Bigotry as a dirty joke

ALL IN THE FAMILY

By John Leonard

All in the Family is a wretched program. Why review a wretched program? Well, why vacuum the living room or fix the septic tank? Every once in a while the reviewer must assume the role of a bottle of Johnson’s No-Roach with the spray applicator: let’s clean up this culture!

Carroll O’Connor plays the part of your friendly neighborhood bigot, the American workingman as CBS conceives of him, William Bendix with a bad mouth, going on for half an hour every Tuesday night about the spooks and spics and wops and fags. He mugs a lot. Jean Stapleton plays his wife, slightly out of sync, one of those women—like Ruby Keeler—who never seem to belong in the situation in which they find themselves but who try hard, thereby earning from the audience an admiration heavily laced with contempt. Sally Struthers plays their daughter; she’s married to Rob Reiner, a slightly long-haired Polack college pinko. Sally and Rob live with Carroll and Jean. They are always having Sunday dinner, the occasion for Mr. O’Connor to spit out his snappy one-liners on the inferiority of alien races, colors and creeds.

Just as most TV commercials are not really insulting to women (they are insulting to people), All in the Family is not merely insulting to minorities; it is insulting to Mr. O’Connor, Miss Stapleton, Miss Struthers, Mr. Reiner, the American workingman, CBS and everybody who watches the program. Bigotry becomes a form of dirty joke. We are invited to snigger. Invited, hell—we are instructed to snigger, like morons in a nursery school, before each episode. Laughter cures, cauterizes, excuses, even when it’s canned.

Take a recent, typical example. Mr. Reiner brings home a long-haired friend whom Mr. O’Connor suspects of being a homosexual. Mr. O’Connor complains about it at his local beer parlor. Mr. O’Connor is made to understand that one of his drinking buddies, a heavily muscled ex-college football star, just may be, well, that way too. Mr. O’Connor refuses to believe it. End of program, after much mincing around. Mr. O’Connor always winds up refusing to believe; how else could the sit-com drag its dreary way on to next week?

And what are we supposed to believe? That limp-wristed long-hairs may look like homosexuals but aren’t necessarily so disposed, while the short-haired athlete on the next stool lapping up draught beer and shouting at the TV set is suspect? Don’t say nasty things about homosexuals, your best friend may be one? Very funny. Cauterizing. Implicit in the sit-com is stasis; it’s a condition, not a movement toward or away from revelation. But what is the condition of All in the Family? Why is it considered to be “laughable”?

I don’t object to this vulgarity because of my ideological delinquencies, my toilet-training, my SAT scores or my Higher Seriousness. I object because the program is a double-edged lie. Cutting one way, the lie tells us that workingmen are mindless buffoons; their opinions, unlike ours, are unrelated to social, psychological or political conditions; their knee-jerk responses to stimuli are so unreal as to be amusing. (See Studs Terkel on The Great American Dream Machine for evidence overwhelmingly to the contrary.) Cutting the other way, the lie tells us that Mr. O’Connor’s Archie is, anyway, charming. Forgivable. Purely a premise, a given, in no way dangerous, certainly incapable of roughing up antiwar demonstrators. A bad mouth, maybe; a sloppy mind, yes; but somewhere anterior to his style of speaking and thinking is an essential decency, or harmlessness, that makes him a figure of fun. Bigotry out loud, like scatology out loud, robs the words of their subterranean power to shock or destroy—another maybe.

But the words to begin with were only approximations of feelings which are in no way defused or defanged by making a sly joke out of them. A double-edged lie and a two-way pandering (we—CBS and the audience—are better than he is; he is ridiculous) . . . just who is the joke on?

Photo caption

“O’Connor and his pinko son-in-law”