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. 

Core Response #1 by Kiera Harvell

 “That neither audiences nor critics noticed Lucy’s feminist strain is curious, suggesting that comedy is a powerful and unexamined weapon of subjugation.”  (Mellencamp, Situation Comedy, Feminism, and Freud, emph. added)

What I found interesting in this weeks readings about television and the family was the ironic (is it?) continuous thread of concern in most, if not all, about the captivating effect of television on the viewer, especially the woman viewer. Modeleski interacts with Raymond Williams’ vision of television as a “fact of flow” but especially focuses on the ways in which daytime television has been specially curated to “capture” the housewife’s attention and thereby hold this audience captive both literally and ideologically. It is an attack of the senses, in which one is constantly reassured of the norms and values of the current hegemonic state ideals, encouraged to participate with them, whether by advertisement and praise for the new “domestic sphere” – as Spigel is concerned with – or via the parasocial enmeshment of daytime tv characters into into the pedestrian “days of our lives” as Modeleski examines. Yet what most sparked the most pause and attention from myself was this one line from Patricia Mellencamp’s piece on early sitcoms.

What caused this pause was the very diametric opinion I personally have of comedy. In my own education I was taught that, historically, comedy has always been a tool of dissension, if not outright rebellion. The only character in a kingdom who could get away with mocking a king was his fool. Often times the court jester was disguised as something innocuous, jingling motley clothes meant to soften reception for the things the joker said and did, as a fool only said foolish things, right? In reality, it was a dangerous game. Should the king stop being amused, the joker’s work could be interpreted as treason, if the king even needed to muster a legal reason for a death sentence. Dissension is often enough. The fool must play politics: he must know where his monarch’s limits are, where the court’s limits are, and he must be a tightrope walker, constantly playing at falling down, but always catching himself. It is very likely the court jester was in fact the most intelligent person in the court. After all, he played a literal game of life or death.

Throughout history we have had fools to tell us how we are foolish. Court jesters could mock a king, Roman plays could mock emperors, political cartoons have ever mocked whole governments. When one is citizen of an oppressive state, dissension often starts, and is spread, with laughter. And with it, sometimes, the bravery to defy state order. Today, in a vast entertainment landscape that has been standardized and molded by its overarching American capitalist structure, comedians take many forms. Some are more silly than others. All of them retain one point of commonality, however, which is that they all play with preconceptions of social order. They question status quo, and voice the daily peccadillos that plague all citizens, and declare it publicly in a way no one else can (easily anyway.) Sometimes we call these pronouncements “shock humor” - a joke that makes an audience gasp before laughing, because, oh my god, he said that!

And yes we have many activists who can do the job of telling the truth now, and act to create change. One thing comedians benefit from that pure political activism cannot is an extremely broad platform. Confirmation bias is a real stumbling block. While political activists will mostly preach to a choir or to opposition with deaf ears, comedy is rated E for Everyone, and everyone likes a laugh. It is disarming and meant to make the mind that takes it in relax. If a comic manages to get themselves a taped special, their platform increases dramatically. While in the end some audience members might not agree with every joke a comic makes, it does not change that it was made to them, and forced a combined questioning of some social qualm. Don’t get me wrong, it is impossible that all jokesters really have something to say. However, the point is perhaps no longer what they say, it is that it has become so normalized that they can say it. After all censorship has ever been a tool for regimes seeking absolute power.

Yet Mellencamp has a point. It stands to reason too that over time government may get wise and start to use this “tool of the people” for their own purposes, especially when they have any kind of control of the means of production. And so comedy has also been used as propaganda, a tool to unite a people against a common, ridiculous enemy. America’s wartime cartoons come to mind, depicting Hitler in various absurd and mocking ways as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck trounce him and his soldiers. This is a colorful example, but it is not beyond the pale to believe that hegemony will find its way into social comedy. Indeed, it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the damaging aspects of hegemonic humor, not the least of which are racially charged jokes. Jokes about Jews, American Blacks, immigrants of all creeds, anyone “different” from some upheld status quo (the dominant group of a dominant system) is verily questioned and ridiculed, viewed sometimes more than the state as a dangerous entity. Because on the other side of questioning societal norm, comedy can instead uphold a social idyll, spotlighting points of structural weakness (which is to say, “other”) in their current environment in an attempt to galvanize a response to eradicate these “imperfections” and meet their idea of social utopia (speaking of Hitler…).

No, I do not deny that comedy can be a dangerous tool in a multitude of ways. The only point on which I disagree with Mellencamp is the contention that comedy is a controlling, or suppressive tool. Comedy by its very nature is disruptive. It disguises itself as harmless in order to let down guards in its audience, only to then force a questioning of whatever aspect of a given environment that they have accepted up to this point, or validates a question that has been sitting unspoken in their minds the whole time.

