TV and Me: Evolution of the Sitcom

Television and I grew up together.  This is our story.  Latest in a series.

 Most TV variety shows featured comedy skits—either the host interacting with guests (one improbable combination: Jimmy Durante and John Wayne) or a small company of regulars performing one-of-a-kind skits and parodies.  But the various Sid Caesar shows developed a repeated situation, with Sid and Imogene Coca (or later Nanette Fabray) as a married couple, with Carl Reiner and other friends.  Jackie Gleason took the next step with a segment featuring the same characters in the same basic situation, including its own title: The Honeymooners.  For one season, in 1955-56, it became a stand-alone half hour show: a situation comedy.

 By then there were lots of sitcoms on TV, many being direct copies of popular radio shows.  Radio is generally credited as the medium that invented the sitcom, where it had evolved in the same way: a segment repeated on variety shows that proved so popular that it became its own program. For example, characters from a play were imported to a Rudy Vallee variety, and soon after to a similar program starring Kate Smith.  It became the radio and early television sitcom series, The Aldridge Family.  (Curiously, I recall only Jimmy Lydon as teenage Henry Aldridge in a series of feature films that I must have seen on TV.)

 In a general way the theatrical roots of situation comedy television shows go back through radio, vaudeville and burlesque to Roman comedies, Shakespeare and twentieth century Broadway. Television made them more intimate, their weekly appearance on one of three networks became a rhythm for millions of viewers, and perhaps more than any other story form, they became barometers of American life.

 The key difference between situation comedy and other kinds of comedy on television was the situation—continuing characters, usually in some kind of family, in a stated social and cultural context which could be as vague as Centerville or Springfield USA, or as specific as 1038 East Tremont Avenue, the Bronx.

Grace Allen, Harry Von Zell, George Burns

 There were hybrid forms.  The Burns and Allen show was partly a variation on their vaudeville routine—Burns’ monologues and his zany dialogues with Gracie—but to fill the half hour required a sitcom setting, their home and neighborhood. (Even the commercials for Carnation Condensed Milk became part of the sitcom, with Harry Von Zell as both character and pitchman.)  The Jack Benny Show was somewhat similar.  The Danny Thomas show Make Room for Daddy was also a hybrid of sitcom and variety show.

 

The Goldbergs, starring and written by
Gertrude Berg

The family at home was the usual setting, though there were also workplace-centered sitcoms.  In both cases, the context was usually urban, often New York City, and working class.  Some very early sitcoms also emphasized urban ethnic characters, playing on the dangerous border of exaggerated familiar characteristics and stereotype:  The Goldbergs (Jewish, the Bronx), Duffy’s Tavern (Irish, Manhattan), the short-lived and controversial Life With Luigi (Italian immigrants, Chicago) and the very controversial Amos n Andy (Black, Harlem.)  

 Ralph Kramden of The Honeymooners was a bus driver living with his wife in a shabby apartment in Brooklyn.  Chester A. Riley of The Life of Riley worked in an aircraft manufacturing plant in California.  My Friend Irma (Manhattan boardinghouse) and Gale Storms’ frenetic My Little Margie (5^th Avenue apartment) and the Danny Thomas Make Room for Daddy were set in New York.  And finally, I Love Lucy, the most popular early sitcom that more than any other set the template for those to come, was set in a modest apartment building in New York City. 

As the 1950s went on, this pattern began to shift, symbolized by the Ricardo and Mertz families of I Love Lucy moving out of New York City, first to a more middle class suburb in Connecticut, and finally west to California.  This reflects the ongoing reality of the 50s; new suburban housing was springing up as the growing (and increasingly child-bearing) middle class abandoned the cities, while in a companion postwar trend, New York City began losing its dominance.

 New York, the center of TV production in the early 50s,  has long been known as the preeminent center of the arts in America, particularly performing arts, but it’s not generally appreciated that one reason for this was because it had the largest potential audience, by far. In comparison to the population of the rest of the country, New York was very, very big, for a very long time.

