by Guy Branum
5. The first-best part of our trip was this ride for kids, Knott’s Bear-y Tales, which smelled like boysenberries. While a very fun ride on its own merits, it was primarily distinguished by the fact that my six-year-old cousin Robby LOVED it. Robby was, traditionally, an animal whose basest instincts could not be held in check by the strongest of mid-1980s ADD drugs. However, he loved that fucking ride. It was, it seemed like, the only time I saw him enjoy a thing that wasn’t violent. My mom took him on the ride like fifteen times, and for a brief moment, his savage breast was soothed. Also, the boysenberry smell was nice.
6. The next time you’re ready to complain about the war on Christmas, ask when was the last time a CVS reminded you how many shopping days are left until Yom Kippur.
7. You’re going to need to accept that my experience of Judaism was something very distinct from your understanding of Judaism. My grandmother’s ancestors emigrated from Germany to New Orleans, the heart of America’s ham basket. They became peddlers in Arkansas, a place which then had little infrastructure for the practice of Judaism. My grandma’s dad pissed someone off and he became dead to his family. Without kith or kin, he went native in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and became a sharecropper. They could rarely afford meat, and what they could afford was traif. Ergo, you will find a deeply inconsistent but passionate construction of the laws of Kashrut from my mother and grandmother in these pages.
8. The 1980 World Book Encyclopedia volume M was my closest personal friend between the ages of seven and eleven. This relationship will be discussed in greater detail later in the book.
BOTHERED AND BEWILDERED
I DO NOT KNOW when I first realized I was from a bullshit1 tiny farm town, but I remember looking at a road sign for Butte House Road, the road that led out of Yuba City and into Tierra Buena, the area where we lived, and misreading it as “Butter House,” then thinking, “That’s not a name for a place that matters.” As I was not yet a capable reader; I would have been four or so.
It is probably Sesame Street’s fault. Sesame Street in the 1970s was obsessed with trying to help inner-city children understand that there was a wider world out there where eggs and milk came from. I remember watching a segment about a crying, screaming baby in the city and the process by which milk got from the country to him. The sadness of the baby was too much for me. Frankly, I hope the people behind that segment are reading this so that I can properly register my complaint: There were too many steps in the milk production and transport process. The milk took forever to get to that baby2; it was Precious levels of pathos.
But the point is that Sesame Street wanted city children to know what the country was like, but they had no interest in placing any other children in context. The “country” they presented was a Willa Cather cliché: farmhouses surrounded by acres of wheat, no one in sight for miles. Sesame Street could realistically portray the emotional life of an eight-foot-tall canary, but it had no idea how rural people lived, loved, or socialized; it imagined them as mythical beasts whose only interest was producing milk for that crying baby. It seems that disregard for the agrarian proletariat is a timeless hobby for everyone in a capitalist system, even Children’s Television Workshop producers. Never trust anyone in a Volvo.
I would ask my mom a lot whether we lived in the city or the country. Of course, I knew that Yuba City was nearby, but even though the word “city” was in its name, I also knew it wasn’t really a city and we didn’t live in it. Yet, contrary to what Sesame Street depicted, we also weren’t isolated from other houses by miles. There were, indeed, houses next to us, but across the street and behind us were orchards (peach and almond, respectively)—which I’d never seen on TV. Pomoculture has no place in the American popular imagination, I guess.
My mom answered me by saying we lived in a “rural area.” What a useless answer. This was exactly the kind of too-precise response that she was always giving me for my too-precise questions—something wholly outside of my frame of reference that would force me to go out of my comfort zone and learn something about where I lived.3 Damn her.
What I learned, in the end, is that I didn’t want to live where I lived. Where I lived was hot, dull, and full of people who were angry at me. It was kind of like hell, but with fewer gay people. The place should have been a boy-child’s paradise, with all the gunplay, roughhousing, and messiness, but I found it excruciating. I knew there was a better, cleaner, more organized world somewhere else. I knew this because, ironically, I’d seen it on TV.