In this light, if we were to reexamine the I Love Lucy text that Mellencamp criticizes, I feel we would find a much more complicated situation before us. We can equate Lucy to the fool, colorfully and comically dancing around her stage to the audience’s delight. Ricky therefore becomes her mocked king, a symbol of social power in the period, the “man of the house.” That things always return to status quo at the end of the episode is a farce, an innocuous disguise. Lucy has already met her goal: she has questioned the power structure, and for safety returns to the net at night, but the question remains and begins to crack what is a very thick wall of patriarchal limitation. Indeed, Lucy actually does not need to continue her freedom fight at the end of each episode, because in reality she is already living her idyll. I personally have always delighted in the meta irony of I Love Lucy. After all, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were truly married, but in “real life” Lucille was the big star with all the money and power that went with it, while comparatively Desi was the trophy spouse. He did as she asked, starring on a show she ran and starred in, from a production company she founded. The ironic reality of I Love Lucy is that Lucy in the show is never in control, but Lucille is in control of everything. Lucy is not really trying to break free of her manacles in her show. She is showing us the way. The comic is not laughing at his own jokes. The jokes are for us.

Core Response #1 by Celeste Oon

I had two main threads of thought while reading about the impact of early television on women and mothers. Firstly, I considered the notion of time. I was intrigued by how the flow of television was molded to enforce a particular lifestyle. Modleski says that “daytime television plays a part in habituating women to interruption, distraction, and spasmodic toil” (5). And indeed, the endless tasks of the housewife are often driven by impromptu demands, a condition reinforced by commercials breaking the stream of narrative.

When considering the state of modern TV, whether it’s cable or streaming services, it seems to me that we’ve been able to “reclaim time.” The invention of DVRs enabled us to watch shows on our own schedules, and pause and scroll-through as we pleased. Streaming services have expanded this beyond the confines of our televisions, allowing us to take the experience anywhere. And as discussed in our first class session, we tend to watch media to accompany our daily activities (eating, exercising, etc.). Thus, rather than letting TV dictate our time, we let time dictate our TV, choosing a piece of appropriate length to match our existing routines. Or perhaps, we’re still subconsciously influenced by program length, as we may linger to finish an episode after completing a task, or binge the day away (“just one more episode!”) instead of attending to responsibilities.

Secondly, I pondered on the concept of parasociality with TV characters. Lipsitz sets the scene for this in relation to women, stating that early comedies “involved a special emphasis on mothers. Images of long-suffering but loving mothers pervaded these programs,” thereby setting an example of appropriate attitudes towards motherhood (83). But interestingly, it wasn’t carried out via mothers seeing themselves on screen—rather, by seeing those like them. Modleski references Lucy Irigaray’s notion of “nearness” as opposed to identification: “The viewer does not become the characters… but rather relates to them as intimates, as extensions of her world” (3). I personally believe there’s a blurry line between identification and parasociality; oftentimes, we form parasocial relationships with people we identify with. Thus, I’m not sure I follow the argument of close intimacy without identification. However, I do appreciate that Modleski points out the ability of parasociality to affect those outside the primary relationship. Current mainstream discourse on parasocial relationships (which is terribly misguided) treats them as taking place within an isolated bubble, and often discusses their effects only on the two parties involved. But it is certainly important to consider what Modleski and Lipsitz mention: the behaviors modeled by figures on TV motivate us—and at times condition us—to believe in the legitimacy of particular actions over others.

Core Response #3 by Eileen DiPofi

        As someone who primarily studies film I found Lynn Spigel’s intervention into television’s mode of spectatorial presence very compelling. In their landmark study The Classical Hollywood Cinema (1985), David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson argue that Classical Hollywood privileges narrative, using form to facilitate immersion within the diegesis. Editing, cinematography, set design, performance, etc. work to cultivate a sense presence within the diegetic space. Spigel argues that, rather than merely replicating this immersive mode of spectatorship, television cultivates a spectatorial presence more indebted to theater. The sense of “being there” the television viewer experiences is not a being within the characters’ diegetic space, but the experience of being an audience member watching a performance unfold—the “there” is that of a theatrical, rather than domestic, space. Spigel offers many examples for how this theatricalized viewing experience is formally constructed, from the mise-en-abyme structure of performance in The Burns and Allen Show to editing strategies like cutting on character entrances to proscenium staging. 

