Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  Certain names come up over and over in this chapter—names like Gelbart and Reynolds and Lear and Carsey. That’s because, as we revealed above, the industry is actually quite small, and influential figures can generate literally decades’ worth of top-notch entertainment. The most productive comic stylists are worshipped in the industry both for their creative abilities and for their willingness to push leftist politics.

  This is not a criticism of the creators. Their shows are (with a few exceptions) terrific. They bring joy to millions of people. They provide us connections with others we wouldn’t ordinarily have—how many people have become friends while debating the cosmic Ginger vs. Mary Ann question? They bind us to others, to our broader community.

  Nor is it even really a condemnation of the insertion of politics into programming. It would be nearly impossible for creators to avoid infusing their values into their work. That’s what makes the best television creators such phenomenal artists: they give us entertainment with meaning.

  That doesn’t mean we should take their products at face value. The entertainment provided by television doesn’t absolve us of the obligation, as informed viewers, to analyze what it is we’re putting in our heads. And what we’re putting in our heads is what a small group of people want to put there.

  YOUR SHOW OF SHOWS (1950–1954): JEWISH SOCIALIST PARADISE

  When Your Show of Shows hit the air in 1950, America was flush from her defeat of Nazism and Japanese fascism, in the midst of an economic boom unprecedented in world history. Americans felt confident, free, and patriotic. And why not? They were citizens of the country with the best government and best military and best economy on the planet.

  Your Show of Shows embraced the feeling of zany joy so many Americans felt in those days. Even as it did so, it provided a breeding ground for artists who focused far more on the dark side of America than on her tremendous strength, opportunity, and potential.

  Your Show of Shows, wrote New York Times critic Jack Gould, was “an island of engaging literacy in TV’s sea of vaudeville mediocrity.”2 Your Show of Shows, said Larry Gelbart, one of the writers on the show, was “pure platinum.”3 The variety show starred television legend Sid Caesar and drew enormous ratings for its entire four-year run—in fact, it was so successful that it spawned a spin-off in its wake, the eponymously-linked Caesar’s Hour (which ran for another three years). The show masterfully combined hilarious sketch comedy with soft social satire.

  The political importance of Your Show of Shows wasn’t the show itself—it was the creation of one of the most powerful germs from which television’s full-scale liberalism would eventually spread. The show’s writers all came from the same milieu: They were New York Jews, outsiders who wanted to be accepted but who undercut conventional mores with ironic humor. Politically they were liberal or socialist, and their politics mixed with their vaudeville and Yiddish theater heritage to create a new brand of humor that would come to define American entertainment. In the future, these liberal comedy geniuses would mentor a whole new generation of 1960s and post-1960s liberals who pushed leftist values far more openly in their programming.

  Sid Caesar himself was a mythical figure—he was a huge man physically, and on one occasion, he famously punched out a horse after it threw his wife from its back4—a Jewish giant from New York with a self-declared “radical-chic” socialist wife (Caesar, his wife said, was strictly apolitical).5 Springing from that culturally Jewish, left-leaning background, Caesar tended to draw his comedic stylings from his own experiences. “In a way,” Caesar wrote, “we were making Americans laugh at themselves and their foibles.”6 This is the essence of comedy, of course—by making Americans laugh at themselves, Caesar really had them laughing at their own values.

  Because Caesar came from a certain milieu, his writers also tended to come from that same milieu—how else could they genuinely channel his voice? And so the writers’ room on Your Show of Shows and on Caesar’s Hour was soon full-up with Jewish liberals from New York: Larry Gelbart, who would go on to write for M*A*S*H; Mel Brooks, who would go on to create Get Smart; Carl Reiner, who would do The Dick Van Dyke Show and The New Dick Van Dyke Show; Mel Tolkin, who would be a story editor on All in the Family; Woody Allen—yes, that Woody Allen; Lucille Kallen, one of Hollywood’s first successful female writers; Sheldon Keller, who would work on The Dick Van Dyke Show and M*A*S*H and produce the television version of The Odd Couple; Gary Belkin, who would write for The Carol Burnett Show; Michael Stewart, who would write the book for the Broadway musicals Bye Bye Birdie and Hello, Dolly!; and future legendary playwright Neil Simon.

