I loathed that daughter, what a pig… I always thought how pathetic Charlie and Alan were, such DESPERATE pussy-hounds. When they spotted some female they wanted to bang, they were sweating bullets, just desperate, as if she was the very last woman on earth. Despite the dozens and dozens of their castoffs, past, present, and future, the newest one was always the only one who mattered. My husband would watch it and marvel at the unending parade of available attractive women. He said, ‘too much is never enough for them.’
Really? I haven’t religiously watched Dick Van Dyke reruns in a while, but I can’t recall anything difficult about him.
I wonder if that’s WHY we were allowed to watch it. I grew up on NewsRadio and Grounded For Life and maybe the fact that, to a parent listening from another room or watching a scene here and there, they seemed like any other random sitcom. Plus, they may have been assuming they were still ‘innocent’ sitcoms like they used to watch. I could see that causing the pendulum to swing back with people my age, now parents, not wanting their kids to be watching the stuff we watched as kids. And eventually it’ll swing back again.
I never watched the Honeymooners, but I’m familiar with the threats of violence. When I hear people complaining about it today, while I understand, I generally disagree with them. To me, that “to the moon” schtick was on par with someone jokingly threatening to kick your ass. Sure, it’s technically a threat of [domestic] violence, but when neither person is taking the threat seriously (Ralph was joking, Alice knew it was a joke), it seems like people are getting offended just to get offended.
Having said that, I have zero experience with DV and maybe those types of jokes do normalize it and make people think it’s acceptable to actually hit their partner. Maybe not. I don’t know.
I wouldn’t say “joking”…I’d say “making impotent threats.” Alice knew he wouldn’t follow through.
Yeah, Ralph was legitimately upset it’s just that his way of expressing it had no teeth.
A major comic premise to the show was that Ralph fancied himself king of his castle while Alice was actually in charge. So stuff would happen, Ralph would try to throw his authority around and Alice would brush it off and set things right. That completely falls apart if you think that Alice was getting the shit beat out of her after the show was over.
I don’t think anyone liked her. It was like they just tossed her in there with whatever scripts they had laying around for Charlie.
However, even worse than her was when they made Alan the Charlie character. Charlie, both Harper and Sheen, pulled that role off very naturally. Alan was written to be a shell of a man, terrified of everything, especially women. Trying to turn him into Charlie 2.0 was hard to watch.
FWIW, I thought the show was still really good once they brought on Ashton Kutcher.
Honeymooners used to be just about my favorite show - gold standard for comedy. I tried to watch it recently, and they just seemed mean. So much yelling. Yeah, Ralph was the buffoon, but even the idea of a husband beating his wife is questionable basis for humor these days. “Bang zoom - to the moon!” and “One of these days, Alice - POW - right in the kisser!” Sure, you can rationalize them as impotent threats. But they still impress me as questionable comedy fodder.
Rob Petrie is just very much of a 50s-60s head of the household, with the little lady kept at home (with that shit of a kid!) Once you catch a couple of instances he is consistently patronizing and controlling of Laura. She really only exists as an appendage of him. Just jars given today’s social dynamics. And then there is the thing of how sad Sally is, instead of the strong attractive person she should be.
Funny to think of these things. In many situations, folk would say I’m not the most “enlightened” guy in terms of modern sensibilities. Which is a fair cop. But the way I’ve changed in terms of how I think of these TV shows might suggest that this old fart is at least becoming a tad less moss-covered.
Then my question is, keeping in mind I never watched the show, did Ralph know he wouldn’t follow through? That is, did he actually have the intention of hitting her and then stopped himself or was he making an empty threat knowing it was an empty threat. Like if a friend pissed me off and I said I was going to kick their ass (I’m not, I never was, it was just something I said).
ISTM, if he was just saying it, that’s one thing. If he actually wanted to hit her but just couldn’t bring himself to actually do it (One of these days, right) that’s different and probably/possibly over the line for a sitcom that, I assume, didn’t explore topics that serious.