 For example, in 1910, New York wasn’t just the biggest city in America—it was bigger than any single states in the Union except 3.  In 1930 and 1940, it was bigger than all the states except Illinois and Pennsylvania, which had the second and third largest cities (Chicago and Philadelphia.)  As late as 1940, the population of the entire state of California was under 7 million, and the entire state of Texas contained less than 6 and a half million.  The City of New York alone embraced seven and a half million.

 In 1910, Chicago had a population of 2 million, Philadelpha 1.5.  At 5 million, New York was larger than the two combined, and more than twice as large as Chicago.  No other U.S. city but these three topped a million people until 1930, when Detroit and Los Angeles joined the club. But even in 1940, New York City was larger than the next three cities combined, and almost the next four.

 But World War II industrial production had spread across the country, not only in the New York area, Detroit and Pittsburgh, but also to the aircraft industry in California and the Northwest, and to military bases and munitions factories in Texas and other states.  Veterans who'd left home for other states and overseas spread out, heading west in particular. The rest of the country was growing. Meanwhile, more prosperous New Yorkers were abandoning Brooklyn and the Bronx for Levittown and other suburbs on Long Island, where its counties of Nassau and Sussex were the fastest growing counties in America. 

For the first half of the 20^th century, almost all legitimate live theatre in America originated in New York—in hundreds of theatres, generating hundreds of traveling shows and stock companies fanning out to the rest of the country. So naturally, much of the acting, writing and directing talent was in New York as well.  This was possible because New York was so big that it could provide audiences all on its own.  Theatre was part of New York’s internal culture.

 This link between population and theatre was first pointed out to me by the great American actor Jason Robards, Jr. in an interview I did with him backstage at the Plymouth Theatre on Broadway in the 1980s.

He described the quantitative decline of New York theatre since the 1920s when his father began as an actor, through the postwar period when he started out, to the 1980s present as his sons were starting their careers, and linked it to the flight to the suburbs and consequent decline of the New York City audience.  “Now,” he said, “I think theatre in New York is going to become like the opera, if it isn’t already: a small, specialized thing.”  And except for the Disneyfied Broadway blockbusters for tourists, that’s pretty much what has happened.

 Though New York had lost out to Hollywood as the film capital, it was the place that early television production was centered in the early 1950s, particularly live television.  The network headquarters and studios were there, as was the acting and directing talent from theatre and theatre training. Also Hollywood wasn’t yet fully competing: the studios were afraid of television eroding its audience, and hoped to starve the new medium. So they resisted devoting their talent and support to TV production.

 But another reason for TV being centered in and on New York was the size of the New York audience. And as in the best days of theatre, New York was large enough to provide an early TV audience, even if they were watching in bars and other public venues.  So a lot of those early programs were made to appeal to New Yorkers.

  However, that was when there weren’t a lot of TV sets in the rest of America. In 1950, 90% of American families didn't have a TV set. But by 1959, 90% of them did. Television became a national medium during the 1950s, and advertisers took notice.  They wanted to appeal to a larger public, and hopefully a more affluent audience.  Hollywood began to take another look, too.  More TV shows would be made in southern California studios.

 So when Lucy and Desi had a baby—thus joining the baby boom, and largely ending sitcoms about singles or childless couples—they also moved out of New York.  In fact the show had always been shot in California. Now it was admitting it. 

The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet was a precursor to new sitcoms set in suburbia, or small town neighborhoods that were the suburban ideal, notably the hit shows Father Knows Best, Leave It To Beaver and the Donna Reed Show.  Later series in the 60s such as My Three Sons (set in a California suburb) would continue the pattern.

 The 1950s were becoming the Organization Man decade, and these sitcom families were generally more prosperous. The dads were more educated, with white collar jobs and professions.  They set a subtly high material standard that advertisers hoped would fuel aspirations at a time of upward mobility, but it was still out of reach for much of the audience.  In an era when the average family income was $12,000, it was estimated that the lifestyle of the Andersons, the Cleavers etc. would require $40,000 a year. 

