Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  Stern was even more forgiving: “It may have evolved into [a Cold War parody], yes. I thought it originally was a spoof of James Bond, and that’s why it didn’t work well initially in England, because they considered James Bond a spoof.”22

  Whether or not Stern believed there was social messaging inherent in Get Smart, his own shows were chock-full of such messages. I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster, a series about two construction workers that lasted for one season on ABC, “had a lot of social content,” according to Stern.23 Stern’s next show, He & She, was a precursor to the urban shift of the early 1970s—but Stern hit a bit early with it, in 1967. The show starred Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss as a married couple; he was a cartoonist (as was Stern in real life), and she was a social worker. They lived in a New York apartment, and the upper-middle-class urban milieu and attitudes were purely Democratic. The pilot of the show opened with Prentiss trying to stop the immigration service from deporting an old man; naturally, she succeeded.

  “I think it was one of the most enjoyable experiences I had, a very rewarding show that did well,” Stern recalled, “but we came after Green Acres, and we were totally incompatible.”24 Allan Burns, who wrote on that show, too, remembered that the show was killed by its urban sensibility and rural timeslot. “It was such a good show, and we couldn’t understand how a show of this quality could be canceled after a year.”25

  THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS COMEDY HOUR (1967–1969): ’NAM AND ’SHROOMS

  Take two clean-cut brothers with a comedy act and give them a variety show. What could go wrong?

  Everything.

  Tommy and Dick Smothers were a pair of liberals who decided to use their newfound slot on television to press the liberal agenda in a way nobody had ever tried before. The show got on the air because Abe Lastfogel of the William Morris Agency approached CBS chairman Bill Paley and told him he needed to target younger audiences. Paley bought it, and bought the Smothers, two of Lastfogel’s clients. Of course, CBS’s desperation had something to do with it—The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was a last-ditch attempt to counter the juggernaut that was Bonanza.26

  Originally, according to writer and producer Ernest Chambers, Tommy, who would become the more vocal of the two brothers on politics, “knew nothing about any social issues . . . he was a pothead folksinger.” But the writers began to educate him. Smothers himself told author Allan Neuwirth, “We didn’t become politically conscious until that show happened, during the mid 1960s. . . . When we got the greenlight for the variety show, we wanted to be relevant.” Allan Blye, one of the key writers on the show, helped push the show to the left: “They didn’t just do political satire—they satirized the right by exhibiting the right.”

  Soon enough, the brothers were embroiled in a censorship battle with the network. They wanted to push the envelope further and further in terms of content. Their first full-scale run-in occurred when the brothers wanted to host Communist songwriter Pete Seeger, who would sing “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” a criticism of the Vietnam War. Prior to the show, the network received five thousand letters of protest. They censored the song but let Seeger on the program.27

  Things only grew worse from there. The show embraced the drug culture; they hired a comedienne named Leigh French to host a recurring sketch called “Tea With Goldie,” in which French played Goldie O’Keefe, the host of a pre-Oprah talk show. In that role, she openly pushed the Haight-Ashbury pot lifestyle. She opened the sketch with the pun, “Hi! And glad of it.” She told audiences that she had gotten rid of “unsightly roaches”—then said thank you to audience members who had sent her their roaches.28

  In the end, it wasn’t the drugs that did in The Smothers Brothers—it was their vocal opposition to the Vietnam War. As they got bigger, they got more and more strident. Said Blye, “At one point I said, ‘God, here we are. We’re number one.’ And Tommy said, ‘Yeah. Well, now we’ve gotta start hitting a little harder.’ Then it became less disguised, let’s put it that way. And more on the nose . . . and being on the nose was less effective, in my eyes.”29 Their sketches were anything but subtle. When radical leftists rioted at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and were beaten back by police, The Smothers Brothers ran a sketch with Harry Belafonte singing “Don’t Stop the Carnival” as they showed footage from the riots.30

  Mike Dann, VP of programming at the time at CBS, told me the show was “very sophisticated stuff for teenagers, and very dirty, a dirty show . . . the kids just exploded for it.” Dann also said that he had to cancel the show because of pressure from President Johnson. “I was forced to cancel The Smothers Brothers at one point because they were so anti-Vietnam,”31 he told me.

