The Public Policy

...Alien's comic sense is most acutely shown in the individual scenes and dialogue...

...But for the kind of diversion you would hope to see in the lounge at Caesar's Palace, it is superb...

...That has its humor to a small audience, but even to that small audience, it has a slightly self-hurting quality...

...He is asked who Nixon was...

...He makes funny what is commonplace in life by looking at it in an exaggeratedly serious way...

...He has also been known to call the mentally retarded either "goofballs" or '~halfwits" while in their presence...

...It does not work...

...The vast majority of television viewers are teenagers and preadolescents...

...My own feelings on this trend are that the pap, however nauseous, was inestimably healthier for the nation...

...This much, however, is clear--All in the Family and its brethren on the boob-tube will produce neither better thinkers nor more responsible citizens...

...There is, I must admit, no satisfactory answer...

...Or so producer Stanley Kramer informed the home audience by way of introduction...

...He and Keaton chase each other around the operating theater and generally try to inject slapstick into a decidedly cerebral situation...

...S/eeper is the adventures of a man who went into a hospital for a routine stomach operation and was instead frozen in a time capsule...

...He has her sing a song when she joins a group of rebels against the modern superstate: Rebels are we, Born to be free, Like fish in the sea...

...By now, almost everyone is familiar with Archie Bunker, the program's main character, who each weekend thrills the nation with his portrayal of typical blue-collar American conservatism...

...Iris girlfriend, Diane Keaton, tries to bring him out of it by imitating Marion Brando's Stanley Kowalski...

...The movie then, as the sum of its parts, is transitory, full of "in" jokes, and uneven though it has its funny moments...

...The list of funny episodes is long...

...The best example along these lines is entitled M*A*S*H...

...The show has a live-in son-in-law who serves to highlight the absurdity of Archie's viewpoint...

...As everybody knows, S/eeper is Woody Allen's latest cinematic venture...

...Still later, Allen, asked by Keaton what he believes in, says "Sex and death two things which come once in a lifetime...

...The "I~ader" of the society has been killed by a rebel bomb, and only his nose was found in the wreckage...

...Dissolve now to the trial itself, which, according to the network and Kramer, involved a sensitive and bewildered couple being railroaded to the electric chair by a nefarious, paranoid government (prominently featuring future McCarthy aide Roy Cohn as an assistant prosecutor) and a collection of confessed-spies-turned-porjurers, out to get the Rosenbergs to save their own skins...

...One might even argue effectively that if the American public enjoys this type of humor, then they are getting precisely what they want, and what they deserve...

...That is a funny joke to people who know Shanker from his teacher's union leadership role in New York City...

...Originally a motion picture, M*A*S*H(an acronym for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) features a group of funloving doctors and nurses doing good deeds near the front lines of the Korean War...

...On the contrary, there are now several regularly scheduled programs which boldly beam their message across the nation, tackling controversial subjects and ideas previously deemed taboo by stuffy little minds...

...In the near future, for example, ABC plans to present the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti as part of its Judgment series, and if their treatment of the Rosenberg case is any indication, you can be sure the he,work historians will have a great deal to say about the victimized Italian Clods" Narcotic anarchists of the twenties...

...It is high time we sent them packing...

...Finally, the victims march together to their execution, while Kramer, in a voice slickly concerned, ties everything together by saying that although the Rosenbergs have died, '%istory will yet have its say...

...For example, when Archie raises a working man's cry against high prices and inflation, the son-in-law immediately points out that Nixon is responsible, and that things would have been much different had McGovern taken top prize...

...Watergate, you may be sure, comes in for a full measure of critical treatment...

...From the very beffimfing, the show served notice that it would strive to be "controversial," "thought provoking," "intelligent" drama...

...The Public Policy by Peter J. Rusthoven Analyzing the A FEW WEV.XS AGO the American Broadcasting Company presented a special program entitled Judgment: The Trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg...

...Trapped in an economic system geared against the little man, he has cheated and lied about working-class friends who might threaten his job security, and in one memorable episode made a transparent attempt to falsify his income tax return in order to help make ends meet...

...If such was your memory of the event, however, ABC's little prime-time drama did its very best to disabuse you of such a m~'r and simplistic view...

...The Talkies Sleeper SLEEPER IS A Szechuanese movie...

...There is nothing wrong with attempting to make television shows more realistic, and today's viewer probably no longer considers I Love Lucy an acceptable reflection of his world...

...It is profoundly unsubstantial except in the most transitory way...