Mama

The broad humor (and ethnic humor), outsized characters and extreme situations of early sitcoms gave way to more subtlety and an attempt at more ordinary problems and situations as the sitcoms became suburbanized. (Though not all of the early sitcoms were frenetic with extreme characters and crazy situations.  Mama--from the book and movie I Remember Mama-- was the story of a Norwegian immigrant family, but it was much quieter.  A plot might involve Nelse breaking his glasses playing basketball, and his father coming up with a solution by attaching an elastic band to them, to keep them on during the game.)

 But in general, the loud and/or confused fathers were replaced by wiser and more understanding fathers; the dizzy mothers gave way to calmer and-- especially with Donna Reed--somewhat more dimensional mothers.

  (In another demographic shift, a third of Americans lived on farms in 1920, down to 15% in 1950 and just over 8% in 1960, perhaps inspiring nostalgic sitcoms like The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres in that decade. Clowns were originally country bumpkins whose clodhoppers and lack of manners were deemed humorous. Fifties kids experienced the archetype in Disney’s Goofy and the puppet Mortimer Snerd.  Those 60s TV sitcoms were perhaps that archetype’s last obvious gasp, as the countryside was trampled by tract houses and shopping malls, and invisible and voracious agribusinesses took over the rest.)

 I remember seeing most of the early television sitcoms, like The Goldbergs and Duffy’s Tavern (at least as far as the opening when the barman answers the phone: “Duffy’s Tavern, where the elite meet to eat… Duffy ain’t here.  Oh, hi Duffy.”)  At the ages of four through seven or so, I couldn’t always follow stories, but I appreciated the same comic elements I liked in variety shows—the gestures, the slapstick, facial expressions (and double-takes) and repeated catchphrases, the eccentric characters from Phil Silvers to Our Miss Brooks, along with the physical humor prominent in sitcoms from Lucy to I Married Joan.

 By the time I was able to grasp the plots, sitcoms of the suburban era were doing less physical humor while dealing more with believable behavior. As a child I was keenly interested in what adults considered acceptable behavior, and so these shows became instructive.  

Donna Reed

What is acceptable and successful behavior is a matter of context and culture. The situations in situation comedy made them about behavior—and how actual behavior contrasts with standards of behavior is a lot of what makes it funny.  As a kid you are just learning those standards, and I learned a lot by what I was expected to laugh at in situation comedies.

 But there was another factor at work. These suburban sitcoms were becoming prominent just at the time that many from the working class were entering the middle class, with its different mores, culture and expectations, which were perhaps new to viewers from that working class cultural background as well.  That was my background, so through the suburban sitcoms I was getting suggestions about behaviors of all kinds in the world I was expected to enter. 

I vividly recall an early example from the sitcom-within one of Sid Caesar’s variety shows, The Caesar Hour. The segments of varying length (some took up nearly an entire show) were called “The Commuters,” with Caesar and Nanette Fabray as a new suburban couple. In one story they were out for dinner at a restaurant with another couple.  They were all sitting in a booth and talking. A waiter brought a salad bowl. Carl Reiner as his friend told Sid to “toss the salad, Bob.” Sid did one of his series of takes—he didn’t understand what he was supposed to do. Carl kept talking to someone, only to say again, more insistently, “toss the salad!” So Sid tossed it up in the air, lettuce leaves and tomato slices falling on everyone.

 This was a time in the 1950s when dining out in a restaurant was new to a lot of Americans, especially those from working class background.  Here was physical comedy as the payoff for a common problem—the uncertainty of etiquette in an unfamiliar middle class situation.  "Toss the salad” was a new concept to a city guy, probably from a poor immigrant family, as well as verbally a funny ambiguous expression. It was just another mystery of middle class suburban manners. 

But it also happened to be a new concept to me. I was vaguely aware that the people on television were richer and more sophisticated than anyone I actually knew. So I saw it perhaps as something “ritzy” people said and did. But it also seemed possible that it was something I would need to know, or something I should know—something that adults knew.

