American Situation Comedy Series - The Provisional Results of My Review

[Lat-Literal]

Well, sorry to see that your fears are keeping you from traveling to a Country that so obviously interests you. I was a bit surprised from your post to find out that we don’t have a Health Care System, seeing as how when I leave my house after drinking my English Tea and checking in on the English Cultural scene I earn my daily bread toiling away in it, but perhaps my dementia has arrived and I am just imagining this. Well, as long as they keep paying me it’s a most tolerable illusion.
Gun fears are real, but it’s more a matter of perception; you wouldn’t believe the number of people that I’ve talked with that won’t go to the U. K. because they are afraid of being mowed down by a truck driving ISIS member outside of Westminster.
Seriously, one can get temporary health care coverage here from plans that are sold via the Internet or Travel Agents. Gun violence is in the main confined to areas that for most will not be touring attractions, and at the National PArks you have more to fear from being eaten by a hungry Bear than from gun violence. Why not sign up for a guided tour that will steer you clear of danger zones?
Life’s not a Spectator Sport, LL.

Thank you for your kind invitation. To be frank, there is another reason. I always thought they would think me a bit strange and not let me in when I arrived on that basis. I do take the point about life not being a spectator sport - it's a good one and my life hasn't always lacked involvement but I haven't been anywhere abroad since early 2006 plus I have parents who are not many years off 90. Your other comments about healthcare and perceptions of urban violence are probably fair. But a friend of mine went on a trip alone to the States. While happily camping in the National Parks, he cycled into LA and got out very quickly as he just didn't like the atmosphere there. I would be similar. I'm quite blasé about the prospect of being eaten alive by a wild animal but am strongly opposed to being shot as a matter of principle. One point I was going to mention is that it is surely Jewish people who have been at the forefront of America's best comedy. That is the impression I have. Rightly or wrongly, I think of American comedy as being in many ways Jewish comedy. That's all for the good.

[Lat-Literal]

Clearly not, since where is The Larry Sanders Show ?

It uses the F word too much.

[teamsaint]

Seems to me that visiting american national parks actually is( broadly) a spectator sport, albeit probably a very pleasurable one.

[richardfinegold]

Seems to me that visiting american national parks actually is( broadly) a spectator sport, albeit probably a very pleasurable one.

Much better spectated by being there as opposed to viewing from the telly

[Stanfordian]

This list will be changed on the basis of any convincing arguments put forward :

01 The Phil Silvers Show/Bilko
02 Cheers
03 The Big Bang Theory
04 Get Smart
05 Mister Ed
06 The Bob Newhart Show
07 Dennis the Menace
08 Police Squad
09 Mork and Mindy
10 The Golden Girls/The Golden Palace
11 The Simpsons
12 I Dream of Jeannie
13 The Addams Family
14 Bewitched
15 Frasier
16 The Munsters
17 The Flintstones
18 Rhoda
19 Taxi
20 Alf
21 Benson
22 Soap
23 The Nanny
24 Happy Days
25 The Andy Griffith Show
26 Everybody Loves Raymond
27 The Monkees
28 Chico and the Man
29 The Mary Tyler Moore Show
30 Leave It To Beaver
31 Green Acres
32 Mash
33 The Dick Van Dyke Show
34 Gilligan's Island
35 I Love Lucy/The Lucy Show
36 Roseanne
37 All in the Family
38 Barney Miller
39 The Jeffersons
40 The Wonder Years
41 Seinfeld
42 Murphy Brown
43 Gomer Pyle
44 F-Troop
45 Spin City
46 Evening Shade
47 My Favourite Martian
48 3rd Rock From The Sun
49 The Adventures of Pete and Pete
50 Dharma and Greg
51 The Beverly Hillbillies
52 Phyllis
53 Something Wilder
54 Hazel
55 Car 54 Where Are You
56 Wait Till Your Father Gets Home
57 Mr Belvedere
58 Valerie
59 Petticoat Junction
60 Becker
61 Perfect Strangers
62 Cybill
63 What's Happening
64 Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
65 Make Room For Daddy
66 Family Affair
67 Night Court
68 WKRP in Cincinatti
69 Malcolm in the Middle
70 Dream On
71 Who's The Boss
72 Bakersfield PD
73 Married With Children
74 Welcome Back, Kotter
75 My Three Sons
76 Sanford and Son
77 Mad About You
78 Maude
79 Home Improvement
80 The Facts of Life
81 Hogan's Heroes
82 Punky Brewster
83 Coach
84 Silver Spoons
85 Laverne and Shirley
86 Three's Company
87 The Odd Couple
88 Kate and Allie
89 Alice
90 Will and Grace
91 News Radio
92 The Burns and Allen Show
93 My Two Dads
94 Dinosaurs
95 The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
96 The Partridge Family
97 Everybody Hates Chris
98 Family Ties
99 Full House
100 My Name is Earl

