Research
The story of the birth of network television is almost synonymous with the story of a short lived genre known as “vaudeo”. In an era where the future of the new medium was so uncertain, this video adaptation of the declining art form of vaudeville theatre served to convince American consumers as well as advertisers of the artistic worth, as well as the mass appeal of TV. After cementing the role of television in the hearts and minds of the American public, the vaudeo program faded away from prime time dominance, making way for situation comedy to takes it’s place at the top of the food chain for a long, triumphant reign. The comedy/variety spectacle has more or less disappeared by the early 1960’s, yet the influence of vaudeville on the nature of television comedy had taken root, the result of which became increasingly apparent as television matured.
While vaudeville had existed in America since the mid-nineteenth century, many of the vaudeo comedians who pioneered the television medium belonged to a certain school of vaudeville comics whose careers had been forged in the Borscht Belt, a string of Jewish vacation resorts located in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. These resorts hired urban comedians as toomlers, who took on a role that was far broader than simply performing stand-up comedy. Their job was to keep guests entertained by any means necessary: “Telling dirty stories to the men around the poker table, flirting with the women out by the pool, romancing the homely with a dance and a squeeze, showing off some sleight-of-hand and bragging to the kids, the toomler was a comic performer not permitted the luxury of distinguishing his life from his art.” (Marc 32). With such a broad demand on the ego of the performer, it is not surprising that so many versatile and daring comedians such as Woody Allen, Milton Berle, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, George Burns, Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, and Don Rickles rose up from this environment.
Given the unquestionably sacred role that Television now holds over popular culture, it is hard to imagine a time when some critics were skeptical of television’s ability to compete with feature films as well as radio. While network executives could clearly see the potential of the new medium, the task of simultaneously convincing the American audience to buy expensive televisions while convincing sponsors to invest in their programming seemed formidable. High production costs, and considerable strain on talent made radio seem like a much safer bet to many advertisers and performers. Another problem was while network TV stations operated out of New York City, most film and radio stars at the time lived in Los Angeles. Convincing radio talent, accustomed to their more casual working environment, mass audiences, and pleasant weather to move to New York and cross over to television was not an easy sell, especially when so few homes contained television sets.
A breakthrough for network programming occurred when NBC paired up a TV adaptation of Texaco Star Theater, a successful radio vaudeville program, with New York native and Borscht Belt veteran Milton Berle. Berle was originally cast as one of seven rotating emcee’s, but was quickly promoted to the sole host of the program. Berle’s was immediately popular with audiences. His high energy, rapid-fire joke delivery, slapstick and mugging proved to be immensely successful on the TV screen. Not only did his Vaudeville background train him well for the pressures of live TV broadcasting, but his New York City oriented humor appealed to the mass television audience in an era when, “Although the New York viewing area represented about 8 percent of the national population, a February 1949 survey indicated that four out of every ten sets were in greater New York” (Baughman 52).
Texaco Star Theatre led the charge of vaudeo into the TV medium, introducing many younger viewers to the spectacle of vaudeville and Burlesque for the first time. This was a godsend for Vaudevillians like Berle, who commented, “I think America has been a lot poorer since old vaudeville passed away, and it makes a lot of us troupers who made our start and were weaned in the wings on the stage of the old Palace and other theaters, feel darn good to have television—the newest of all media—be the means of bringing back one of the happiest phases of American life.” (MacDonald 64)
Berle’s superstardom was unprecedented in television history. He was nicknamed “Uncle Miltie”, and “Mr. Television”, a fitting name, as he played a significant role in helping the TV networks overcome the initial hurdles of the new market. “As well as the automotive products peddled by his sponsor, the success of Milton Berle sold TV sets, comedy, stage entertainment, and the very notion that television should be an integral part of civilization in the United States.” (MacDonald 68)
The success of Texaco Star Theatre led to a slew of Vaudeo programs that dominated network TV in the early 50’s. One of the most influential of which, was Your Show Of Shows, which was a prime example of NBC president Pat Weaver’s ambitious approach to TV programming. Idealistic about the cultural potential of television to enrich mass culture, Weaver wanted to create a comedy/variety spectacle that would engage viewers intellectually as well as comedically. Admiral Broadway Revue, Max Liebman’s television debut starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca had already been turning heads during it’s short run in 1949. It was the first TV variety show with a permanent cast and crew, as well as the first Broadway style show produced in a theatre designed expressively for television. The series did so well in fact, that it’s sponsor, the TV manufacturing company Admiral, could not keep up with the sudden demand for it’s products caused by the show’s publicity, and the company decided that the show’s budget would be better spent increasing their manufacturing capabilities, and cancelled the show.
