archie’s fan base was made up of the latter, quoting him and laughing with him, not at him. Archie quickly became the flag carrier of the Not Nearly Silent Enough Majority, which was not Lear’s intent and why I believe All in the Family was an epic fail in political theater.

The same people watched The Jeffersons and saw a silly, stupid, and uppity black guy and his stereotypically sassy colored maid. This was not an edgy comedy about the rising black middle class for them but a minstrel show, showing why George Jefferson did not belong on the east side of Manhattan. Maude was an obnoxious bitch who reinforced those people’s ideas of what “women’s libbers” were all about. Like all of Lear’s characters they were cartoons, but at least they were not insipid cartoons like Mike and Gloria.

Comic political theater is difficult to do well. It can be earnest, but that is boring and not funny. It can be sly, like My Man Godfrey, but that slipped into earnestness near the end. Or it can be based on buffoonery. Lear tried that with Archie Bunker, but failed because Archie’s beliefs, which may have seemed ridiculous when put on paper, reflected too well what too many people believe to succeed.

2

Undoubtedly there are people who agree with what Stephen Colbert is saying on the Colbert Report. That does not make it failed political theater.

Anybody who is so far down the end of the curve that he or she doesn’t see the satire almost certainly isn’t going have his or her opinions changed by anything. It is changing the changeable minds where the social satire works.

3

No, it was brilliant political theater. Many of his other shows? Not so much.

4

But how many people who would agree with Colbert’s character watch his show? AITF was vastly more popular and I have heard many people quoting him approvingly while I’ve heard none do the same with Colbert who he has not spoken to directly; he is not Appointment TV for the Tea Party. I think this demonstrates why satire is rarely effective as a political tool. The satirist is too often playing for the people who agree with him and is ignored by those he is satirizing. Lear got the ear of those he mocked, but too well, succeeding commercially but failing politically.

5

We must come from very different backgrounds. I have never heard anyone treat Archie Bunker as anything other than how he was written. The vast majority know exactly why he was written as he was.

6

Really? This was around Chicago, and I’ve known a lot of racist jerks.

7

But it’s not MY background. I was raised a Minnesota liberal through and through and, like Lear, labor under the belief that if someone doesn’t come around to my way of thinking I haven’t explained it enough.

8

Back in West Texas, I can’t recall any of the rednecks taking Archie Bunker for real. But they probably didn’t watch such a “liberal-trash show” in the first place.

9

Maybe I spent too much time around my in-laws and their ilk. God knows that my wife tries to avoid them.

But it isn’t “taking Archie Bunker for real” as much as them agreeing with him and yucking it up because he spoke the truth as they saw it. As if Glenn Beck, the serial rapist and murderer, had a sitcom.

10

I didn’t say I did not know any racists. It just isn’t that hard to figure out that Archie was not being portrayed as a visionary. With all the laughs directed at him and the mispronounced words etc.

11

Archie wasn’t all bigot, all the time. There were times when he’d abandon a racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, or homophobic principle. Didn’t he have a navy buddy who was transsexual, whom he accepted completely? I think those episodes were appeals to bigots to soften their views–like Archie had.

Moreover, the show doesn’t ring as liberal as I’d remembered it. I saw an episode a few years ago and Archie referred to hippies as, “fags.” Meathead’s defense was that long hair doesn’t make someone a “fag.” He DID NOT deny that there was something wrong with being gay.

12

You are wrong because:

  1. The point of political theater need not be to get people to change their minds.

  2. “Epic fail” did not exist in those days, and Those…Were…The…DAYYYYYYYS!

13

The show was run in the 1970s, not the 21st century. That opinion would have been far from mainstream back then, and even if he had said it, the CBS ceensors would never have allowerd it.

Remember, people in the past don’t look at things the way we do now.

14

He was a lunkhead who held on to small-minded beliefs but could also be moved to consider other points of view.

How is that not anything but a Good Thing? Other lunkheads may say Yeah! to his small-mindedness, but they also see him re-consider his positions.

If AitF only preached to the converted, what good would that be? Give the small-minded someone that they can identify with and show them ways to more open-mindedness.

