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Conservative Tastes
Happy Days with Blondie
Dagwood Bumstead is a much better symbol of American manhood than any of his successors.
The death in October of Tom Bosley, ranked ninth on a 2004 list of the “50 Greatest TV Dads of All Time” according to his obituaries, reminds us of that golden era of Happy Days and other shows which taught us, virtually from the beginning of television itself, that TV dads — and, therefore, probably, most real ones too — were great. No longer, obviously. Now the best a TV dad can hope for is to be a harmless, lovable simpleton and buffoon like Homer Simpson, whom Entertainment Weekly recently ranked — as The Simpsons celebrated 20 years on the air — number one on its list of the 100 greatest fictional characters, in any medium, of the last 20 years. Quite an accolade! To be sure, Homer had his precursors in the form of Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden of The Honeymooners, who wasn’t actually a dad, and his cartoon version, Fred Flintstone, who was. There was another cartoon dad with similarities to Homer who goes back even further, to whom I shall return in a moment. But it was the Father-Knows-Best dad of what the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin would have called the official culture who was the face of American fatherhood in the popular culture up until Bill Cosby’s Cliff Huxtable in the 1980s.
The other day I heard Mr. Cosby being interviewed on a radio show where he was asked who were the role models for black families today in the way that he was for those of the '80s. He quite rightly replied that there were none — nor for white families either. Now TV dads are all like Homer or his spin-off, Peter Griffin of Family Guy — or Stan Smith of American Dad, who is a spin-off of Archie Bunker — and therefore mockeries of the patriarchal and TV ideal. As such, they are creatures of the anarchic, subversive, and disreputable unofficial culture that once existed alongside the official one but has now expropriated it.
One exception might be the excellent Mitchell Hurwitz sitcom of a few years ago called Arrested Development, whose too-brief three seasons between 2003 and 2006 are now available on DVD. Its big idea was that the Bluth family patriarch, played by Jeffrey Tambor, was a criminal property developer and the appalling father of a large, dysfunctional family one of whose sons, Michael (Jason Bateman), aspires with limited success to be an old-fashioned sitcom-type dad to his own son.
There was a kind of apostolic succession from Happy Days to Arrested Development in the form of the Bluth family’s corrupt and useless lawyer, Barry, played by Henry Winkler or “The Fonz” of happy memory. But the show was far from being a throwback. Mr. Bateman’s Michael represents the frustrations of the so-called millennial generation at the often appalling self-absorption and self-indulgence of their baby-boom parents, which has left them with no moral compass for raising their own children — or for doing much of anything else. Michael’s watchword was “Family First,” even though the family in question consisted, apart from himself (a widower) and his son, George Michael (Michael Cera), of pretty uniformly appalling people from whom he was constantly trying and failing to detach himself. The problem was that they were too appalling. As the show was live action rather than animated, it didn’t contain talking dogs or space aliens, but it had in common with the cartoon family shows to which it was a partial response a lot of the exaggerated and surreal character that has been the hallmark of American cartooning since Gary Larson took up his pen.
We are now so accustomed to the anarchic and fantastical Larson style that we may be in danger of forgetting that self-mockery long antedates it among America’s family values, though it was formerly self-mockery of a more measured and serious sort. As The Simpsons celebrate their 20th anniversary this year, so the comic strip “Blondie” celebrates its 80th. Originally drawn in 1930 and for more than 40 years afterward by Murat Bernard “Chic” Young, the syndicated strip is now drawn by his 71-year-old son Dean, in partnership with John Marshall, and he plans to pass it on in his turn to his daughter, Dana Young Coston. The survival of “Blondie” is a reminder of the kind of humor that preceded the fashion for the surrealist fantasy that now holds sway on the equally old-fashioned “funny pages” as well as on TV — and of the kind of society such humor once appealed to and to some extent still does.