Weaver took the opportunity to give the clearly talented troupe a higher budget and use the show’s variety format to expose the general public to the high arts. The resulting program, Your Show Of Shows, showcased beautifully produced opera and musical segments alongside original and satirical comedy sketches, which poked fun at day to day domestic life as well as parodying popular and foreign films. The quality stood in stark contrast next to Milton Berle lampooning in front of the camera in drag, and the whole cast and crew drew a sense of pride from this. Max Liebman boasted, “One thing we take for granted on our show is that the mass audience we’re trying to reach isn’t a dumb one, it has a high quota of intelligence and there’s no need to play down to it.”
Vaudeo gave a massive audience to television, and at times lent prestige to the networks, but as in the case of Admiral Broadway Revue selling too many TV’s, Vaudeo’s success may have contributed to it’s own downfall. As the TV audience grew dramatically, it became less centralized on the east coast, and therefore more difficult to please with New York Jewish comedians offering New York oriented comedy. The spread of television viewership across the heartland coincided with the massive migration of postwar families away from the urban setting, and networks were quick to acknowledge the need for comedy that appealed to a broader audience, one with a more domestic middle-class basis.
Borrowing the format from radio, situational comedy stood in stark contrast to vaudeo programs with their priority of being as inoffensive as possible. The aim was appeal to the philosophical consensus of the middle class, rather than to confront societal and customs as vaudeville satire inevitably does. Shows like Father Knows Best and I Love Lucy were strongly geared towards reinforcing established domestic roles, and the majority of the comedy was based on the futility of attempting to break free from the mold and instigate change.
By the start of the 1960’s, not only had TV viewership increased dramatically, but the American population had become very philosophically factioned. The same morality plays that captivated the 1950’s audience became less potent across the changing US landscape. As the tensions and pressures of society built up, without a strong presence of satiric release, comedy instead turned towards escapism. Shows like Gilligan’s Island, and The Beverly Hillbillies are prime examples of comedies that portray groups of ordinary Americans being transported into worlds of luxury and leisure where the political pressures of modern society become less relevant than inane social reactions. The sitcom portrayals of war during this time now also seem particularly inappropriate considering what we now know about what was then taking place in Vietnam. “McHale’s Navy (ABC 1962-6) and Hogan’s Heroes (CBS 1965-71), covering, respectively, the Pacific and European theatres, turned World War II into a bloodless, painless, deathless male-bonding romp that seemed more like summer camp than the hell-on-Earth that so many artists working in other media have described” (Marc 106).
The extreme depth of the escapist trend in the 1960’s is the “magic-com”, which quickly became “The most prolific sitcom subgenre and arguably the most popular type of program on all American television during the sixties.” (Marc 107). These sitcoms such as The Adam’s Family, The Munsters, My Favorite Martian, My Mother The Car, Mr. Ed, Green Acres, I Dream Of Jeannie, and Bewitched, all inserted supernatural characters and elements into everyday domestic life often displaying the magic as a subversive element that disrupted the otherwise idyllic flow of normal domestic life, and caused nothing but trouble for the human, male protagonist.