        Seeing as narrative cinema’s immersive mode of spectatorship has been the subject of ideological critiques, television’s frequent direct address and foregrounding of its own performativity could, at first glance, offer an antidote to spectatorial inculcation into a dominant ideology. However, Spigel’s concept of the “theatricalization of the domestic space” that occurs in sit-coms suggests that the medium merely constructs a different spectatorial relation to a dominant ideology, one based in post-war consumer culture. I want to think through this concept in relation to the episode of I Love Lucy that I watched for this week. “Kleptomaniac” (1.27) ends with what is, even on a narrative level, Lucy’s performance. Upset that Ricky thinks she is a thief, Lucy stages a scene with Ethel in which they pretend to have just robbed a bank, a gas station, and a circus. The narrative positions Ricky, Fred, and Dr. Robinson as the intended audience for this diegetic performance—Lucy and Ethel are trying to get back at them for accusing Lucy of being a kleptomaniac. The virtuosity of Lucy and Ethel’s theatrics is lost on the three men because they mistake what they are seeing for reality. By contrast, the televisual audience is “in the know”—we are fully aware that what we are seeing is a performance on the part of Lucy and Ethel (and, by extension, Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance). Through this dramatic irony, Ricky, Fred, and Dr. Robinson become the butt of the joke because they fall for the reality effect of Lucy and Ethel’s performance; they are the dupes who engage in a spectatorship that, like narrative cinema, confuses theatrics with reality. By contrast, we the television audience take pleasure in our awareness of the artifice of what we are seeing. This episode structures a viewing position that is, as Spigel argues, operates “contrary to the notion that these early television households presented a ‘mirror’ of the audience’s life at home.” Instead, Lucy’s living room takes “on the functions of the stage space” (19). I am attaching a screen grab from this final sequence. We see Lucy dressed as a bank robber, and her performance incorporates the signifiers of a typical film gangster: she puts on a New York mafia accent and James Cagney-like swagger, calling Ethel “baby face” and toting a machine gun. Further, as Spigel suggests, the staging and framing adhere to a tableau style, with action directed outward to the camera rather than contained within the characters’ milieu. The finale comes when Lucy brings in a baby elephant she has supposedly stolen from the circus, delivering a coup de grâce to any lingering trace of realism. As Patricia Mellencamp suggests, I Love Lucy is a prime example of how narrative is sublimated to performance in the sit-com; while Lucy fails in her ambition to escape domesticity (in this episode, her attempt to chair an upcoming auction), she succeeds in getting “exactly what she and the television audience wanted: Lucy the star, performing off-key, crazy, perfectly executed vaudeville turns” (88). 

        The final scene of “Kleptomaniac” also demands consideration of the other aspect of Spigel’s “theatricalization of the domestic space”: the audience’s domestic space becomes—or more specifically, incorporates—the space of the theater. What appears to disrupt normative spectatorship by eschewing realist immersion was, in fact, crucial to the construction of the Cold War consumer. Television’s theatricalization of the domestic space is part of the larger trend Spigel observes in observes in mid-century architecture, advertising, television, and commercial culture more broadly wherein middle-class homeowners were encouraged to bring the outside world into their domestic sphere through consumption (7). Just as Lucy brings a range of public sites into her living room through her final performance—the circus, the crime scene, the charity auction—the consumer is encouraged to bring outside entertainments into their own living room by watching television and other forms of domestic consumption. Of course, as Spigel demonstrates, utopian fantasies of public/private incorporation were accompanied by dystopian fears of domestic alienation. While Lucy’s final performance stays on the level of screwball comedy for the audience, through Ricky, Fred, and Dr. Robinson, we might identify anxieties around bringing the modern world—and its pathologies (i.e. kleptomania)—into the home through obsessive consumption. 

Core Response #2 by SMDI

Lynn Spigel’s horizontal sweep of television and its cultural constellations makes for a particularly enlightening text, as usual. Though her methodology does not explicitly acknowledge the traditional materialists, it is through her analysis of “magazines, advertisements and television programming” (33) as well as spatial considerations that she builds a convincing account of midcentury America’s cultural tensions. This chapter might be the fourth or fifth piece I’ve read by Spigel and, unless memory fails, Installing the Television Set contains the only reference she makes to sound, specifically the “high fidelity” (12) craze of the 1950s as well as thoughts about “sound quality” (13) in her discussion of realism.

Sound, I would argue, is especially important to historical discussions of television because, on one hand, its ascension coincides with the rise of stereo consoles in American homes and, on another, because both technologies sometimes share the same piece of furniture if not circuitry. In other words, stereo consoles and televisions either coexist in the same space, often competing for attention, or were indeed the very same item (see Magnavox ad below).