...Ihere are other lovable, funny characters in this series, but I think one can see already the major themes of this mature new adult comedy...

...But where Lucy was merely mindless, M*A*S*H and its ilk are actively pernidons...

...They will yield, at most, a little more cash for those wonderful men who have learned to exploit the sophomoric cynicism which these shows peddle as the new American wisdom...

...Allen is told that there was a great nuclear war caused by "someone named Albert Shanker getting hold of a nuclear warhead...

...In contrast to Pierce and McIntyre, they are very much in favor of both the army and the war...

...Allen makes enormous fun of ,Diane Keaton, his inamorata in the movie, and she takes it without much of a whimper...

...The heroes are a pair of doctors, Captains Pierce and McIntyre, who are cleverly and drunkenly cynical about life in general, and about the army and the Korean War in particular...

...Near the end of the movie, Allen and Keaton are in an operating theater for an attempt at a truly funny concept...

...After the stern cold warrior of a judge sentences the pair to death, the scene switches to Sing Sing, where Julius and Ethel exchange sentimental love letters (read outloud for the benefit of the audience), while an angry world cries Sauvons Les Rosenberg to a barbaric and unyielding America...

...Again, terribly funny, but oh, so chic...

...His interchanges as a pathetically weak man with sexy, demanding women have a quality which sometimes approaches the Chaplinesque, but his resentment of women is so pronounced that it narrows the appeal of the sequences far beyond what Chaplin realized with his idealized, pedestalized women...

...It is too topical, too fluffy...

...In a few years, certainly in a decade, it will have lost its humorous appeal for all but those with a really extensive memory for nostalgic trivia...

...These shows, you see, are part of television's new wave of hard-hitting, mature adult programming--which means, of course, that they are situation comedies...

...One need not, however, remain silent-for the sooner the public grows weary of this trendy trash, the better...

...They have been asked to "clone" a person from a nose...

...There are any number of opportunities yet in store for you...

...Still, the movie has its hilarious moments...

...Still, it is too much like a Las Vegas night club act...

...In short, All in the Family, one of the highest ranking shows in the Nielsen ratings, presents each week a humorous half-hour of at/ hominum argument against the working conservative...

...Major Burns is given to telling native Koreans that they should be "grateful for our coming over here to save the American way of life in Korea from Communism," or similar nonsense, all intended to expose our idiotic motivation for intervening in the conflict...

...When his time capsule is thawed out, Allen, who plays the leading character, is found to have been wrapped in wrinkled aluminum foil, just as hamburgers are wrapped when put into a freezer--aluminum foil for science fiction, ho-ho...

...The Korean War, you see, was really just an early Vietnam, over which our dumb, bumbling country got all worked up with foolish idealism and equally foolish fears about communism, and then proceeded in its obnoxious way to interfere with the peaceful lives of a group of Asians who were really wiser than all of us...

...Indeed Allen's movie is so heavily by Benjamin Stein focussed on New York that parts are almost regional jokes...

...Where almost all of the audience could empathize with Chaplin's love and worship of women who seemed to be far above him, a far smaller group might understand Allen's falling madly in love with women whom he hates and is disgusted by...

...They are also the program's resident boobs and patsies...

...That is a funny idea, and giggles are evoked just by the sight of the solitary nose on the operating table in a huge operating theater...

...Now, most of you probably recall the Rosenbergs as the husband and wife who were convicted of, and eventually executed for, espionage behalf of the Russians in connection with the United States atomic bomb project at l_~s Alamos...

...Even the self-selected audience which cannot help but love themselves shift uneasily in their seats...

...The Alternative April 1974 23...

...One can only guess at the effect of week-in, week-out exposure to this tripe on their view of this nation and its history...

...S/eeper is a movie whose appeal is to the few, and its appeal is only brief...

...It has been kept alive in the hope that the "Leader," white suit, white tie, white shoes, and "Dry Look" hair-do, can be recreated...

...After all, most of us have seen things on television with which we disagree, but what exactly is one supposed to do about it...

...He can set a scene which is hysterically funny at first glance, but he often does not seem to know how to get out of it...

...But Allen does not seem to know what to do with it...

...In his work as a director though, Allen is, most clich6d of all words, uneven...

...An appreciative audience laps it up...

...As M*A *S*Hpresents our past, so All in the Family, the first of the new hard-hitting, adult TV shows, gives us comic perspective on our present...

...One might fairly ask, of course, what all this has to do with public policy...

...But anyone interested in television's view of our past and present need not search his daily newspaper for occasional announcements of special programs...