Living in a rural area, my family did not have access to cable television until I was sixteen. You see, there weren’t enough people near us for it to be financially sound for the cable company to lay cable out to us. Civilization, it seemed, was a volume business. What this means is that for most of my childhood, my primary tools to learn about the wider world were the five to seven channels we could get with our TV antenna.
Let me tell you about the world on TV. It was sophisticated and full of well-dressed people saying interesting things and living in houses with few or no rats in them. Let me tell you about living in an almond orchard: There are a lot of rats. Rat food is literally falling from the trees for six months of the year. And when it wasn’t rats, it was their somewhat more sartorially engaged cousins, the ground squirrels, who were constantly seeking refuge in our attic like tiny, even more hirsute Dutch Jews.4 We didn’t have cats because we wanted them; we had them because they were the thin, furry line between us and an army of rodents full of the healthy fats and calcium of California almonds. So the general absence of vermin and livestock from the lives of people on television was spectacularly appealing to me. I wanted into that world.
And the 1980s were a glorious time for sitcoms. America’s thirty-year uncontested dominance in the Western world, Reagan’s sweeping tax credits, and Bill Cosby’s ability to keep his serial sexual abuse under wraps combined to create a nation that was ready to make sweet, sweet love to the mythos of its middle class. Family Ties, The Cosby Show, Growing Pains, and serried ranks of mediocre imitators presented this real America where no one was engaged in manufacturing or agricultural work. Everyone went to college. Problems were simple and solved in a half hour. Checks never bounced unless it was due to a hilariously contrived misunderstanding, and dads were never unemployed for more than an episode. It was heaven.
But before I watched 1980s sitcoms, I watched sitcoms from earlier eras. In my observation, there are three kinds of television all kids like: Kids watch cartoons, they watch shows with singing and dancing, and they watch old sitcoms. We know these things, but we don’t really think about them. Let’s take a moment to think about what aspects of a kid’s life these entertainments are speaking to. Well, except for the singing and dancing shows. We know why they like them: Children are dumb and you don’t need to know anything to enjoy watching Kelly Clarkson sing or Rumer Willis and a Russian guy do a paso doble. Also, they’re really good.
Cartoons are fantastically absurd illustrations of the basic power relationships of our culture. The ones I grew up with were obsessed with the dynamics between predators and prey. A mouse always outsmarting the cat trying to eat him, a rabbit always outsmarting the hunter trying to eat him, a roadrunner always outsmarting the coyote trying to eat him. When I was a child, this disturbed me greatly. Wile E. Coyote never got to eat. Never. I know that, intellectually, we’re supposed to imbue the roadrunner with personhood and be shocked by the idea that a coyote would want to eat him, but a child from a farm doesn’t have the privilege of psychological dissonance on this point. Some animals eat other animals (and even I, as a human, am one of those animals that eat animals). Somehow Looney Tunes was expecting that the only way Wile E. Coyote could be a morally upright individual was to subvert his very nature and starve.5 While I had no idea at the age of four that I was gay, I was nevertheless recognizing and being disturbed by the very same warped cultural sentiment that would demand virginity of me until law school. Way to foreshadow, Chuck
Jones.
Culture for children is obsessed with animals. Anthropomorphized creatures dominate storybooks, cartoons, and the world of Disney. Even before that, baby books are teaching you animal names and the culturally sanctioned sound that each barnyard animal makes. But who is the audience for these books? Most children saying “The pig says oink” will never meet or spend significant time with a pig, and those of us who had periodic social contact with a chicken could have told you what it “said” from firsthand experience.
Pardon me for a moment while I digress from my digression. To children on a farm, chickens are not cartoon creatures concerned that the sky is falling. To us, they are the enemy. Chickens are assholes. When I was four, it became one of my daily duties to go collect eggs from our chicken coop. This meant that every day, I had to stare down a rooster while I prepared to steal his unborn progeny from his harem of concubines. This rooster, descendant of the velociraptor, at nearly three feet tall, with feet that nature had seen fit to equip with little knives, didn’t seem like a fun cartoon; he seemed like my equal—my nemesis. Every day, as I did my Mom-given duty, he would peck and claw at my shins, and every day I would wish him, and all his smelly, dumb chicken concubines, ill.