Rick Altman probably addresses this relationship in his scholarship, but much remains to be said about television sound broadly. Stereo consoles, for example, often had a “presence” knob which through a preset, stepped series of equalization curves would seek to respatialize a record's sound to the specific acoustical context of the home, offering an added promise of spectacle and illusion (“hyper-realism” in Spigel’s terms). I wrote about this knob for my MA exam but much research remains to be done. How can we begin to understand the pressures by a thriving recording industry upon the sonic practices or infrastructures of television?

Week 3 clips

 Busby Berkeley, Dancing Dames:  4:08-5:30 

https://criticalcommons.org/view?m=10Mrmhz3f 

  

Quantitative Studies/Effects Studies within popular media:  

https://www.apa.org/pi/prevent-violence/resources/tv-violence 

http://www.thesuccessfulparent.com/categories/children-and-media/item/the-impact-of-tv-violence-on-children-and-adolescents#.WmdlWpM-c_U 

 

https://seejane.org/research-informs-empowers/data/ 

 

Thorburn on TV Aesthetics: 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15295038709360123 

Fans on Buffy tropes: 

https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Buffy%20the%20Vampire%20Slayer%20(TV)/works 

 

Media Industries Journal: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mij/about 

Horace Newcomb:  http://www.tvworthwatching.com/BlogPostDetails.aspx?postId=5284 

https://tableau.uchicago.edu/articles/2018/05/regarding-television 

FNB:  Woman in the House 

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8300xn  

5:23 :  the young independent woman 

20 min in:  are you lonely? Scene with young daughter 

25: ending 

 

Gitlin  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Gitlin 

 

Singapore Olympic coverage: 

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHtVfjejaNQ 

Roseanne:  2 clips: 

Beginning to 1:53 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIr1aZ0f4wA 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXOVZzDaRcY 

 

AITF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jYDpAf4XLM  (Archie meets Mike) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwwD0MwQo5w (gun control) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAhKZ-n3bes  (national anthem) 

 

Hendershot:  https://www.heatherhendershot.com/home/ 

 

Parks + Recreation 

http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/howtowatchTV/clips/parks-and-recreations-cultural-forum-1 

2/2 Gitlin Prime Time Ideology--Marina Massidda

 “The usual slants, then, fall into two categories: either (a) a legitimation of depoliticized forms of deviance, usually ethnic or sexual; or (b) a delegitimation of the dangerous, the violent, the out-of-bounds”(261). 

The depoliticization of deviance Gitlin refers to hinges on the location of such narratives within the private sphere. Television narratives at least superficially uplifting minority sexualities and ethnicities can thus propound the notion that self-actualization, the optimization of individual liberty and expression, “can be affirmed through the existing private commodity forms, under the benign, protective eye of the national security state”(265). While aesthetically deviant character representations and arcs can alleviate the threat of patriarchal authority to individual self-determination, they simultaneously subdue the societal grip of the same in the public imagination. Watching the episode of Father Knows Best, I felt soothed by the understanding that the protagonist is clearly capable of anything she sets her mind to, if not for the pesky societal expectations traditionally barring girls from engineering. It’s also interesting that her precocious desire to undertake a masculine vocation corresponds with her indifference to frivolous feminine articles like dresses, yet her inescapable feminine wiles are reaffirmed by her heterosexual attraction to her trainer. Their comical attraction seems to replace the oppressive authority of patriarchy as the obstruction to her unconventional career path, relocating a heteronormative battle of the sexes as benign, natural, and even desirable organization of roles. While progress within her desired field seems inevitable, the conventional femininity she seems to reject at the outset is reinforced as something intractable which lubricates her foray into a mens’ world.

Gitlin outlines the ways television predicts and responds to a mosaic of evolving tastes from a heterogeneous viewing population. This is part of the process by which television as an appendage of capitalism absorbs and domesticates the criticisms and contradictions of the capitalist model. While I absolutely agree with the way he describes this domestication in contrast to fascistic models, I have always been skeptical of the notion that commercial television responds primarily to changing audience tastes. Of course this has to be true to an extent, but I suspect the extent to which the industry manipulates public taste even in a heterogeneous sense is hugely underestimated. Programs, slants, broadcasting patterns and reformist sympathies in television evolve because novelty is baked into the capitalist model, rather than changing in step with an increasingly progressive social climate. I would like to know, if audience demands have any control over broadcasting/streaming releases whatsoever, how are these desire projected? How are we to know to want what has never been offered, say the portrait of the “regular hero” in Gitlin’s terms, such as a portrait of communist/anarchist rebellion freed from the abstraction of the supernatural or other forms of patriotic allegories?