They certainly were having heated disagreements. They insulted each other and used raised voices. Then he would shake his fist and threaten to send her “to the moon” “one of these days.”
All of this while set in a tenement.
I don’t think it takes a crazy leap to imagine that in a lot of similar situations, the natural progression led to violence.
I think he knew it was an empty threat. He was just making noises out of frustration. I don’t remember any reason to think he was actually physically violent with anyone, just trumpeted and flailed his arms around. Even with Norton, he might give him a little shove in a “Stop doing that!” manner but it’s not as though he tried to actually hit the guy.
In real life “similar situations” a lot of television would fall apart.
The first result when I googled. Form your own opinion.
Of course, then there are the 3 Stooges who went well beyond threats…
Was that out of the ordinary for TV shows or even real life 60+ years ago though? Weren’t a lot of shows like that? Leave It To Beaver, I Love Lucy, Andy Griffith (with Aunt Bea as a stand-in for a wife/homemaker). I Dream of Jeannie was practically designed around that premise and used it heavily as a plot device.
That’s what I was assuming. Again, never watched it and I’m certainly not defending it, I was just curious about the context.
Those clips are about all I knew about the show. I never considered either of them to take those threats seriously.
The Honeymooners was based on the more typical style of comedy that had emerged from vaudeville and radio. Sometimes called the ‘Irish’ form of comedy it typically involved a husband, father, boss, or any authority figure that was angry, blustering, threatening, sometimes intoxicated, and occasionally violent. They would be presented as buffoons, constantly floundering in their authoritative efforts and eventually receive their come-uppance. Usually in the case of the husband and father they turn out to be men who are sorry for their actions and tell their family how much they love them and all is well again, i.e., “Baby, you’re the greatest!”. The Simpsons are a modern day example of this kind of comedy, but in general TV comedy moved away from that style in the 60s.
Yeah, this is my take as well.
I used to listen to the Bickersons on XM Radio and I remember them both being pretty well matched and the show relying on being witty as opposed to using the threats of violence as comedy. Interestingly (or maybe obviously) I see that the Honeymooners was inspired by The Bickersons.
I think even then the Honeymooners would have been considered some-what ‘low-brow’ comedy, perhaps a step above the Stooges, based on the violent rhetoric (though there was no actual violence). I Love Lucy a similar theme, Lucy was always afraid of Ricky finding out about her hijinks. He would rant and rave in Spanish and his hilarious broken English, and Lucy would cry, but he would never put words to the threats, and the whole thing was done in an exaggerated comic style.
The Bickerson’s model showed up in comedy time and again afterwards with long married couples living out an endless argument. That form of comedy will never disappear as long as people grow old together. It’s really only different from the repartee between young couples that we call sexual tension, except we aren’t supposed to think Grandma and Grandpa are just revving up their engines before releasing that tension in the bedroom. Well we weren’t supposed to think that in the old days, but comedy has expanded the envelope in every direction now.
The Andy Griffith Show could be surprisingly feminist, occasionally, for a show of its period (albeit very much inconsistently so). There was an episode where Ellie Walker wanted to run for town council, and a full-on war of the sexes broke out all over Mayberry because all the men were firmly in the "it’s silly to think a woman could do that " mindset. Finally, at the end, it was an offhand remark by Opie that shone a light on how wrong-headed the men were (of course it was Opie; I think that over the run of the show, Opie might have taught Andy more than vice versa, in his own innocent way). Andy took it to heart, and that was that. I don’t think a hard-core sexist of the sixties who had any kind of decision-making power on that show would have allowed that ending.
Scrubs started and ended a few years earlier than HIMYM did. Scrubs had The Todd, who was very bit the womanizer that Barney was, but seemed to lack any ability to be deceptive about it.
I recall seeing this a while back. Yes it shows Ralph in a very bad light, but still, I had to laugh.
Of course you had to laugh. That shit is funny!
“I had no idea the first astronauts were so fat.”
“He wasn’t an astronaut! He was just using space travel as a metaphor for beating his wife!”