It is significant that Bewitched was one of the most popular of the magic-coms as it’s subtext seems much more blatant. The female protagonist, Samantha, is a witch who has chosen to give up the wild and exciting life of a witch for a quiet, domestic one with her husband in the suburbs, a husband who adamantly forbids her to use her magical powers. Her family of undomesticated, fun loving witches regularly chastises her for this choice, but she is somehow confidant that she was made the right choice, despite the unimaginable limitations this puts on her lifestyle. When she does use magic, it’s only in the service of her husband. The show attempts to normalize the incredible illogic of Samantha as “a woman with unimaginable magical power (who) uses it entirely to shore up her husband’s ego, make him look good, help him keep his job, beat down his enemies.” (Marc 112). The show uses a distorted version of the Father Knows Best style morality play to show the noble aspect of middle class domestic experience, yet this sentiment is turned upside down (perhaps unintentionally) by the contrast between it’s imaginative and liberating depiction of “witch culture” with that of the humorless, boring, and ultimately “square” depiction of domestic life.
Even by the start of the 1960’s, sitcom’s saturation of prime time had already made many viewers nostalgic for even the blandest shades of satire that they remembered from the old vaudeo programs. Not only was the 1950’s sitcom lacking in comedic potency, but it had lost touch with an increasingly liberal popular sentiment, which disdained the way in which, “American network television in the Eisenhower age profited by presenting American viewers with didactic narratives legitimizing the nuclear family, paternal authority, and, with the aid of sponsors’ commercials, domestic consumerism” (Kercher 346).
Throughout the 1950’s many satirists and alternative comedians had struggled considerable in attempting to sustain television careers. Celebrated radio satirists such as Henry Morgan and Fred Allen were often only able to appear on television as quiz show hosts where the potential for topical satire was slim at best. One of the most influential comedians of early television, Ernie Kovacs found it nearly impossible to attract a mass audience despite his overwhelming cult following.
Kovacs had made a name for himself in 1949 with the program Three To Get Ready, which aired on NBC’s Philadelphia affiliate station WPTZ, from 7 to 9AM. TTGR was a prime example of the kind of innovation that can occur when a small budget and a small audience allows good talent to compensate. The show was notable for it’s casual style of live improvising, often involving the production assistant throwing props at Ernie for him to play with (which led to the spontaneous creation of Ernie’s famous “Percy Dovetonsils” character), or Ernie trying to throw buckets of water on, or de-pants his unsuspecting straight newsman co-host. What really held TTGR apart from other comedy/talk shows was it’s reflexivity. It was not uncommon for the cameras to broadcast footage from out the third story window of the studio showing Kovacs arriving late for work, or joking around in the master control room, or outside playing in traffic. When Kovacs’s reputation was able to land him various TV specials on the major networks, he took advantage of the budget to invent camera tricks and gags that were unique to the medium of television. These specials brought NBC and ABC prestige and praise from critics, however, his humor was often over heads of most Americans, which, coupled with his untimely death in a car accident in 1962, prevented him from gaining a national TV series dedicated to his unique brand of absurdist humor.
Despite the continued reliance on situational comedy, the major networks gradually recognized the commercial potential of intelligent and, more importantly in the 1960’s, liberal satire. As advertising and marketing strategies had become more sophisticated over the decade, a focus on specific demographics rather than the “mass public” became prevalent among the networks. Executives began talking about the “egghead” demographic- educated, upper middle class and younger Americans who held a strong influence of societal trends. Satirical comedy was becoming increasingly popular throughout radio shows and nightclubs. The willingness of the networks to cash in on this new trend in intellectual comedic sensibilities, however, was matched by the always present fear of stepping over the line of “good taste”, and breaching the dated, yet still widely held conception of the TV as a “guest in the home”. In effect, “satire” was more often that not, an advertising slogan thrown around rather than an approach to writing comedy.
One unsuccessful attempt to cash in on satire on behalf of NBC was The Bob Newhart Show. The program was promoted by the network as “smart, adult satire”, which was not untrue, yet many audiences were disappointed by the considerable lack of political satire. Despite The Bob Newhart Show being a providing a quality, intelligent comedy show, it was apparent that audience NBC was going for wanted something much more bold and outspoken,
One of the more promising examples of satire in the early 1960’s was an adaptation of the popular, yet controversial British news satire series, That Was The Week That Was. Once again, the show was heavily promoted for it’s hard hitting and intelligent satire, despite a lack of intention on behalf of the network to commit to strong satirical material. The show’s executive produce, Leland Hayward, for example, would boast to press on how the show would not hold back, and showcase political material, without forgetting to add that that the show would observe the limits of satire and “maintain good taste”.