Actually, the secret of the strip’s success is not that different from that of The Simpsons. The Bumsteads — Blondie, Dagwood, their children Cookie and Alexander, dog Daisy, and a curious neighborhood boy called Elmo — reflect both an important aspect of America’s self-image and an ability to laugh at ourselves. That’s also true of The Simpsons, which is one reason why George H. W. Bush’s wish for an America more like The Waltons than The Simpsons turned out to be a joke on him. He might have done better to have wished us more like the Bumsteads, even though Dagwood, like Homer, is lovable for his faults. And they are largely the same faults, too. Both are lazy, work-shy, perpetually hungry, semi-detached husbands and fathers whose gargantuan appetites and capacity for goofing off (like that of Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey, another hardy survivor of the earlier era) have made them worldwide symbols of American manhood.
DAGWOOD IS OFFICE MANAGER for the J. C. Dithers construction company, and Mr. Dithers has much in common with Mr. Burns of The Simpsons, owner of the nuclear power plant where Homer is chief safety officer. Yet it is in their respective workplaces that we can best see where Homer and Dagwood diverge. Dagwood’s malingering is of a classically pure kind, while Homer’s also regularly endangers himself and the whole community. That this is meant to be comical points to the fact that Homer, for all his comic excellences, lacks Dagwood’s recognizably human quality as well being, like him, an embodiment of appetite and laziness. Similarly, Mr. Dithers is an irascible and tyrannical but unmistakably human boss, partly because he is as much in awe of his formidable wife, Cora, as Dagwood is in awe of him. Though they joke about it, the Simpsons writers have made Mr. Burns, one of whose catchphrases is “Release the hounds,” near of kin to the Prince of Darkness, which no one would say about Mr. Dithers — someone who, as his name suggests, is scarcely less of a screw-up than Dagwood himself.
Similarly, though Dagwood has never been a mental giant, one couldn’t imagine him, like Homer, playing checkers against a chicken-and losing. What is gained in the humor of such an episode or others that are funny only in their preposterousness is lost in the sense of our connection to the real world of middle-class striving that Dagwood and Mr. Dithers alike still inhabit, along with most of us. There was just a touch of the fashionably surreal in a recent strip in which Dagwood found that his pay had been docked by 5 percent for something called the BEGF. “That’s a favorite charity of mine,” says Mr. Dithers. “It’s the ‘Bumstead Employment Guarantee Fund,’ which goes back into the company to make sure nobody suddenly decides to fire you!” Dagwood expects to be the victim of injustice, if not the epic and therefore unreal injustices of “Dilbert” or The Simpsons, as much as we expect him to be, and accepts this philosophically as he turns to the reader and says: “Shoot, that’s my favorite charity too!”
There is exaggeration here, but also more truth to life than you will find in most of the comedy of The Simpsons or others of today’s TV-family sitcoms. When Marge briefly leaves Homer after finding that he has paid off a gambling debt by allowing Fat Tony and the mob to make a porn film in their house, we know that this is not the familial disaster it would be in real life, any more than the meltdowns caused by Homer’s incompetence are real-life environmental disasters. This is fantasyland. Dagwood and Blondie still live (just about) in the real world. Both the Bumstead and the Simpson households are based on, even as they mock, a “Victorian” model family in which a downtrodden working man, exploited by his employer, is able to take his revenge by slacking off, as well as to regard his home as his castle — and, accordingly, to regard his wife with a certain chivalric deference. But the mockery of The Simpsons is unleavened by the lingering suspicion conveyed by the relative realism of “Blondie” that, in spite of the hits that model has taken in the last century, there is something about it that strikes many people, and not only men, as a sort of middle-class state of nature, with all the reassuring stability of work and family life that that implies. That’s something worth hanging on to for another 80 years.
About the Author
James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (36) | Leave a comment
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RT| 1.5.11 @ 7:10AM
Great article.
Watch any sitcom and men - especially fathers - are the butt of most of the jokes.
Watch any beer commercial and men are always portrayed as immature fools.
Watch virtually any action movie and it largely consistes of petite women karate-kicking large men into submission.
On and on it goes. In our culture masculine traits are held in complete contempt...unless exhibited by women.