  The show was short-lived—it only lasted from 1967 to 1969—but it opened the door to what would come next: the era of open leftism masquerading as entertainment.

  LAUGH-IN (1968-1973): SOCKIN’ IT TO THE RIGHT

  George Schlatter is a jolly fellow, a comedian among comedians, with offices off of Beverly Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Walk inside, and you’re in showbiz central. There are signed pictures of every conceivable celebrity, a framed invitation to Nixon’s inauguration, pictures of Schlatter, solidly built and wearing a thick Vandyke, alongside stars like Goldie Hawn, mugging it up with the cast of his show, Laugh-In. It isn’t tough to tell Schlatter’s politics—he’s got books by Al Franken and Chris Matthews lining his walls—and one of Ann Coulter’s books. On his desk, he’s got a “Bushisms” calendar, as well as an unopened “Bush in a Box” set of Bushisms.

  If his office didn’t tell me where Schlatter stood on politics, the man himself wasn’t shy. “I miss political commentary on television,” he told me. “When the funniest thing on television is Sean Hannity and his impression of Gilbert Gottfried, you realize what a sad state we’re in. And some of the funniest stuff now is news. Bill O’Reilly, the loofa king, sexually harassing an employee on the phone at two o’clock in the morning, offering to bring his bony ass over there and play in the shower with a loofa, that’s as funny as anything I ever did. Rush Limbaugh, this balloon buffoon, who should have a cable up his ass being floated over the Macy’s day parade, taking this moral position as the head of the Republican Party, I find that to be hysterical. You have this man, this convicted junkie, who sent his housekeeper out to score pills, is a moral leader of the Republican Party? Just stop it. I find Rush Limbaugh funny. And Ann Coulter, of course. We would have no need for the c-word without Ann Coulter. That word would fade out of existence. And Laura Ingraham I like a lot—how a woman can live with no lips? I know them. I find them all amusing. You know Michael Savage? You know what his real name is?”

  “Michael Weiner,” I answered.

  “Not Weiner, Weener,” he guffawed. “Michael Weener. And now you have Glenn Beck, with these two bright blue contact lenses that give him these blue kind of deer-in-the-headlight surprise look, I find him really amusing. It’s almost too easy to make fun of them. Making fun of Sean Hannity is like making fun of a cripple in a crosswalk. And Rush Limbaugh? Come on. I picture someone behind him with a pump, stick a fork in him and he’d deflate.” Schlatter came back to Coulter, who he obviously found fascinating: “Ann Coulter could be one of the main reasons we should legalize abortion but make it retroactive. This salesperson for bulimia, who can open a beer can with an elbow, she only weighs nine pounds—I’m all for freedom of speech but I draw the line there.”

  Schlatter’s politics were no different when he produced Laugh-In, a hit variety show that revolutionized both political content and style on television, holding down its slot on NBC for five seasons and finishing number one for the first two seasons. The show, starring Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, a pair of comedians, was a quick-cut festival, with sketches running one after another, bam-bam-bam-bam, with no letup. “Laugh-In was a pure television show,” Schlatter related. “It was a combination of burlesque, of vaudeville, of theater, of motion picture, of circus, of
carnival.”

  It was also a political festival. “The sixties was the Vietnam War, the pill, the Beatles, and Laugh-In . . . you could take the sixties in rewind and say that’s what shaped the sixties,” said Schlatter. “The pill changed everything; the war changed everything and made us aware of our vulnerability and made us aware of our guilt for having gone in there and destroyed a nation just because we could. . . . If we were on the air now, boy, we would be cutting it up real big, the fact that we never learn. This monosyllabic brain donor took us into a war in Iraq and we bought it. We’ve got to defeat them, right? Weapons of mass destruction. He was the weapon of mass destruction.” It’s difficult—and useless—to attack this much fatuity piece by piece. But this monologue gives an idea of how Laugh-In was structured: it was so much, so fast, that no matter how much was unfunny or offensive, the sheer volume overwhelmed the senses.