  The writers’ room was a repository of New York Jews: “I don’t think there was ever a group so aware of their own psychological problems and others’, and that awareness found its way into the writing,” Gelbart explained. “We zeroed in on the rough spots in life—there’s no fun in happiness. Bliss is boring. Fortunately, none of us had that in abundance. One of the great engines for comedy is ambivalence, where you attack parts of something—or somebody—the worst parts of the human experience which, in total, you really love.”7 Here Gelbart lays bare the truth about comedy—in order for comedy to work, you have to love the target of the comedy.

  That ambivalence toward the human experience—and toward certain basic American principles—would later lead many of these writers to become instrumental critics of the status quo, infusing their programming with openly political messages designed to subvert the social structure. Growing up unhappy in small, cramped tenement houses in the Bronx tends to leave a significant imprint on people. It certainly did on these creators. It would leave an even bigger imprint on the next generation.

  THE HONEYMOONERS (1955–1956): BLUE-COLLAR CLASS CONFLICT

  I met with Leonard Stern, the creator of The Honeymooners and producer of Get Smart, in a penthouse apartment off of Wilshire Boulevard. This is expensive territory, and his apartment looked it—he had letters by Jefferson and other founding fathers framed and posted on the walls. Stern, a distinguished-looking elderly gentleman with a white goatee, greeted me warmly, then handed me a copy of Mad Libs—the fill-in-the-blank word game he invented—as well as a copy of a book of idiotic network censorship letters playfully titled A Martian Wouldn’t Say That.

  Stern was born in New York and attended college at NYU. While he was there, he started writing jokes for Milton Berle, who embraced the young student. Soon, Stern was writing stand-up for comedians all across New York, even writing a movie for Abbott and Costello. He then moved west to California to pursue opportunities as a screenwriter.

  Stern was a victim of his own success, however. Berle’s incredible drawing power put a significant commercial dent in the Hollywood moviemaking industry—people wanted to stay home and watch Berle rather than go out to the flicks—forcing the moviemakers to cut back production until they were virtually at a standstill. “I couldn’t get any work out here,” Stern recalled. Then his agent informed him that he could get a slot as a staff writer for The Jackie Gleason Show.

  Stern already knew Gleason. “When I first started,” Stern told me, “I was a joke writer, and Jackie was one of the many comics in New York always looking for material and meeting with writers.” They met in Los Angeles. That social relationship paid dividends (as it so often does in Hollywood). Stern stayed on the show for four years, where he introduced the long-form television sketch-cum-show, The Honeymooners, which ran a grand total of thirty-nine classic episodes in 1955 and 1956.

  The Honeymooners centered on Ralph and Alice Kramden (Gleason and Audrey Meadows), a bus driver and his wife. Ralph was a victim of capitalism, a guy always attempting to get rich quick. Alice was a tough wife, willing to take Ralph’s rage but also willing to give it back to him double. The Kramdens’ upstairs neighbors, the Nortons, were better off. Ed Lillywhite Norton (Art Carney) was a sewer worker and Ralph’s best friend; his wife, Thelma (Joyce Randolph), was Alice’s be
st friend.

  Of all of Gleason’s sketches, why did Stern choose to expand The Honeymooners? “First of all, family set up. Husband and a wife. And another couple. It was more traditional,” he said. So far, no surprises. Then Stern explained why the Kramdens really appealed to him. “It had enormous, to me, potential because there was no working-class show on television.”

  Poverty on television was, Stern believed, a necessary component of reality that simply wasn’t being reflected. “I didn’t think there was anything representing reality of most of the watchers,” said Stern. “Focus on the working class always appealed to me.”

  Stern particularly disliked television’s initial elitist focus. “Television was infinitely esoteric in the beginning,” he averred.8 That certainly wasn’t what Stern and Gleason were looking for. “In my part of Brooklyn,” said Gleason, “we had a million Ralph Kramdens.”9 That was reality.

  “The Honeymooners,” Stern summed up, “was a class distinction.”