Thanks for the article.
Diane| 1.5.11 @ 7:52PM
As a fairly petitie woman, I agree. That is why I watch very little television, especially the vulgar and sickening commercials. My question is: why are all of you watching this stuff if it is so bad? Wake up fellas! Aren't there better things to do. If you keep watching it, they will keep producing it.
Alan Brooks| 1.25.11 @ 10:31PM
Dagwood's CARTOON manhood?
Bush 41 was more of a wimp than any other president.
Appleby| 1.5.11 @ 7:15AM
In my own extended family I am seeing that sitcom that Michael J. Fox was in with the hippie boomer parents and the conservative children. My thinking is that the kids saw what life was like under If If Feels Good Do It, and rejected it. Of the nieces and nephews who have married, all are homeowners, all husbands have good jobs in both industry and business, all wives stay home for the most part with their two or three children, working a couple of days a week while the children are cared for either by their husbands or a family member or are in school, and for the most part the children are well disciplined, have good vocabularies and manners for their age and abilities, and are in short being brought up like we were in the Fifties (without the sexism, of course). They are not influenced by what they see ungovernable brats doing on teevee because their mothers are there to say,*What would happen if YOU said/did that?* and the child knows the answer is not *everybody would laugh.*
The one thing the binkie slinging generation, removed from reality by that two inch screen between their thumbs, is missing, is this interface with reality. In families like ours, mothers and fathers are filling that gap because they remember what it was like when everybody Did His Thing -- and they hated it.
Dwi Fort Worth | 1.5.11 @ 7:22AM
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Mike Walsh| 1.5.11 @ 8:30AM
After the Clinton administration I could never look at Mrs. Dithers closing in on Julius with a rolling-pin without thinking of Hillary and Bill.
David W| 1.5.11 @ 9:41AM
I've seen a number of the Simpsons episodes. For many of them Homer is not harmless (bumbling, self-centered, selfish, self-destructive, alcoholic, insensitive, hateful (especially to the religious neighbor Flanders), stupid, lacking in common sense, and so forth). It is only by the grace of God (or the writers) that he doesn't destroy his family, neighborhood, or Springfield. I would not say that Dagwood and Homer are that similar. My personal opinion though.
emilio lizardo| 1.5.11 @ 9:57AM
As if. American dads are lampooned in the personage of Dagwood Bumstead as lazy louts, cheats and gluttons, ridiculously coiffed and attired. That is, when they're not hectored and bled dry by their greedy wives, or having their skulls crushed or asses kicked by the boss. A fine commentary. Nice article, idiot.
Stormzeye| 1.5.11 @ 10:21AM
Great piece. As has often been noted, the heterosexual white American male is presented as feckless, drunk, over sexed, ignorant and immature. Often, were it not for the competent and insightful female in his life he would degenerate further into a frat house slob. Notice the Progressive Insurance commercials with Flo the competent saleswoman and the endless parade of stupid and/or gay men she as to deal with. It's sad that Hollywood and Madison Avenue are allowed to promote these images of men when so many of our boys are raised and surrounded by women. No wonder there's so much confusion amongst the "millenial generation" about what it means to be a man. Chivalry has been slain by the dragons.
solidground| 1.5.11 @ 11:24AM
For one take on how media currently view the role of dad and the men who fill it, take a look at the execrable "comedy" series "Modern Family." Here, dads are portrayed as completely useless dolts who are bossed, dissed and generally used and abused by their oh, so much more intelligent and capable wives and children. "Stupid," "wimp," "pathetic," "clueless" and "gutless" are adjectives that leap to mind in describing the dads that inhabit NBC's idea of how men perform in a family role. The fact that "Modern Family" is also a highly rated series tends to indicate that Americans, dads included, are buying the slander. I find that truly pathetic.