Initially, That Was The Week That Was (or TW3) was held in high regard by critics as well as the general public, and it’s material, often poking fun at conservative politicians, the civil rights conflict and the war in Vietnam, certainly pushed the boundaries of political satire on television. One example of TW3 not holding back any punches was a news bulletin “…from Jackson Mississippi that UN paratroopers had just been dropped by Guatemalan Air Force planes to rescue Negro ministers, missionaries, and civil rights workers.” (Marc 102) Of course, this line of satire was less popular in the south, where many affiliates refused to even air the show on their stations. Even the show’s attempts to target politicians on a bipartisan basis caused controversy, as president Lyndon B. Johnson apparently used his connections at NBC to get the show to stop making fun of him (the result of which led to the forced resignation of TW3’s producer and editor Marshall Jamison, who spoke out against the censorship), the show was even forced to stay off the air in the weeks leading up to the 1964 Johnson-Goldwater election.
It wasn’t long before the quality of the show went downhill, party because of the strain of weekly live broadcasting on the writers, party because of the constant pressure NBC put on the writers to tone down the satire and political relevance, and party because Leland Hayward, in an attempt to reach more viewers by beautifying the cast, fired many of the better trained comedic performers such as Henry Morgan, on the basis of them being less attractive. In the second season most of the writing staff was replaced, and the quality of the show, as well as the critical reception of it, continued to steadily decline.
A small resurgence of the Vaudeo format pushed it’s way onto television in 1966 when a comedy folk music duo landed a comedy/variety program on CBS called The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. The Smothers Brothers showcased satiric sketches in the same vein as TW3, yet they were decidedly less political, and less outspoken, and yet the backlash against it was much more intense. There were many reasons for the quick cancellation of the show, including guest appearances from controversial musicians like Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, but the network reacting to strongly to the mild satire in the show seems unreasonable. FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson exclaimed in reaction to the cancellation, “My God! if we’ve come to the point where that is so controversial it can’t be seen on American television, we’re a hell of a lot sicker and in a hell of a lot more trouble than I ever thought!” (Carr 2).
In 1968, a more successful attempt at modernizing vaudeo was made by NBC with Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. Taking influence from early vaudeo, Ernie Kovacs, and the topical satire of That Was The Week That Was, the show was an attempt to springboard off of the comedy/variety format to create a new genre of television comedy, whose aesthetic was created by video editing techniques, and humor based on rapid fire one-liners. While it had it’s fair share of satirical humor, Laugh-In was somehow able to avoid significant controversy and last for a five season run. It is more than probable that the inventive, fast pace format of the show in fact distracted from the topical humor that might have caused controversy. Or perhaps it was because, unlike The Smothers Brothers, who appeared deceivingly clean cut and innocent looking, Laugh-In wore it’s hippie counter-culture identity on it’s sleeve, which in turn served to normalize the radical imagery that it embodied. In any case, it became clear that the long term effects of comedians pushing the envelope over the past two decades had left it’s mark in the public sphere of television, and created a welcome space for the comedian to experiment and subvert cultural norms within the living room.
While researching the often futile struggle of comedians to find a way to do they’re jobs in the mass entertainment culture during the early decades of television has been somewhat frustrating, what came up fairly often was the notion that whenever comedy was marketable to a smaller audience, one specific to a location, or philosophical demographic, the potential of innovation and discovery within the art form opened up tremendously. This research has helped me to think about the Internet as a new medium that has opened up the potential of comedic expression, and although after a decade the technology has not revolutionized comedy in any tremendously significant way, I am starting to be aware of the way that it creates potential for cult audiences to form around ideas so avante garde that they could not possible have survived in an era such as the first two decades of television broadcasting.
(6:00)