  Stern’s class distinction in The Honeymooners paved the way for an entire line of comedies focusing on blue-collar workers: The Honeymooners turned into All in the Family, which turned into Roseanne. The evolution of the blue-collar comedy demonstrates the liberal attitude toward the lower-middle class: Stern treated them sympathetically in The Honeymooners; Lear treated them with acidic derision in All in the Family, since the left perceived such urban dockworker types as racist homophobes in the 1970s; and by the late 1980s, the left was attempting once again to reach out to blue-collar workers in an attempt to convert the newfound Reagan Republicans.

  THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW (1961–1966): THE PERFECT KENNEDY LIBERALISM

  The Dick Van Dyke Show is perhaps the most perfect sitcom ever broadcast. Dick Van Dyke as Rob Petrie and Mary Tyler Moore as Laura Petrie are the most captivating sitcom couple in television history. The program is easily the most universally worshipped comedy out there among television’s creators. But there was more at work with The Dick Van Dyke Show than simple laughs. If one show ever embodied an entire era, this was it.

  While The Dick Van Dyke Show is now perceived as a conservative show, it was in fact quite liberal for its time. It took the liberal (and morally praiseworthy) position on race relations; it reflected the nascent feminism of the time. It gleamed with that Kennedy-era optimism.

  Rob wore a perfect JFK hairdo. Laura wore a perfect Jackie Kennedy hairdo. Rose Marie played Sally Rogers, a single career woman who, along with obviously Jewish writer Buddy Sorrell (Morey Amsterdam), constituted the multicultural writers’ room for a Sid Caesar knockoff (played to hysterical effect by Carl Reiner).

  The moving force behind the show was Carl Reiner, who was both a star and creator of the show. Reiner was another Bronx-born Jew who got his break in Sid Caesar’s writers’ room. Reiner grew up in a lower-class neighborhood; his parents paid $22 a month in rent, and moved when the rent went up to $33 a month. His father, who was a watchmaker, was a self-made man in the traditional American mold; “my father would have killed himself rather than go on [relief during the Great Depression],” Reiner said. Reiner himself graduated from high school, then began working in a machine shop.

  He broke out of that rut by taking acting classes with FDR’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). Unlike his dad, he was perfectly willing to take advantage of government aid. That willingness launched his career.10 “I owed my show business career to two people,” Reiner later wrote. “Charlie Reiner, who prodded me to sign up for the free drama class, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who established the NRA, the National Recovery Act, and the WPA.”11

  One particular episode was deliberately and hilariously geared toward liberalism on racial issues. The third season of the show opened with an episode titled “That’s My Boy??” which centered on Rob’s paranoid belief that his newborn child may in fact have been switched at the hospital for the baby of Mr. and Mrs. Peters. Sheldon Leonard, producer of the show and another New York–born Jew, insisted that the payoff at the end of the episode would have the Peters walking through the door—and they would be black. Bill Persky, a writer on the show, later reflected, “We didn’t think it would be possible.” The NAACP took a look at the script before it aired, and signed off on it. Procter & Gamble, one of the show’s key advertisers, didn’t. George Giroux called up Leonard and told him, “We’re frightened.” Benton & Bowles also called up and tried to nix the script. Leonard talked them back from the ledge. Finally, CBS tried to reject the script wholesale. Leonard told them to shove it.

  When it came to the climactic scene, the creators had to decide how to play it. Director John Rich hit on the strategy: “We felt the only way the show would work was having Rob give control of the situation to the black man. What scared us was having Rob ask the black man, ‘Why didn’t you tell me on the phone?’—the exact question the audience would ask. The answer was, ‘And miss the expression on your face?’ That was the key. It gave control of the moment to the black man.” Rich wanted to make the black couple look good, so he held out for the best-looking couple he could find. He told them to stand and wait when they entered the Petries’ home. Mary Tyler Moore recalled, “The audience went crazy.” Van Dyke said it was the biggest laugh in the history of the show.12

  It wasn’t just Leonard who wanted to push boundaries. Mary Tyler Moore decided to take a stand with regard to her attire. “I immediately caused a stir in my style of dress. I wore pants,” Moore wrote in her autobiography. “TV wives didn’t do that . . . here again, television hadn’t quite caught up with the times.”13 It was while working on The Dick Van Dyke Show that Moore met and married Grant Tinker, the future NBC head and cofounder of MTM Enterprises, which would be responsible for many of the biggest shows of the 1970s and 1980s.