Periodically, one of our dogs would find its way into the chicken coop and kill all the chickens. Every time this happened, my singular thought was “Vengeance!”
Less than a year ago, I was holding my three-year-old niece, Ali, and we saw a red-tailed hawk snatch a sparrow out of the sky. We discussed what had happened, and then I asked her if the incident had upset her. Ali gently placed her hand to the side of my face and said, “Uncle, hawks eat birds.” It wasn’t drama. It was nature.
I guess what I’ve been trying to say since two digressions ago is that children’s media is obsessed with animals because animals help children make sense of the hierarchies and orders in the world around them. Coyotes, cats, and men in fur caps are hunters; bears and wolves are scary; and cows, chickens, and dogs are domesticated animals you can befriend and talk to. The observed world that Ali uses as a basis of understanding—that is, a world of rural farm life—doesn’t exist for most kids, so those kids have to learn to place themselves in the world through stories about animals who can stylize the orders in their own lives. Kids in suburban Dallas can’t necessarily watch a fox snatch eggs from their chicken coop, so they must learn what a fox is, and what it represents, from Swiper the Fox taking Dora the Explorer’s backpack. These primitive, exaggerated archetypes help them understand their own place in life. As small, weak creatures, children can identify with the small, weak prey, and imagine for a moment that they might subvert the power dynamics like Road Runner, Tweety Bird, and Jerry always manage to.
What does all of this have to do with old sitcoms?
If cartoons and children’s books about animals are an attempt to educate children about their place in their family and the biological order from which humans emerged, old sitcoms are repurposed culture through which kids learn about the world they’re going into. Or, more simply, old sitcoms are used by children as a primer on sophistication.
You might be ready to dismiss all of my experiences as outdated and meaningless, unrelated to the lives of the cool young people of today, but kids are still watching these shows. My niece watched the entirety of M*A*S*H one summer and recently plowed through The Office. Tina Fey just told a story on Late Night with Seth Meyers about her eleven-year-old daughter watching all of The Andy Griffith Show. So my point is super-valid and contemporary, just like me.
One could respond, “Well, of course kids like sitcoms. They are silly and fun.” This is missing the point. The point is that the old sitcoms that kids are watching have little to do with the contemporary world. Kids therefore consume them differently: alone, alongside sitcoms written specifically for children, as opposed to watching with their family, the way they watch contemporary sitcoms.
So why are kids watching sitcoms with Nixon jokes or references to MC Hammer or the McDLT? I think the reason is twofold. First, you’re learning what adults are talking about. Encapsulated in the judgment of a joke are dense lessons about specific pieces of culture: Barry Manilow is lame. Brad Pitt is handsome. “I have a girlfriend who lives in Canada” is a thing sad guys say to seem cool. When I watched The Brady Bunch for the first time, I didn’t know who fucking Davy Jones and Joe Namath were, but I can now reference them as the cultural icons they will eternally be.
Where did you learn what Harvard was? With the exception of children born to Crimson alumni or faculty, I’d hazard a guess that you learned it from a joke on a sitcom, and if you’re Gen X or Millennial, that joke was probably on an old sitcom. It’s where we learn the things everyone knows. Even those kids whose parents were on the Harvard School of Divinity faculty did. What did they learn from their real-life experiences? Harvard is where Mom works. Harvard is a place in Cambridge. Meanwhile, on TV, particularly on situation comedies, is where you learned Harvard means smart.
The other, more important function old sitcoms provide is a large volume of simulated adult social interactions in which kids learn about expected behavior in a low-stakes environment. Remember in WarGames when Matthew Broderick is trying to teach the war computer that not all games have a winner and loser? He makes the computer play tic-tac-toe over and over again, and then it starts simulating nuclear wars. Then it realizes that no one wins a nuclear war, so the world is saved only to go back to the Cold War for another eight years of crippling Defense Department spending.