  Schlatter insisted that the show was balanced in its politics. “Jokes on the left and then on the right.” Evidence of that supposed balance was the presence of Paul Keyes, one of Nixon’s joke writers. “We did not agree with Paul Keyes at all,” Schlatter said, “but he was a very effective writer . . . he gave us that serious right-wing point of view that we would use to balance the political comment on the show.” Keyes’s greatest triumph was Schlatter’s biggest regret—Keyes got Nixon to come on the show during the 1968 election in an attempt to cast off his stodgy image. Nixon appeared for approximately four seconds, questioningly uttered the show’s catchphrase—“Sock it to meee?”—and that was that. But the appearance apparently had a major effect on the course of the 1968 election. “They said it elected him,” Schlatter lamented, “and I’ve had to live with that ever since.”32

  ROOM 222 (1969–1974): THE LAUGHLESS COMEDY

  “You must be Ben,” said Ann Reynolds as she welcomed me into her home. “Gene will be back any second.” Gene Reynolds’s house was a cozy one-story colonial-style home in the Hollywood Hills off Sunset Boulevard. As we waited for Gene to return from a lunch with some of his business friends, his wife regaled me with stories about Gene’s television career—and colorful commentary about her strong dislike for the Bush administration.

  When Reynolds returned, he brought out a folder of pictures from his early days in Hollywood. Reynolds had been around since the beginning—the beginning of the beginning. After starring in several films as a child actor, he began to work on the other side of the camera. He eventually landed a job in casting at NBC, then parlayed that into a directing slot.

  The idea for Room 222 came from a program instructor he had at Poinsettia Playground in Los Angeles. “I made him a history teacher at a high school that was integrated, and that he would be black,” Reynolds told me. “And it would be the first time not in a comedy show or a cop show that you had a serious lead who was black.”33

  The time was ripe for this sort of television show. A spate of movies about urban schools—many of them with black leads—had exploded onto the American landscape, asking challenging questions about race and the efficacy of the educational system (To Sir, with Love with Sidney Poitier being the most obvious example of the genre). The Kennedy glow had dissipated with his assassination, and liberalism had moved into heavier and darker territory. Race relations was the issue of the day.

  But race relations was no laughing matter. That’s why unlike prior comedies, Room 222 was a dramedy, perhaps the first of its kind. There weren’t many open laughs. There also wasn’t any interracial sexual tension on the show. There were, however, lots of topical issues covered, from Vietnam to gender roles to racism. All were covered from a typical Democratic perspective—tolerance, understanding, and multiculturalism always won the day.

  Reynolds worked with two of the people who would become heavy hitters in the industry: James L. Brooks and Allan Burns. Burns signed on as a writer after Brooks recruited him and ended up running the show after Reynolds was ousted. “We put on a show that had an equal number of blacks and whites,” said Brooks. That, Brooks said, was a priority.34 The network’s big problem with the show sprang from its take on race—its sincerity made it unfunny. It had to be that way—Reynolds felt that “because [the main character] was black, it was important that we didn’t make him a clown.”35

  “The networks weren’t [looking for social content]. The writers were,” Burns explained. “The writers were leading the networks at that point because they wanted to write stuff that was more socially conscious. . . . You really had to fight them on it.”36

  Despite the network battles, Reynolds drew enormous pride from the product. “I know that Room 222 turned a corner,” Reynolds said to me.37 In racial terms, it clearly did. More than that, it emboldened the creators of the show for their next steps: M*A*S*H for Reynolds, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show for Brooks and Burns.

  ALL IN THE FAMILY (1971–1983): FLUSHING CONSERVATISM DOWN THE TOILET

  The opening episode of All in the Family featured a warning from CBS: “The program you are about to see is All in the Family. It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter we hope to show, in a mature fashion, just how absurd they really are.” Then the warning disappeared as, for the first time on network television, the audience heard a loud and sustained toilet flush.38

  “In the beginning—of television comedy—in the beginning was the word,” Larry Gelbart later wrote, celebrating All in the Family. “And the word was Don’t. Don’t show life as it is, don’t show people as they are, and don’t, under any circumstances, allow anyone to talk in any way that resembles how anyone actually talks. Polish ’em up, button ’em down. The less human, the better. . . . And then it happened. One amazing night, Archie Bunker went to the can. And from off-camera—could it be true?—we heard him flush! The gurgling of the plumbing at 704 Hauser reverberates to this day; flushed with a vengeance forever were network and sponsor timidity about human imperfection and all manner of hypocritical detritus. The seat went down and the lid was off.”39

  Never before or since has a show so clearly stated its objective: the mocking of traditional values, the shocking of the bourgeois, the full frontal attack on authority. And never before had a show so quickly established its style: loud and vulgar.

