As a kid, my parents pretty much raised me on old sitcoms. They considered it their duty to educate me on the greatness of the American television of yesteryear. And so, I eagerly watched as Lucy tried for the millionth time to be in Ricky's show, as Grandpa Munster performed another zany experiment on Herman, and as the skipper failed at another harebrained attempt to escape the island.
Then, there were the shows from the seventies. These were shows like "All in the Family," "The Jeffersons," and "Sanford and Son" (for anyone reading this who is older, you are probably questioning my parents' decisions).
I actually watched these shows when I was about fourteen or fifteen, and a lot of it went over my head. Many of the episodes focused on controversial political and social issues of the time such as racial discrimination, the Vietnam War, and abortion. I didn't always understand the references, and some of the humor was a bit dated, but I still grew to respect what these shows were doing. Maybe the humor was a bit crude or didn't hold up over time, but they were trying to explore controversial issues in a thoughtful yet amusing way to perhaps help Americans approach such heated topics.
Humor can help diffuse tension, and America was sure experiencing a lot of tension exiting what had been one of its most tumultuous decades in a century. There had been riots and protests over the war in Vietnam, racial and gender discrimination, and economic injustice. The Chicago Riots of 1968 (sparked by the assassination of Martin Luther King) left eleven people dead, and over 2,000 imprisoned.
Just a few years later, the fictional Archie Bunker and his neighbor George Jefferson would engage in racist banter played up for comedic effect, including the occasional use of the "n" word.
Keep in mind that this was aired on primetime television.
This was groundbreaking. Sitcoms before "All in the Family" never used racist or sexist jokes, and they certainly never used the "n" word. It was considered uncouth. You simply didn't talk about racial discrimination or gender discrimination on television. People watched TV for entertainment.
The genius of shows such as "All in the Family" was not to use racist jokes to appeal to a more bigoted America. In fact, its point was exactly the opposite: racial humor was used in a subversive way to comment on racial issues in America. Archie Bunker represented an older, white, working-class American trying to deal with the social changes of the sixties and seventies. The commentary was very subtle. In fact, the show in no way tried to make Archie Bunker look hateful, or even always wrong. He was simply a well-meaning man struggling to adapt to a changing society. "All in the Family" wasn't always trying to give you a point of view, it was just using humor to paint a picture of an America irreversibly changed by the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of the New Left.
This is very different from the entertainment landscape today. Not only is any kind of thoughtful political satire or sitcom not on the airwaves, (with the exception of maybe "South Park"), but, when entertainment media tries to inject any politics into its format, all that results from it are far from creative, unfunny, and narrow-minded opinions.
I think an example that perfectly illustrates my point is Cracked.com. For those of you who haven't heard of it, Cracked.com is a humor website. I found many of their articles funny and entertaining. Lately, however, I've begun to notice an increase in more politically-oriented content. And I don't mean political satire, like what you would see on The Onion, for example. I mean political propaganda.
Take the following article and video on gun control:
"The 4 Most Meaningless Arguments Against Gun Control"
"How Gun Control Made Australia Safer Than America"
Do those titles sound even remotely funny to you?
I'm not trying to start a debate about guns. That's not the point. The point is that the authors on this site use a platform that primarily is about humor, not about any kind of thoughtful political satire, but feature a snarky and one-sided article that makes any supporter of the second amendment look like an uneducated cowboy.
Contrast this with Archie Bunker, who is made like-able to show that bigots are people too.
Cracked isn't the only media to do this. Rolling Stone (whose title now accurately reflects the rate of its declining readership) has been writing explicitly political articles for years now, most of them with the same pretentious, hysterical tone. The articles are all vehemently left-wing, as if its somehow impossible to like Rock n' Roll and the Republican Party at the same time.
Buzzfeed, a site that was originally made for humorous videos, lists, and quizzes, suddenly began producing news articles and editorials that spewed out populist leftist thinking.
The Best of Tumblr, a Facebook page that posted humorous Tumblr posts, soon became flooded with the shrill cries of radical feminists.
Why does this frustrate me, do you ask? As much as I'm obsessed with politics, I really don't care to go on a website meant for entertainment only to be met by such stringent political opinions. Just what exactly is the reason for bringing politics into what should be a place for amusement? Especially if these opinions are so, well...opinionated?
Some of you may just be thinking, "Well, Shant, of course you'd complain about this. You're conservative, and these sites happen to be liberal. The problem is you just don't want to hear political views that are different than yours."
Well, Norman Lear, the man behind such shows as "All in the Family" and "The Jeffersons," was an unapologetic liberal. But he was able to create television that people from all over the spectrum could appreciate.
The brilliance of "All in the Family" was that people from both sides of the political aisle could watch it and learn to laugh at themselves, and in the process, perhaps become more sympathetic to the other side.
In my humble opinion, we should look back to shows like "The Jeffersons" and "Maude" to see how comedy and mass media can really make us think about political issues, rather than forcefully shoving whatever the political zeitgeist is down readers' throats.
Perhaps if we stopped looking at one side as angels and the other as demons, and saw that there was a little bit of the fool in all of us, maybe our fractured political landscape would begin to heal.