What I’m saying is that cartoons are tic-tac-toe, and old sitcoms are simulated nuclear wars.6 Old sitcoms involve people outside of your understood cultural context clues having a polite struggle or misunderstanding, and then someone within their group has enough social savvy to solve the problem at hand. To illustrate, let us go to America’s most beloved and prestigious sitcom: The Facts of Life. Tootie is obsessed with Jermaine Jackson, so she abandons a scholarship fair to go to his concert, then sneaks into his dressing room only to discover that Jermaine Jackson has nothing to say to her. Also, the papier-mâché bust she made for him is destroyed out of concern that it may be a bomb. Then, wise, noble Mrs. Garrett explains that fanatical obsession with pop stars is something that happens to teenage girls—she was obsessed with Sinatra in her day—but one mustn’t let it overwhelm their identity. Everything returns to normal, and then they do it again. When I watched this, I had no idea who Jermaine Jackson was, nor Sinatra, nor scholarship fairs. I was able to piece together what they meant as cultural symbols, and accept the cultural lesson: Don’t be a teen girl who sneaks into a pop star’s7 dressing room.
So why old sitcoms? One issue is volume: Network sitcoms have traditionally been disseminated in sums of twenty to twenty-six per year. That’s fewer than one every two weeks. Old sitcoms, however, are just lying around, being broadcast six times a day on the Oxygen network. You can get through a lot of human interactions that way. The other issue is that they are removed enough to be safe. Black-ish may be asking necessary and relevant questions about race in the present day, but old sitcoms are discussing questions that are well settled. Alex P. Keaton does speed to get good grades, but learns drugs are bad. Jessie Spano does speed to get good grades, but learns drugs are bad. Cherie plays in a refrigerator, nearly suffocates, and Punky Brewster must use CPR on her before we learn playing in refrigerators is bad and knowing CPR is good. They are like law school casebooks for everyday life that we give to curious ten-year-olds.
So why sitcoms? Why can’t old prime-time dramas do the same work? I would argue that they are not as interpretable by children. Dramas require that you react to the facts being given, and that you use your own knowledge of human interpersonal dynamics to identify the central conflicts. Sitcoms don’t. They have constant metatext going on in the form of jokes. In the pilot of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Phyllis’s daughter Bess says, “Aunt Rhoda’s a lot of fun. Mom hates her.” The irony in the joke allows it to pack concen
trated knowledge about these characters. Rhoda is fun, Phyllis hates Rhoda, Phyllis hates fun, Phyllis’s job in future scenes will be to hate fun, Rhoda’s job in future scenes will be to piss off Phyllis.
The much scourged laugh track is astoundingly helpful, too. Like the dramatic overpronunciation of instructional language recordings, it tells you when to identify tension in language. Mary asks, “You lied to me?” Rhoda says, “You betcha!” and the laugh track sounds. This is not how normal life works. But it’s funny—as disarming as it is informative.
Sitcoms make knowing human nature a fun game, but they also provide an important window into other lives, with an emphasis on what makes those lives like yours. The sets of multicam sitcoms so frequently place the center of the perspective in the center of the living room, in front of the couch, where the sitcom family’s (or young gal in the city’s) television would be. It is, then, a type of fun-house mirror for your parents’ living room.
The first old sitcom I fell in love with was The Dick Van Dyke Show. It played every day at noon and twelve thirty on one of the stations in Sacramento, so during the summers, my mother would give my sister and me our lunch, and we would forget the heat of a Sacramento Valley summer and the phalanx of rodents mounting an offense on our attic by transporting ourselves to New Rochelle in 1962. My mother gave this show to us as if it were a gift. It was the only family sitcom her father had allowed his children to watch. He apparently found the domestic simplicity of The Donna Reed Show too distant from his family’s impoverished, alcoholic reality, but he couldn’t help himself with ol’ Dick Van Dyke.8 The show was just too funny.