When you’re a kid just about everything “adult” is strange-- tossing a salad as much as foreign movies. Kids get told when they’re doing something “wrong,” and that covers a lot of ground.  So you have to spend some time trying to imagine why adults do and say things, and what they mean. Sid Caesar’s humor was often based on exaggeration, and on taking something literally that wasn’t meant to be taken that way. It’s exactly the kind of humor that appeals to children, because we often made those mistakes, and we also often thought adults were strange and didn’t make much sense. Sid Caesar represented us, as well as the urban working class trying to fit into white collar suburbia. 

Through sitcoms I learned about expectations and procedures of adults and children, including older kids.  I more or less grew up with Ricky Nelson. There was an idealization of family behavior among the Nelsons as well as the Andersons, the Cleavers and the Stones (Donna Reed Show.)  I sometimes wonder how my parents were responding on the sofa behind me as I lay sprawled in front of the TV set, as they saw these families solve problems without raised voices and threats, tears and tantrums.

 By the age of eight I apparently had grasped enough about stories to write one.  As the result of a classroom exercise in third grade, I went home and wrote my first play.  Its specific inspiration was the introduction to “White Christmas” I read in the sheet music on my Uncle Carl’s piano (it was a new song then) suggesting that it was possible to have Christmas without snow—something that hadn’t occurred to me.  But the play itself was all sitcom, with a sitcom family of father and mother, older children John and Mary, and the comic little brother, Bobby. My third grade class put it on (with John Glancy as John and Mary Jo Repasky as Mary.)

 By fourth grade, I had my own rep company in the form of my Cub Scout den, and the monthly skits I wrote for us to perform at the big pack meetings in the Cathedral basement were mostly inspired by TV shows: a pirate adventure was one, and another was the George Gobel variety show, including the sitcom within it.

 I remember those long-running suburban shows the best, probably because I was older and they were kept alive in reruns for another decade. But I had some favorites that aren’t so well remembered, like the two shows starring Wally Cox, Mr. Peepers (1952-55) and the Adventures of Hiram Holiday (1956-7.)  I remember Mr. Peepers especially, a live situation comedy set in a high school—the perpetually befuddled Mrs. Gurney, and the character played by Tony Randall.  I also liked Peter Lawford in Dear Phoebe and then in The Thin Man (combining mystery and comedy) with Phyllis Kirk.

  Another favorite was The People’s Choice starring Jackie Cooper, and Cleo, the sardonic basset hound who commented on the action, and though it belongs more to the 60s, Jackie Coopers’ Hennessy series, which started in 1959.  Though I still cherish skillful slapstick, these quieter comedies also appealed to me.  

But probably the 1950s situation comedy that to me fondly represents this era more than any other was The Life of Riley. I knew this fish out of water (working class guy in suburban California) series so well that I can still recall enough of the opening narration to tell you that Marjorie Reynolds played Peg, and Tom D’Andrea was Gillis.  I may not have cared much about the stories at times, and just waited for the closeup of the forlorn face of William Bendix as he spoke the magic words, “What a revoltin’ development this is!”

 The Life of Riley could remain in memory also because, at least for awhile, we watched it as a family. At our house we ate supper at 6 pm, so we finished in plenty of time for the news (network news was all of 15 minutes then) and Captain Video or some other kidcentric show at 7.  The evening shows could begin as early as 7:30.  It may be necessary to reiterate that like everyone we knew, we had but one television set, which sat immovably in the living room.  So family members might drift in and out, watching the screen in various combinations, depending in part on what was on.  My sisters as well as I usually sprawled on the floor, with a parent or two behind us on the sofa.

 There were times that our whole family watched, with variety shows and sitcoms as the more likely occasions.  But my one specific memory of a family viewing ritual must have occurred only in one TV season, of 1955-56, when I was 11, my sister Kathy was 5 and then 6, and sister Debbie was 2.  It was on Friday nights, when we watched Ozzie and Harriet together at 7:30, then Mama at 8, and The Life of Riley at 8:30. At some point we were all together on or around the sofa.  That’s because at some point my mother made us popcorn.