Hiya lat,

Can't stand American TV Comedies for some reason.

As a child I would watch 'Top Cat'. I didn't like it much but there was so little choice back ten. A cartoon cat living in trash can, I ask you!

Ha! I'm just off to watch 'Love Thy Neighbour' or maybe 'On the Buses'.

[Lat-Literal]

Hiya lat,

Can't stand American TV Comedies for some reason.

As a child I would watch 'Top Cat'. I didn't like it much but there was so little choice back ten. A cartoon cat living in trash can, I ask you!

Ha! I'm just off to watch 'Love Thy Neighbour' or maybe 'On the Buses'.

I accept that not everyone likes them. That's fine. You will know that there is an overlap between "Top Cat" and "Bilko". On cartoons specifically, I think it is generally considered that "The Flintstones" is a sitcom, "The Simpsons" is a sitcom and "Wait Till Your Father Gets Home" is the sole sitcom in between them on the time line. I'm not sure why that should be. Originally I thought it was animal cartoons that were excluded from the category but it wouldn't account for the absence of "Wacky Races" and others. If I find out more, I'll say.

"On The Buses" is fairly early in the history of British sitcoms. It's enjoyable in a rough and ready way. I think its time has come round again. I find it funnier now than I remembered it and probably funnier than I would have found it in the 1990s. Doris Hare was only eleven years older than Reg Varney in real life even though they were mother and son in the series.

I'm currently wading through a few American ones I had missed - "Caroline in the City" and "Veronica's Closet" which are both acceptable - and "Blossom" which, dare I say it, is aimed at teenage girls. But here's a curiosity. "Head of the Class". In its final series it regularly featured Billy Connolly but this episode, "Mission to Moscow", is from the third series and it was recorded at the time of Bush v Dukakis. It was ground breaking in its way. That is, it's the first episode of an American sitcom to be filmed entirely in the Soviet Union. While it is full of clichés - not least, it is the Americans who win the competition - and there is a strand of paranoia running through it, the sense of optimism about the new openness is palpable. A lot of water has flowed under various bridges since but it reminds me of my outlook towards Glasnost etc at the start of my working life and I tend to hold onto it even in the present day.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2xpzyf

[pastoralguy]

I've been through the list 3 times now and I fail to see 'Friends'. Surely the greatest of US sitcoms ever! (I may have developed word blindness though).

[Stanfordian]

I've been through the list 3 times now and I fail to see 'Friends'. Surely the greatest of US sitcoms ever! (I may have developed word blindness though).

Hiya PG,

I can't see the appeal myself of friends sitting around on café sofas but you are right 'Friends' is immensely popular especially with my children and many other friends.

What about the 'Cosby Show', very popular in its day but maybe in view of Cosby allegations repeats are now being been shelved. Then there is the much loved 'Sex in the City'.

[vinteuil]

.

... I don't recognize many from Lat's original list, praps coz we didn't have a telly when I were little.

