Core Response #1 by Alexandra Lavin

I found the article "Situation Comedy, Feminism, and Freud" interesting in its discussion of the “shaggy dog” type of joke, and how it fully encompasses the give and take (mostly give) dynamic between George and Gracie. A shallow look of the show would tell us that Gracie is the one doing all the comedic heavy lifting — even the actor is clear that he isn’t the one getting the laugh, that she has all the funny lines. But the very fact that most of her jokes are “shaggy dog” jokes means that, no matter how funny her lines may be, the laugh is immediately taken from her and given to George. As the article states, the jokes she is delivering are inherently nonsensical, they are playing with the audiences expectation for a joke and refusing to hand one out. Based on the description, it seems to me that the joke comes in two parts: the initial absurdity makes the audience pause, confused that their expectations were not met, and then they laugh when they realize that that was the point all along. Others who have delivered the shaggy dog jokes (the article mentions Chico Marx) are portrayed as aware of the joke, and therefore the recipients of the laughter. But while Gracie of course gets a lot of laughs during the show, because she is portrayed as unaware that she is even telling a joke, by the end of the show the audience won’t psychologically recognize her as the recipient of those laughs. Instead, the audience will only assign her that initial pause, that lapse of understanding, and, after that wink to the camera, assign George the laughs, as he is the one clever enough to know it was a joke all along. 

What struck me most in this was the concept of the absurd in relation to the roll of women in the 1950s. This shaggy dog dynamic obviously reflects men’s perspective on women during the time — while Gracie isn’t a housewife, it is not a stretch to assign her roll in the show to the roll of the woman in the home. They run around with their silly little tasks, constantly faced with child-like bewilderment at the complexities of the world, lucky to have a man that understands, that can make sense of the disorder, that keeps the household afloat through a god-like omnipotence. I Love Lucy presents us with a more obvious idea of what women must have felt about this arrangement at the time. As much as they lampoon her attempts to leave the household and become an entertainer, the article proves that there is a thread of thread of grief for what she could have been — she tells Ethel that it isn’t funny, “it’s tragic.” But from a modern perspective, I would argue that The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show does just as much to illustrate the plight of women in the 1950s by engaging with the absurd. Gracie does all of the comedic heavy lifting, she gets all the laughs, she is the star of the show. Similarly, women in the household did all of the household heavy lifting, kept everything in order, were the center of the nuclear family. But all George had to do was wink at the camera to undermine all of that humor, to assign only absurdity to Gracie’s comedy and take all of the laughs for himself. All the man had to do was come home with his briefcase, and assign all of the heavy lifting of the nuclear family to himself, and cast all of his wife’s hard work aside as absurd.