15

I think that’s what made it so brilliant. He wasn’t just a caricature of a narrow-minded buffoon (though yes, his beliefs bordered on hilarious). Lear and O’Connor made him relatable despite the buffoonery.

16

Lear & O’Connor never intended to portray Archie as either totally bad or stupid but as a decent, somewhat ignorant, guy trapped in his own prejudices & reacting badly at first when challenged too strongly or quickly but eventually realizing he might not always have it right. Yes, at first, there was some marketing, I am sure with Lear & O’Connor’s full consent, of Bunker as a poster boy for the Right, because you might as well make some cash off the people you’re trying to enlighten.

Btw, I think I somewhere have a child-size Archie Bunker for President T-shirt and a Wit & Wisdom of Archie Bunker PB.

17

Yeah, I think there’s a misunderstanding of satire at work here. No offense, drop.

Satire isn’t there to change people’s minds - though that can happen - but rather to present points of view and show ways in which people (most people) have some level of identification with that thing that’s being skewered.

Archie Bunker isn’t there to mock small-minded bigots but to expose that level of small-mindedness in all of the viewers. Each of us has that in ourselves to some greater or lesser extent. And by presenting a character who is obnoxious - to some greater or lesser extent - with which the viewer can identify on some level it allows a certain greater self-awareness. That doesn’t mean someone will change, just that a viewer might become more aware of their own internal processes.

It’s perfectly possible for two people to view the same bit of satire and come away either reinforced or rejecting their own worldview. Either can be correct provided the viewer in question learns a bit about how they think (most people don’t know much about such things).

Archie Bunker also served to show that people - and satirical characters - aren’t always of one mind. Sure, Archie could be a bigot and so forth, but he also loved his wife and daughter very much. He certainly tolerated Mike (a polack! a hippy freak! a liberal!) in his own house because he loved them so much. Otherwise, were he just one-dimensional, he’d have tossed the Meathead right out the door.

18

Sure, you can’t expect someone from 1971 to speak in 2015 politically correct terms no matter how progressive the character is.

But that is not to say that the show wasn’t very progressive when it came to gay rights. Below is a link to a write up about one particular episode. It was only the 5th episode aired and contained tvs first gay character in a sitcom. In 1971.

http://splitsider.com/2012/05/all-in-the-family-and-the-first-gay-sitcom-character/

19

The idea came from the UK show ‘Til Death us do Part’.

Fwiw, in the UK show the idea was to set up the lead character and then use various family members as socio-political foils to examine issues of the day. Not least amongst those being the generation gap.

The idea was to expose issues and generate debate - or ‘art’. I’d think, inevitably, you will have ‘win’s’ and ‘failures’ along the way.

Didn’t Rosanne do something similar?

20

I think that was actually George Jefferson. I only know this because that ep happened to be on during one of my caregiving nights. Louise thought that he’d been meeting with another woman instead of his old army buddy. Turns out George was meeting with the woman who’d once BEEN his army buddy–and knew nothing about it until the meeting!

Anyway, to continue with the character discussion, I agree that it was a wise decision to make Archie likable. There was a flap during the show’s run where Laura Hobson, author of the novel Gentleman’s Agreement, took Lear to task for supposedly making bigotry likable. Lear’s response was that he’d never intended to create a hateful bigot, since that would give viewers the room to sit back and tell themselves “I’d NEVER act like THAT.” By making him motivated by fear instead of hate, by making him relatable, it offered the chance for viewers to recognize themselves in him. How successful that was is, as the OP said, debatable.

But I also like the fact that Lear didn’t make Mike entirely lily-white either. Sure, no one can argue Mike’s goals weren’t laudable…but his air of smugness and superiority often acted as a counter to that. (Like the time when he told the African-American burglars, “I know what you’ve lived through–I learned all about it in sociology class.” Or when Lionel called him to task for only ever wanting to discuss “the black problem” with him–in short, defining Lionel by his race no less than Archie did.)

This one book I’ve got on the series sums it up nicely–Archie is the wildebeest dragging himself to the water hole day after day, surviving as best he can day by day. Mike is the photojournalist on safari zipping by in a Land Rover, taking pictures for a story on the survival of wildebeests. Sure, the story may help them in the long run, but that doesn’t make very much to the animal who only knows what he has to do to survive.