A Horse Is a Horse

Abstract

The 1960s were a time of upheaval and revolution in the United States: national tragedies, assassinations of cultural icons, a controversial war, and social revolutions including the civil rights movement and Second Wave feminism. During this decade television executives clung to a nostalgic version of American life that was quickly fading from reality. Television situation comedies of the preceding decade had idealized the white American family with its requisite picket fence, omniscient father, and stay-at-home mother. By the 1960s that mythological world was crumbling, bringing reform and new ideas to television. Innovations in the 1960s sitcom reflected the national cultural shifts and divided between “domestic,” which were variations on the home and family scenario, or three distinct “variant motifs,” dealing with military, rural, and fantasy themes (Bryant 1989, 124). In this article I examine the fantasy programs that operated within the variant mode and maintain that these sitcoms align with the traditions of Theatre of the Absurd outlined by Martin Esslin in his Theatre of the Absurd (1961). By drawing these parallels, I argue that the 1960s’ fantasy sitcoms functioned as a social corrective that challenged cultural stereotypes and normative ideals using tactics similar to those found in the Theatre of the Absurd.Situation comedy evolved from popular early twentieth-century radio serial programs and emerged as an innovative comic form in early television (Bryant 1978, 14). The situation comedy arrived visually in American living rooms and, according to David Grote in The End of Comedy: The Sit-Com and the Comedic Tradition, fundamentally “changed our cultural conception of comedy” (1983, 14). Grote declares that the formula for sitcom was a true innovation: The situation comedy must be seen for what it is, a new form, a new kind of comedy. . . . It is, in its way, just as stunning and revolutionary as the new comedy of Menander . . . when it replaced the Aristophanic Old Comedy with the forms, plots, and heroes that would serve all of Western culture down to the appearance of the American television sit-com. (12) Early sitcoms used recognizable form and structure that incorporated familiar characters, predictable high jinks, and narratives that were easy to follow. Familiarity was essential to its success, and sitcom incorporated tropes and techniques of vaudeville and traditional stage comedies. The time-honored domestic scenario established by Menander’s Greek New Comedy was foundational to 1950s’ television programming, evident in shows like I Love Lucy and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.The 1960s sustained that tradition, including white, middle-class, heteronormative, family-based stories in the weekly lineup with Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver that adhered to the patriarchal societal norms. But with cultural shifts looming large, the 1960s required programming that would, if not directly address, at least subtly acknowledge the shifting cultural landscape. Variations in the domestic themed situation comedy emerged to address the cultural moment. Sixties television brought a flood of fantasy programming to sitcoms, with no less than sixteen magical plots appearing within a few years (Hough 1981, 217). The decade saw an explosion of television comedies, but the variant mode within the genre of sitcom was a unique innovation that was a response to a cultural call for change. In a shifting landscape, with the threat of internal and external change at every turn, the immersive world of fantasy sitcom was an escape from reality. The innovative fantasy genre provided shows that had highly imaginative characters and scenarios including Bewitched (in which a young suburban housewife who happens to be a witch is married to a handsome young advertising executive who is a “mortal”); I Dream of Jeannie (based on the premise that a sexy genie living in a bottle is subservient to her “master,” a handsome young astronaut in Florida); The Munsters (a satire on American homelife featuring a family of benevolent monsters); The Addams Family (a macabre family with supernatural abilities who live cheek by jowl with suburban America); and Mr. Ed (a program about a talking horse and his handsome architect owner, the only person Ed speaks to). These fantasy-themed situation comedies link to the timeline, practices, and tropes of Theatre of the Absurd, where, as Esslin affirms, the “fantastic and nonsensical have a respectable and accepted place in the tradition” (1961, 332).Theatre of the Absurd emerges onto the post–World War II existential landscape that finds people hopeless, bewildered, and anxious. For Martin Esslin and the playwrights included in his definition, the postwar human condition is absurd, without purpose, and lacks cultural meaning (Esslin 1961, 23). Esslin outlines numerous tropes of the Theatre of the Absurd in his book, using the plays of Pinter, Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet to illuminate his argument. He creates the genre “Theatre of the Absurd” to provide a framework of themes and ideas that run through the work of these playwrights. Broadly defined, the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd contain characters who devalue language and declare its inability to enable communication, are antiliterary