  If that wasn’t enough, All in the Family’s theme song, “Those Were the Days,” made the target of the show even more obvious. “Girls were girls and men were men,” Archie Bunker and his wife, Edith, warbled every week. “Mister we could use a man / Like Herbert Hoover again. / Didn’t need no welfare state, / Everybody pulled his weight / . . . Those were the days.” This has all the subtly of a frying pan in the face. The theme song clearly suggests that conservatives live in the past. It suggests that conservatism is backward-looking, nostalgic, fearful of change, and unintellectual in the Lionel Trilling sense—a series of “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” It is scornful, caustic, a liberal’s gritty picture of what conservatism constitutes—and it set a pattern for portrayal of conservatives on television that continues to this day.

  All in the Family was a liberal breakthrough, and it was meant to be. Archie Bunker was the stand-in for conservatives, a moron with a loud mouth and prejudices up the wazoo. His son-in-law, Meathead, was the stand-in for liberals, a stand-up guy who fought Archie’s narrowmindedness at every turn. Only rarely would Archie score a point—and even then, it was usually at the expense of Meathead’s laziness or loafing, not his politics. All in the Family was a new kind of show for a new time. It was a seminal point in the launch of the hip, urban programming toward which television had been aspiring. When CBS greenlit All in the Family in order to reach out to supposedly more valuable urban audiences, it opened the door to the total takeover of liberal television.

  The show also recast the television vision of the blue collar worker. In The Honeymooners, the blue collar guy had been the hero, the Don Quixote in search of the bu
ck. In The Beverly Hillbillies, the hicks had been the protagonists, and their lifestyle was contrasted favorably with the rich and famous lifestyle surrounding them. Now, for the first time, the blue-collar guy was the villain, and his son-in-law, the aspiring graduate student, was the hero. While All in the Family had the trappings of the lower-class comedy, it was actually an elitist approach to politics.

  There was a reason for this. In 1968, poorer, blue-collar workers voted disproportionately for George Wallace and Richard Nixon, in contravention of their history of voting Democrat. By the time All in the Family hit the air, liberal anger at the lower-class voter was rising to the surface; the true liberals, in this new view, populated the college campuses, as Mike did. This was a groundbreaking shift, and it paved the way for hostile depictions of lower-class whites for the next two decades, until Roseanne broke the barrier again.

  The show clearly reflected the politics of those who created it. Norman Lear, who ran in the same social circles as the liberals who populated the comedy writers’ rooms of shows like Your Show of Shows, was a product of his background. He experienced anti-Semitism in the army, and he was reflexively interested in infusing his social responsibility in his programming. All in the Family, he said, gave him the opportunity to infuse social messaging, and he took advantage—just as he did in all of his work. “They all had a great deal of social awareness,” he said of his shows. “I’m a serious man. . . . Life is a serious matter. But I see it through a prism that finds comedy in anything. A gift from the universe.”

  Comedy, in other words, was a vehicle for Lear’s politics. That comes through in almost every episode. One of Lear’s favorite episodes was “The Draft Dodger.” “The Vietnam episode was a Christmas episode,” Lear recalled. “[Archie] invited a friend, and Mike invited a friend. Mike’s friend had gone to Canada to escape the draft, he was a draft-dodger. And when Archie learns this at the dinner table, he wants him out of there. . . . There was an explosive scene.”40 The scene in question is indeed explosive—and as always, it puts Archie squarely in the wrong. “He owes explanations to the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Commander in Chief, the President,” Archie shouts at the draft-dodger.