Jeff Krasney| 1.5.11 @ 11:40AM
The biggest problem I have with both the Simpsons and Blondie is that they are both not funny. The Simpsons stopped being funny sometime in the mid to late 90's and Blondie has never been funny in my lifetime. (I am in my early 50's.) As for the author's larger point about constant bad depictions of men in television shows and movies and commercials, that train has left the station. The people who make those shows are reacting to public tastes and will quickly change the content of their programs as tastes evolve. This is simply a case of someone working in an intensely competitive field who is meeting a demand for programming that is demeaning to men.
Ken (Old Texican)| 1.5.11 @ 12:34PM
Todd Palin is my hero TV personality dad.
Beth| 1.5.11 @ 7:40PM
Good one! I like him, too.
Franco| 1.5.11 @ 12:34PM
You got it all wrong. It is precisely the imperfections (mildly put) of Homer, Stan Smith, etc. that make the characters funny and identifiable, even lovable, to viewers (hence their popularity). I never identified with Raplph Kramden (a loudmouth, and whom Fred Flintstone is a cartoon version).
My children are toddlers and after seeing some of the Flintstone and Jetsons episodes I'm struck by what a wuss George Jetson and what a boor Fred Flintstone is. But, in the end, just like Homer and Stan, each comes back to home and hearth like good father does. The real-life issue is that there are too many "fathers" who don't.
Cosby was never funny, nor was Blondie. That's why they have faded from the scene.
PolishKnight| 1.5.11 @ 1:37PM
Good job finding a silver lining Franco!
I liked an episode where Homer met his opposite: "Grimes" who was a hard worker at the plant and envious of Homer's success despite Homer's incompetence. Homer has a single family home, two cars, a wife and children that live with him, and a stable job. While this seemed more common in the 1950's, it's an "American dream" that escapes many families today. Even if Homer pulls a "Homer", he still gets the job done.
On the other hand, even the leftist creator of the Simpson's hasn't found a way to make the leftist utopia of single mother families and adult leftism seem realistic or even funny. You can laugh at Ned Flanders, but where is an adult version of Lisa Simpson as a neighbor to laugh at? Lisa, the smug, high academic achieving leftist, never grows up and that goes for her unchallenged leftist ideology too.
In addition, notice that even the leftist creator of the Simpsons has something that they reviled for decades: The single earner patriarchal family! Hmmm, consider that the Cosby's tried to represent a black family as upper middle class professional two-incomes who seemingly rarely had to study. This represented the feminist utopia of the era: Women would all get high paying jobs that they didn't have to show up at and then would marry a man who earned more than them. Even conservatives bought into this have-cake-eat-it-too paradigm.
solas4me| 1.5.11 @ 12:56PM
Lucas McCain, Ben Cartwright. These are some more "TV Dads" that had it right.
Appleby| 1.5.11 @ 3:30PM
Ben Cartwright had no wife. Inexplicably all his wives were dead.....
Jari| 1.6.11 @ 7:14AM
Of course he had to be a widower.
Which is more improbable, Ben Cartwright being bullied by a woman with a rolling pin, or Ben Cartwright marrying some wimply little submissive woman who wouldn't say a word as he and his sons tracked mud in?
If Ben's wife had been alive, the dynamics of their relationship would have taken over too much of the show.
(Cowboy "Leave It To Beaver", maybe?)
sinanju| 2.16.11 @ 1:23PM
"Bonanza" was a bit after my time, so I've really seen only a handful of episodes on Nick and TVLand. Were there any episodes where women tried to snare ol' Ben? In reality, I'm sure a wealthy widower would have been fair besieged (unless he preferred "sporting women" there being plenty of that at the time as well).
sinanju| 2.16.11 @ 1:19PM
And Cartwright's eldest son was his own age...