with insubstantial plot or story, hold an underlying sense of menace or dread for the terrifying world they encounter, and use devices like repetition and circular timelines as theatrical conventions (400–407).Esslin quotes Ionesco to help establish his premise for the Theatre of the Absurd: “Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose . . . cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless” (1961, 23). Ionesco maintained the impossibility of communication, a trope that is evident in all his plays but especially in The Lesson, where a professor attempts to teach a student who desperately wants to understand, but never manages to comprehend any of the absurd facts he presents (Esslin 1961, 145–46). They speak a dissimilar internal language with no possibility for mutual understanding. Samuel Beckett creates a similar world in his plays where characters “attempt to communicate where no communication is possible” (32).The communication barrier trope is established and repeated throughout the 1960s’ fantasy sitcom. For example, in the first episode of I Dream of Jeannie Tony finds Jeannie on the shore of a deserted island. In this isolated location, Jeannie (performed by a platinum blonde, curvaceous, Caucasian actress) speaks to Tony in Persian, establishing her identity as one of Middle Eastern descent. The opening dialogue of the series is pure vaudeville inspired cross-talk filled with misinterpretation, as the characters have no way to communicate due to the language barrier, though this is magically “cured” with a blink of Jeannie’s eyes when Tony “wishes” he could understand her (Nelson 1965). In season 1, episode 1, of Bewitched, Darrin is trying to make sense of his conundrum (when he discovers that his wife is a witch on their wedding night) and has gone to the hotel bar to have several drinks to take the edge off his stressful situation. Darrin strikes up a conversation with a man sitting on an adjacent barstool, but each of them is engaged in a one-way dialogue—talking, but not to each other (Asher 1964). In what appears to be a “normal” conversation, not only is the notion of real communication stymied, but all attempts are futile.Communication is the main challenge within the premise of Mr. Ed and the nonsense that results from inability to communicate serves as the predominant comic device. In the series premiere, we meet Wilbur, a young architect, and Ed, his talking horse. Ed only talks to Wilbur, so the nonsense that ensues during the first episode is based on the comedic trope that everyone (including his new wife, Carol) thinks Wilbur has lost his mind (Amateau 1961). He quickly realizes that he needs to keep Mr. Ed’s idiosyncrasies to himself, establishing this nonsensical comedic trope. Esslin situates the idea of nonsense as foundational to the Theatre of the Absurd, stating, “there is a magic” about it (1961, 341).Fantasy and nonsense can often be used interchangeably in opposition to what is real. Sumanyu Satpathy, in his article, “The Illogic of Fantasy and Nonsense,” explains that “talking animals, magic mirrors, flying human beings, and such other obvious elements that belong to the world of fantasy or the fantastic are also used liberally to construct the world of nonsense” (2015, 165). Esslin situates Alice in Wonderland in his discussion of traditions of the absurd, stating that in “Lewis Carroll’s nonsense world, there are creatures that try to break the determinism of meaning and significance” (1961, 343). This is also true for Mr. Ed, when, in season 1, episode 1, Wilbur expresses his bewilderment and Mister Ed remarks, “Don’t try. It’s bigger than both of us!” (Amateau 1961, 14:35). Wilbur has fallen down a rabbit hole as complex and deep as Alice’s and the nonsense world he inhabits with a talking horse is, indeed, a wonderland.The inability to communicate recurs in nearly every episode within the fantasy sitcom genre, as the main characters inhabit a world in which they are aliens: monsters, vampires, a witch, a genie, and a talking horse. Though they try desperately to adapt, they are foreign—the estranged other—and communication is impossible. Communication is tied to intrinsic meaning, and for Beckett “the form, structure, and mood of an artistic statement cannot be separated from its meaning, its conceptual content” (Esslin 1961, 44). Jean Genet embodies the position of “outsider” within the Theatre of the Absurd. According to Esslin, Genet’s “plays are concerned with expressing his own feeling of helplessness and solitude” (201). Genet was the quintessential outsider as an Algerian immigrant in Paris and a homosexual in a heterosexual world. The characters in Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, The Addams Family, and The Munsters are outsiders, immigrants, and refugees trying to fit into a foreign landscape. Communication is challenging when encountering the “other,” and the 1960s were a time when a cultural and generational divide was forming and impacting the ability to understand and interpret one’s friends, family, and a world in flux.Women’s role in the home, family, and cultural landscape was beginning to change and those shifts were reflected on the small screen. The 1960s fantasy sitcom subverted the feminist movement by “othering” their female leads. In Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, both female leads were empowered