But I thoroughly relished (still do when repeated)

. Frasier
. The Simpsons
. Taxi
. Soap
. Third Rock From The Sun

.

[Lat-Literal]

I've been through the list 3 times now and I fail to see 'Friends'. Surely the greatest of US sitcoms ever! (I may have developed word blindness though).

Hiya PG,

I can't see the appeal myself of friends sitting around on café sofas but you are right 'Friends' is immensely popular especially with my children and many other friends.

What about the 'Cosby Show', very popular in its day but maybe in view of Cosby allegations repeats are now being been shelved. Then there is the much loved 'Sex in the City'.

May I refer my honourable friends to post no 10, part of which reads:

"The Cosby Show would have been included but given all of the hoo-ha around Bill Cosby now, I no longer know what to make of it. Series involving allegations of misconduct such as Two and a Half Men and Martin have been left out. Frasier has a pretty good placing even though I came to it late. I was initially wary of it because it was a spin-off from Cheers which was almost an iconic extension of my young adulthood, just as Friends became for a later generation. I have never understood the latter series or really wanted to understand. Mash is a fascinating one because it seemed too advanced for me when it was originally broadcast and in some ways unfathomable. Hence, I delayed it but I am finding it good to watch now".

For Friends, see also Sex and the City.

.

... I don't recognize many from Lat's original list, praps coz we didn't have a telly when I were little.

But I thoroughly relished (still do when repeated)

. Frasier
. The Simpsons
. Taxi
. Soap
. Third Rock From The Sun

.

A sophisticated selection.

It's just a damned shame that you have not only missed seeing several on the list but presumably the brilliant Banana Splits.

[Lat-Literal]

More from "Not Yer Average Comedy Thread":

Dick Van Dyke

He's still alive and was 92 in December in spite of having had a neurological condition for a decade, needing rescue from a car fire in 2013 and having to be on a nicotine withdrawal programme for the last 10 years. A New Deal Democrat, who had not actively campaigned for a candidate since Eugene McCarthy in 1968, he publicly endorsed Bernie Sanders as his choice for the Democratic candidate in the 2016 US election. In July 2016, Van Dyke said of Donald Trump, "He has been a magnet to all the racists and xenophobes in the country, I haven't been this scared since the Cuban Missile Crisis. I think the human race is hanging in a delicate balance right now, and I'm just so afraid he will put us in a war. He scares me."

Draining the Swamp

I was intrigued to hear the phrase "draining the swamp" being used widely in an episode of sitcom The Addams Family about an election in the mid 1960s. Mr and Mrs Addams were worried that a candidate was going to get rid of their alligators by misunderstanding his political intentions for "draining the swamp". Trump's famous reference, which harks back to Reagan in 1983 and is now widely used, was probably first used publicly in 1903 in a letter from Winfield E. Gaylord, State Organizer, Social Democratic Party, Wisconsin: "Socialists are not satisfied with killing a few of the mosquitoes which come from the capitalist swamp; they want to drain the swamp." However, its origins may have been earlier. Victor L Berger, a writer in that state, had been producing comment since the 1800s although much of it wasn't brought together until "Berger’s Broadsides" in 1912: "It cannot be avoided any more than malaria in a swampy country. And the speculators are the mosquitos. We should have to drain the swamp, change the capitalist system, if we want to get rid of those mosquitos."

One year later, labour organizer Mary Harris “Mother” Jones used the same phrase in a similar context. The next main reference is by another woman Agnes Maude Royden in her book "Sex and Common Sense": "Drain the swamp, and you get rid of the malaria, for there is no longer any place for the malaria-bearing mosquito to breed. Drain the swamp of immorality, and you get rid of venereal disease, because there is no longer a place where these diseases can breed". She would have been on every chat show in the 1960s had she been around.