  As always, those involved in the making of the show cited its realism. “I was writing about what I knew,” said Carl Reiner. That was especially true with regard to including Rob Petrie’s work life in the show, a new and fascinating television development. “I was breaking ground without knowing it. But that’s why it probably worked, because it was one person’s reality. And if you do one person’s reality, there’s a pureness about it.”14

  Reiner’s focus on reality forced him to bump up against the censors repeatedly. The censors decided to crack down on one episode, titled “Where Do I Come From?” in which Rob and Laura’s son, Richie, asks the grave question. “They wouldn’t accept the fact that when the son asked, ‘Where did I come from?’ they actually told him, ‘You come from Mama’s belly,’ ” fumed Reiner. “And I heard: ‘No, no, no, no.’ I argued for days, and if I’d had -----you money, I would’ve left, I was so mad.”15

  This was the early 1960s, so Reiner lost; his vanguardism went unappreciated. But the rage he displayed at that relatively meaningless incident of censorship forebode the future of politics on television: When the gates opened, strident liberalism would come marching through.

  GET SMART (1965–1970): THE STUPID INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY

  Mel Brooks started off as a young writer on Your Show of Shows. A poor Jewish kid in New York, he made good by using a key schmatta salesman technique—bugging people until they buy something from you. He met Sid Caesar through a mutual friend, then shadowed Caesar everywhere. “He was funny and ingenious and he liked my type of humor, so he hung around me,” Caesar remembered.16 Soon, Brooks was hired.

  Like everyone else at Your Show of Shows, Brooks was a liberal. He brought that liberalism to bear when he created Get Smart (1965–1970), a parody of James Bond spy agencies, starring Don Adams as Agent Maxwell Smart—the kind of guy who has a phone in his shoe. According to Brooks, the theme of the show was “the earnest stupidity of organizations like the CIA. I would say honest and earnest stupidity. They want to do a good job. But they don’t hire enough [multicultural people]. They hire too many WASPs and they get too much white-bread thinking.” Naturally, he followed up that revelation with a stri
ng of invective against the current CIA: “They’re still out of touch. In a strange way, they’re still kind of supermen, kind of SS troops: We’re blond and the best and everyone else should be incinerated. . . . They don’t know right from wrong. That’s what makes a satire of these government bureaus really funny.”17

  Brooks said that Get Smart was supposed to channel feelings of rage against the government over the Vietnam War into laughter at the government. Buck Henry, cocreator of the program, agreed; the idea, he said, was that audiences could “see government espionage for what it really is, an idiotic enterprise glamorized by Hollywood.”18

  Dan Melnick, the cofounder of Talent Associates, a production company responsible for the leftist social-issue drama East Side/West Side starring George C. Scott, originally came up with the idea for Get Smart. Melnick wanted the show to be a social satire. ABC was so put off by the pilot—one executive reportedly stated that it was “dirty and un-American”—that Melnick, along with Brooks and Henry, had to go back to the drawing board.19 What they came back with was much more innocuous. It was so innocuous, according to producer Leonard Stern, that Melnick brought back a revised draft with the statement, “If you don’t like this, you can have your money back.” ABC hated it, and Melnick gave the money back. Eventually, NBC picked it up.20

  When I spoke with writer Allan Burns, who worked on the show before getting his biggest breaks with Leonard Stern at Room 222 and then The Mary Tyler Moore Show, he chuckled at Brooks’s interpretation of the show as true social satire. “Obviously it was a CIA-type organization which is very inept, but if anybody had ever said, ‘This is a parody of the ineptness of the CIA,’ I would have been surprised because that’s sort of post-show thinking. I think Mel sounds like he’s trying to make it a little smarter than it was.”21 Rather, the show was supposed to parody the country’s obsession with spies in shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and I Spy.