by magic, a transgressive power that dismantled any real alliance with women’s liberation. Samantha and Jeannie rejected the notion of housework that Betty Friedan decried in The Feminine Mystique (1983, 233–57). Despite their best efforts, they repeatedly had to rely on their supernatural powers to fulfill their requisite womanly duties of housekeeping, as their abilities in the domestic arts were nonexistent. This attempt to assimilate reflects the cultural shift in the country and the conservative resistance when confronted with social change.The use of repetition in dialogue, structure and theme is used throughout the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd, and this trope is evident in 1960s sitcoms. First, each program opens with a theme song that reminds the audience of the essential premise of the show and includes pertinent exposition of the characters’ backgrounds and objectives. This introduction repeats each week, reminding viewers that the world they will encounter is a familiar one. Characters have repetitive catch phrases, gestures, and psychological “tics” that become a familiar balm for the viewer as they recognize a character’s anticipated foibles.Plots are circular in Theatre of the Absurd, and plays often end as they begin, leaving audiences with the feeling that life is an endless cycle of struggle as seen in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Ionesco’s Bald Soprano and The Lesson. Likewise, the circular plot structure is part of the essential form of situation comedy. According to David Grote, endings in situation comedy differ from traditional comedy: The ending of the traditional comedy is the promise of a new life, a celebration, a wedding, a possible baby, a new and better world. The only ending that the sit-com allows is death. Because the series format is designed to last forever without significant change, obviously no ending is planned. (1983, 103) Grote also states that “the basic plot of the television situation comedy is a circle rather than a line” (66). The circular nature of the sitcom form and plot is based on character motivation as Grote defines it: In the traditional basic comedy plot, characters start at point A and want to get somewhere else, to point B. . . . In the usual situation comedy, however, the character is at point A and does not want to get to anywhere else, no matter how much he protests that he does not like where he is. . . . Anything that threatens the basic situation is repelled or expelled. (67) Esslin states that the Theatre of the Absurd rejects motivation of characters, a notion that is in pure alignment with the situation comedy as a genre overall (1961, 376). Characters encounter situations and then move on, but they never move on to anything different and they are trapped in a fantasy world with no escape other than the series cancellation. Grote concludes that “the audience needs to know the fundamental premise of the series, or the individual episode makes no sense, but that does not matter” (1983, 67). For situation comedy as a genre, the underlying suggestion for the viewer is that nothing important has ever happened, and each week will bring a new beginning with the same familiar ending. This circular plot structure and repetition can serve as a palliative to viewers who live in a world in flux, with the relentless familiarity of sitcom characters and plots operating as an emotional balm.Harold Pinter’s plays are set in a realm of menace and mystery, and his characters encounter threat in both the known and unknown world around them (Esslin 1961, 235). The 1960s fantasy sitcoms reflect an underlying world of menace that lingers and threatens to upend the normative cultural ideal. Though typically set in suburban America—the land of white picket fences and stay-at-home moms with after-school milk and warm cookies waiting on a kitchen table when obedient children return home—the fantasy genre upends that trope with the danger and menace of an intervening world where the societal rules have changed. The unrest of the 1960s resulted in dramatic and unrelenting change to social norms and cultural values. It was a war between the generations that challenged the notion of the traditional American family. The monster genres in The Munsters and The Addams Family served to undermine the idealized nuclear family by parodying the sitcoms of the 1950s (Morowitz 2007, 41). As Laura Morowitz describes, “they draw on the grotesque as a powerful tool for critiquing the notion of ‘normalcy’ and call into question the artifice of the 1950s ideal” (41).The house with supernatural powers is a trope that is evident in these magical sitcom environments, and one present in Ionesco’s play Amédée, in which an expanding corpse invades and transforms the apartment (Esslin 1961, 161). The house itself can no longer be trusted as a place of real safety; it shifts and transforms into other locations or changes shape or dimension, becoming both unfamiliar and perilous. In The Addams Family and The Munsters, their houses have supernatural properties that create a world of marvel and danger, and function as a center of opposition to societal norms. The audience adapts to these unearthly theatrical conventions and learns about the rules of the fantasy world through well-placed exposition. The haunted dream world is the foundation of The Addams Family and The