Ironically, there is a huge gap until 1960 (Panola Watchman (Carthage, TX), “Anderson’s Platform For America,” "Bills to limit the ceiling of the Federal income tax are just swatting flies when we need to drain the swamp" (Tom Anderson, editor of Farm and Ranch magazine—ed.) and 1963 (Port Angeles (WA) Evening News, Letters to the editor, "Congress is not going to repeal socialistic programs one at a time. Instead of swatting mosquitoes, we need to drain the swamp"). Then it's another small leap to 1970 (A newsletter issued by the Kansas Cooperative Council includes this observation regarding procrastination over new farm legislation and its importance to farmers: “When a man is up to his shorttail in alligators, he has difficulty reminding himself that his initial objective was to drain the swamp.”) and 1971 (Blind Man on a Freeway by William Moore, California - "When one is up to his ass in alligators, it is easy to forget that his original objective was to drain the swamp". Here it becomes almost colloquial although nowhere near as commonplace as in the Twittersphere : the uneasy use of the word "one" alongside "ass" is a hoot but would no doubt have been dropped - and possibly given the state of its origin a precursor to Reagan's famous use of it in 1983.

That is, unless he and the latest President were influenced by The Addams Family. After all, Reagan was in showbiz and it was by far and away the most accessible of these references.

[richardfinegold]

The Dick Van Dyke show was a homogenized (I.e., less Jewish and made more palatable for Gentile taststes) sitcom that derived from Your Show Of Shows, an early 1950s, Live TV show with Sid Ceaser as the headliner. Dick Van Dyke show (DVDS) was created by Carl Reiner, who was a writer on YSOS. Other writers for YSOS included Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Neal Simon, and several other young Jewish Comics. One can only imagine the material that this melting pot produced Reportedly the best jokes that came from this group never made it on the airwaves, fearing censorship.
Anyway, DVDS attempted to capture some of this hilarity and put a white bread face on it, in the talented star and Mary Tyler Moore, who was a terrific comedic actress

[MrGongGong]

'Big Bang' and 'Frasier' share that great delight of comedy programmes, the unseen character -

You might like this

Foucault, Freda Fry and the power of silent characters on the radio, from Rebecca Wood, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham in the Department of Disability, Inclusion and Special Needs
Abstract
The Archers is a much-loved soap opera which relies entirely on audio outputs: on actors speaking, and listeners listening. Despite this, 15 silent characters are quietly listed on its website, constituting an astonishing 12.5% of those catalogued. And that doesn’t even include those naughty Button girls. In fact, from Rosaline in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, to Godot in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and not forgetting Tracey the barmaid in Eastenders, silent characters have long played a crucial role
in drama, an influence all the more acutely felt if they are unseen as well as unheard. Meanwhile, informed by the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty, Acheson (2008) describes the profound role non-speaking can play in some communities. Similarly, if Foucault argued that language cannot be separated from power, his idea about ‘pauses’ indicates that silence can permit truths to emerge (Humphry, 2013). Using key examples such as Freda Fry and Sabrina Thwaite, invoking philosophies of language and silence, and drawing comparisons with non-spoken communication such as Brian’s newspaper rustling and Lynda’s sniffs, I will explore the expanding role of the silent characters in The Archers, and suggest they have an influence and potency in the storylines that speaking actors should envy.

http://www.academicarchers.net

The conference is this Saturday

[Richard Tarleton]

(I.e., less Jewish and made more palatable for Gentile taststes)

Were/are you a fan of Seinfeld, richard?

[richardfinegold]

Were/are you a fan of Seinfeld, richard?

By the time that Seinfeld came out, I had stopped watching television completely. However, since my ex wife was addicted to television on the order of 12 hours a day, and since my children liked Seinfeld, I’ve seen several episodes .
Seinfeld was 25 years after the Dick Van Dyke show, and attitudes in the States and elsewhere about ethnicity had changed dramatically. When Dick Van Dyke aired there no non white characters on any television here