Hacker Cinema
The Honeymooners
1955 · TV series · 30 min episodes · 1 season
Created by Jackie Gleason
A bus driver and his sewer worker friend struggle to strike it rich while their wives look on with weary patience. One of the most influential situation comedy television series in American history.
3 positive8 neutralfrom 11 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
11 comments on Hacker News
So I love watching 50s-70s television shows: honeymooners, I love lucy, twilight zone, alfred hitchcock, Mission Impossible, Columbo. (recent MeTV lineup).
I'm a millennial. It occurred to just the other day, the language they use, they say "dough" a lot. They need dough. Where's the dough. Any criminal is always involved with gambling and gangs and they need dough! And the normal working people storylines are pinned to their lack-of-dough situations.
I remember the internet very fondly too. There's always an age of innocence but it just takes time to realize everyone just really needs and wants dough. And that's what happens.
> Social decay is a real phenomenon
Calling this decay is an incredibly short sighted view of the actual changes that are happening. Kids used to grow up in toxic households with parents fighting and hating each other. Just look at old TV shows like Married with Children and The Honeymooners.
Now they grow up with an absent parent. I'm the latter and I'm really happy my parents chose divorce over keeping up appearances and giving me a shitty life. Domestic abuse in general has also been on a pretty steady decline because of the decrease in societal pressure to stay married.
Herman was even described as having "the mind of a child" in one of the episodes. The plots often revolved about some childish scheme that Lily tried to put a stop to.
MwC was definitely the oafish husband, again with the childish schemes, much like Ralph in the Honeymooners. It's just a raunchy version of the Honeymooners.
ILL is a rare exception - a reverse Honeymooners.
P.S. I still enjoy watching these shows. Especially the Munsters. Herman always makes me laugh.
It sometimes beautifully worked across seasons as in "The Puffy Shirt" (where George becomes a hand model).
I think this was mostly Larry David's work. Jason Alexander once mentioned in an interview that after David left, this "dovetailing" of story lines kind of stopped, and I tend to agree. David continued it (even more pronounced) in "Curb Your Enthusiasm". Even the golf ball twist was kind of repeated - in extreme form and with a baseball - in "Curb".
Side note: another early TV show that often pulled this off to great effect was "The Honeymooners". I think this is the show that had the most influence on Seinfeld. Ed Norton is basically Kramer, Ralph Kramden is basically George, Alice is Elaine, and Alice's mother is Newman (you can also map "The Honeymooners" characters, and even entire plot lines, to "The Flintstones", but that is another story, and AFAIK Jacky Gleason, the creator of "The Honeymooners", considered suing Hanna-Barbera in the 60ies).
Jerry Seinfeld himself once said that we should wait and see if "Seinfeld" is still funny in 50 years like "The Honeymooners" (that was 20 years ago).
"Fawlty Towers" also did this very well.
The key joke and catchphrases for one of the most popular television shows of the era (The Honeymooners) was about a husband threatening to physically assault his wife ("One of these days, Alice, right in the kisser! Bang, zoom, to the Moon!)
Everything's a composite. Unless there's a writers room book on it (and I don't think there is), anything else is speculation.
In the context of comedy, to be specific, she seemed to be a composite of the Maxwell car and Rochester from the Jack Benny Show mixed with the 1950s sitcom Beulah. The sarcastic Yiddish Brooklynite is a generalized trait that got put on a bunch of characters (Ethel Mertz, the honeymooners, bugs bunny, Frank Nelson, the mother-in-law etc)
Maybe there's a definitive interview in some trade magazine somewhere. It's not as immediately direct as "The Flintstones is The Honeymooners"
The Flintstones was in effect an animated remake of popular live-action TV series The Honeymooners, with the stone-age setting as just an added quirky facade to get easy jokes out of. It was, needless to say, never meant as an actual reference to any actual stone-age.
Compare this to, say, Dinosaurs, which (while in many ways similar to The Flintstones) had actual references to contemporary events and phenomena.
:)
I guess the Fortran programmers from 1960 might be at least somewhat familiar with Fortran 2008, but I suspect the gulf would be wider than a spoken language change. If I watch an episode of the honeymooners, the parts I don't understand are cultural, not linguistic.
The author blames the modern sitcom's remoteness from working and lower-middle class concerns with their creators' immunity from the recent recession. In place of everyday situations, we have shows set in "soundstages and writers’ rooms," the haunts of the out-of-touch in New York and LA. So you wind up with a show with this sort of genesis:
Our creator was once a prominent writer and performer on a comedy sketch show, which aired live every Saturday night from an NBC studio in New York. It ran for 90 minutes. After their time on the show came to an end, our creator decided to pitch a sitcom based on their experiences there. The lead character is the head writer on a comedy show, similarly produced in New York. They must balance their work in the writers' room and their personal life, though this turns out to be difficult. A pilot is made, and our creator plays the lead.
Modern viewers may recognize this as 30 Rock, but it is in fact The Dick Van Dyke Show. It is based not on SNL but on a direct ancestor, Your Show of Shows. Carl Reiner's performance in the pilot may have dissuaded executives from casting him in the commissioned series (hence Dick Van Dyke), while Tina Fey remained the lead in her own version. But otherwise the parallel rings a sight near perfect.
The author stumbles over himself insisting, however, that while The Dick Van Dyke Show did not give vent to working and lower-middle class concerns, it did at least feature characters who "had careers" and were definitely of a class. As if the same were not true of shows like 30 Rock (which is at times obsessed with class difference), or of Parks and Recreation and The Office. These do not depict realistic workspaces, but why place that demand on a sitcom? And why not place the same demand on, yes, The Honeymooners, Taxi, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, I Love Lucy, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, The Andy Griffith Show, and on and on. In all cases the demands of the form—and in almost all cases the demands of overly long tenures—stretched the premises and the rare attempts at realism very thin.
I think you can make an argument that the most popular comedies available right now—whether on TV or at the movie theaters—are unflinchingly escapist. (Though, as the article notes in its discussion of an episode each of Horace and Pete and Girls, this has not gone unnoticed or unremarked by all of the shows' writers. Still, these two are not the most popular things around by any stretch.) Similarly, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were seen to traipse across exclusive resorts, high-class stages, ballroom floors, and Venice, in elaborate dresses and a "top hat, white tie, and tails"—all during the Great Depression. Sometimes hard circumstances produce a public clamoring for comment; sometimes the public just wants a reprieve.
As a former ESL teacher, I think TV can be helpful but it's better to be very selective about which shows you watch. Pick shows that have a lot of dialogue in English.
Older TV shows tend to be more dialogue-centric. If you have the TV Land channel, I'd suggest: MASH, All in the Family, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, The Dick Van Dyke Show, &c.
Contemporary shows that would be good for this purpose might be: Modern Family, NCIS, Mad Men, Big Bang Theory, Parks and Recreation, Arrested Development, Parenthood (advanced: lots of simultaneous talking).
One thing I've learned the hard way is that self-deprecation only works in British comedy. In the USA most people don't get it and it not only damages your career but your dating and social life, too.
The greatest (or second greatest, depending on your opinion of "The Honeymooners") and most popular sitcom in American television history was almost entirely based on self-deprecation (Seinfeld).