Munsters, both set in crumbling, cobweb-filled Victorian homes, exceptionally decrepit when viewed in black and white. These are dark and disturbing settings, with eye-popping though often hokey special effects, magical incantations, and supernatural powers. Yet, in a cultural reversal, the characters who live there consider themselves and their lives to be completely “normal” and find the outside world to be incomprehensible. Outsiders, such as the nosy neighbor Gladys Kravitz in Bewitched and the rational psychiatrist Dr. Bellows in I Dream of Jeannie, are caught in a flipped reality where the rational world has evaporated. There are also “normal” characters who live within the family of outsiders, like the beautiful niece Marilyn in The Munsters. She attempts to straddle both worlds and wants to date conventional boys from school, but these attempts at integration always fail as the two worlds are at odds and doomed to deep and inevitable misunderstanding. These familiar characters also function as subversive cultural messengers who provide social correctives through their characters’ objectives and plotlines.Esslin includes the surrealist artist Guillaume Apollinaire in the tradition of the Absurd, whose art was “more real than reality” and who wanted “a theatre that would be ‘modern, simple, rapid, with the shortcuts and enlargements that are needed to shock the spectator’” (1961, 362). The effects and technological gimmickry of the 1960s fantasy sitcoms are in perfect alignment with Apollinaire’s surreal hypothesis. By the 1960s television technology had evolved to include the ability to create novel effects on screen with uncanny moving objects, and characters’ power to magically appear and disappear. Ionesco grounds his plays in a world of the anti-realism of inanimate objects. His play, The Bald Soprano, opens as the “English Clock strikes 17 English strokes” (Killinger 1971, 117). Other stage directions call for the clock to chime random numbers of times and finally “as much as it likes” as Ionesco allows the clock to have free will (Ionesco 1958, 19). Ionesco embraces a world in which time has no meaning and the laws of the universe cannot be relied upon.Apollinaire suggested that humans are so stupid that theatre must be “enormous” in order to reach them. The 1960s sitcom fulfills that premise with bigger-than-life scenarios that stretched the imagination. They operated in a world that was not subject to the laws of the universe and “featured violations of the laws of nature as their main attractions” (Marc 1989, 129). The fantasy sitcom motif rejects the notion of realism and embraces a world that, as Artaud described, is “the moment when the impossible really begins” (Esslin 1961, 383). Artaud “calls for a return to myth and magic,” insisting that audiences want a reflection of their internal conflicts that can only be found in a “poetic, magical theatre” (383). The 1960s fantasy sitcom was grounded in illusion and myth that brought comfort to a culture whose world around them was rocked with revolt. Indeed, it was a reflection of the cultural menace and threat to the normative ideal brought on by the 1960s counterculture revolution.In a time of substantial transition, 1960s fantasy programs could also serve as a form of social critique and allowed viewers to commiserate with characters over mutually frustrating problems such as new technologies, consumerism, the generation gap, and social dissent. Like plays in the Theatre of the Absurd, 1960s sitcoms were subversive and, according to John Bryant, they “served as mild rebuffs of authoritarianism” (126). Chris Ritchie confirms this in his article, “Against Comedy”: Ideas and dissent can be propagated through joking, and authoritarians feel threatened by it. Although comedy can be a divisive force, it can also unify. We may joke about others and thus denigrate them, but we also share jokes and are united in our laughter, coming together in brief moments of liberation from work, personal distress, and political despair. (2020, 8) As early as Aristophanes, writers of comedy and comedians were using their wit as powerful tools to rebuff and rebuke those in power. In his essay “Conformist Comedians,” Ivo Nieuwenhuis reminds us that “this critical, anti-authoritarian spirit seems to have gone hand in hand with the practice of comedy” (2018, 104). The 1960s fantasy sitcoms were not as benign as they might have appeared at first glance. Lawrence Mintz states that “popular culture is the primary purveyor of ideology and the most powerful communication medium of the culture,” and fantasy sitcoms served the function of delivering a powerful cultural message to their audience (1985, 42).In the final chapter of his book, Esslin imagines a direction for a theatre of the future. For him, any prospective absurdist theatre would need to incorporate the idea that “dreams, daydreams, fantasies, nightmares and hallucinations are realities as significant, as terrifying, as decisive for their lives as any external realities” (1961, 432). Esslin resolves that a post-absurdist theatre will use these premises freely and unstintingly, and imagines that the form will be absorbed into the mainstream. Sixties’ fantasy sitcoms did just that, but moreover they used the techniques of Theatre of the Absurd to herald and navigate a colossal cultural shift, adapting comedy to conform to a world in flux.