...The 22 The Alternative April 1974 cure of government censorship would be considerably worse than the disease, and is clearly not even to be considered...

...It obviously takes a rather small group of people to think that showing a bitchy, demanding woman is, on its face, funny...

...He is thawed out two hundred years later into a society which is only superficially different from the one he came from...

...Major Houlihan, on the other hand, is a '~Regular Army Clown," anally fixated about things like rank and regulations and medals and such, even though there's a war going on and people are out there dying for no good reason...

...Primarily it works for the same reason that most of Allen's jokes work in Sleeper--Allen kno~s his audience...

...Why then, you may ask, did the jury convict...

...But how many people know about that...

...If some of you are regretting your failure to witne~q this particular version of history having its say, you need fret no longer...

...Sometimes his misogyny, even when it breaks through the outer limits, and deep into the heart of male chauvinism, is funny though...

...Each week the audience is treated to their repertoire of snappy one-liners on these topics, and is left to reflect, through its chuckles, on what a silly country we were for letting the neanderthals who run our armed forces interfere in the personal business of some formerly happy Koreans...

...They seat him, in a drugged state, at a table and two of them pretend to be his mother and father talking to him in heavily accented English, generously laced with Yiddish phrases...

...Cloning" is the process of developing a complete organism from a single cell...

...It is a cheap shot, but it works...

...In that joke Allen sums up the feelings of frustration of a larger body of people whose lives are demarcated by frustration and envy...

...Burns and Houlihan are also revealed each week as Bible-spouting hypocrits, cuddling up in their tents even though Burns has a wife back home all of which shows how much you can trust those idiots who strut patriotism and morality...

...Lest you think the pro-army view is unrepresented, allow me to present Majors Frank Burns and Margaret Houlihan...

...The networks seem inordinately proud of them, and talk of a "new maturity" which permits such programs to replace the pap which formerly saturated the airwaves...

...An examination of two of the most popular of these shows should demonstrate what I me'an...

...His interrogator says that the only thing that archaeologists can figure out about him is that he must have been a person who was once a leader, but did something so horrendons that all written evidence of him has been expunged...

...Kramer followed this with a little discourse on the '~hysteria" gripping the country in 1951 while the trial took place, as behind him a mushroom cloud slowly blossomed and then faded from the screen...

...The movie, for example, lacks the elements of truly lasting humor which are present in the Marx Brothers movies...

...Of course, the Koreans Burns talks to are all very clever, perceptive, inscrutable types, who respond to him with insightful witticisms like 'We thank you from the bottom of our bomb craters," yuk, yuk...

...The live audience usually registers its approval of such bon mots with prolonged, knowing laughter...

...Similarly, Allen's constant harping on his Jewishness is funny to those familiar with that kind of humor, but to the huge mass of Gentiles in this country, it might appear at best unfamiliar and at worst sick...

...At one point, for instance, people in 2173 are trying to reorient Allen to his life in 1973...

...When he is shown artifacts of the 1970s, he describes them in ways which are quite predictable, but nevertheless always draw a laugh...

...It is delicious, tangy, and satisfying while you are watching it, but it leaves nothing behind...

...Allen suddenly goes into a trance and imagines that he is Blanche DuBois, from A Streetcar Named l:lesire...

...All this was tragic, of course, but at least with the aid of some clever young men who saw through it all and realized how truly meaningless the whole patriotic trip was, our folly can be exposed through laughter...

...And there are, supposedly, more such "specials" on tap...

...Allen is the feckless-looking comic impresario who at thirty-five is the envy of everyone who looks like a schlemiel but knows that he has what it takes to be a movie superstar, if he could but be discovered...

...Archie, when he is not stating his affection for "Richard E. Nixon" (s/c), is fond of referring to black women as "mammies" and their sons as either '%oys" or "spades...

...According to Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear, innovators of the new approach to TV comedy and producers of the show, this political viewpoint involves about equal portions of bigotry and ignorance, and very little else...

...You cannot help but laugh, even if you wonder why Allen likes her so much...

...It is a small group of selfselecting, self-reinforcing young people who are familiar with current events and modes, especially with goings on in New York...

...a half-hour sitcom on CBS each Saturday night...

...Stirring stuff indeed for a Monday evening...

...But Archie is really a victim himself, or so the show's "deeper" moments would have us believe...

...Very simple--the Rosenbergs took the F-;fth Amendment when asked if they were members of the Communist Party, and, of course, the hysteria-gripped men and women of the jury considered that the equivalent of a plea of guilty...