Robbins Mitchell| 1.5.11 @ 1:13PM
Well,Homer Simpson has yet to have a kind of sandwich named after him
albert constantine jr.| 1.5.11 @ 4:30PM
About 25 years ago, when I was in the Marine Corps, one of my colleagues remarked how funny he thought the Blondie comic strip was. As I had been exposed to the feature for 20 years and had not yet seen anything that made me laugh, I asked him what he thought was funny about it. He stammered a bit (he was a college grad who subsequently completed law school) and the offered that those big old sandwiches were hilarious. Decades later, I still have seen nothing to chuckle about in "Blondie", but I must confess that when I see an oversize sandwich, I think of Dagwood. On the other hand, whenever a potentially dangerous error is made, exclaiming "DOH" will be forever associated with Homer.
Clint| 1.5.11 @ 1:23PM
This is what happens when we allow The Liberal Agendists of The Entertainment & Mainstream Media to " DEFINE " White Conservative American Men.
We are in a Media War.
SF_Exile| 1.5.11 @ 3:44PM
It's funny, I love The Simpsons. The older I've gotten (and now that I'm married) I see so much more in the episodes than previously. That's not to say there can be some really annoying,
overly santimonious writing - see various episodes regarding religion and Lisa's blatantly lefty personal agenda - but all in all I think there's some fine stuff there. The one thing that comes back to me over and over is that no matter what Homer madly loves Marge and Marge madly loves Homer. She, obviously, is the stronger of the two, trying to keep the lot of them on the straight and narrow. They are what they are and will make do.
A show which I think deserves a second look from the family standpoint is 'That 70's Show'. Obviously the collection of kids is the focus of the show, but the interactions of Red and Kitty Foreman with those kids is important. It's an interesting time period in which the show works. Cultural and societal changes are causing upheaval with both the adults and the kids. The rules (the constants) are changing - unemployment, divorce, and drug and alcohol use is all depicted equally with humor and drama. Through the use of then-current trends, the vagaries and unfairnesses of life are shown.
The kids, by virtue of hanging out in Eric's basement, take their cues from whatever familial undercurrent is happening in addition to their own issues. Each of the kids reacts to Red and Kitty on some level as if they were the kids' parents. But more importantly, Red and Kitty are supportive of each of those kids, whatever happens. Yes, their methods are ham-handed and perhaps overbearing but the message is there: you have a place to be. Ironically Red and Kitty appear to have a harder time with their own kids than they do with the others. Perhaps in some way that mirrors reality.
Harrison | 1.5.11 @ 6:45PM
The Simpsons, though cartoons, at not exactly aimed at children. Besides, I recently watched an episode of Gidget where she berated her friends' father and her father for acting... immature. That was in the early 60s.
wnmc| 1.5.11 @ 7:42PM
I agree with the earlier commenter that the Simpsons lost their verve after about four seasons. I suspect that their best writers left. Up 'til then the Simpsons was an edgy satire and really quite funny.
For the past fifteen years, the Simpsons has lapsed into a broad, rather silly sitcom and to my mind is not very funny like most sitcoms relying on sight gags and bathroom humour.
As for Blondie, I never found it funny but loved the wonderfully drawn cartoons. For my money and attention the best cartoon strips ever was Calvin and Hobbes. Wonderfully drawn, imaginative, funny and slightly subversive.
Oh and Bloom County.
Beth| 1.5.11 @ 7:42PM
Here is one sitcom TV dad that I like. Freaks and Geeks is considered something of a cult classic, though.
Bill| 1.6.11 @ 2:05PM
The role of fathers and husbands in the nuclear family as portrayed on TV has been what it is for quite a long time, 30 years or so.
It makes me long for what was once a respected role in American society: the never-married non-homosexual bachelor who enjoys masculine pursuits and eschews feminity.
Bill| 1.6.11 @ 2:06PM
femininity, sorry.
Sailor Joe| 1.6.11 @ 4:38PM
Heathcliff Huxtable, Ward Cleaver and Jim Anderson, like their non-fiction brothers are the men we need and (to paraphrase "A Few Good Men") secretly want in our society. They are our skilled labor, fair decsion makers, quitely adoring & respectful husbands. They set an example by quiet deeds, not pronouncements. They do things they can pay for others to do to show that any honest work is beneath no one. And most importantly, veterans all, they are the ones we want to rush in and save us from the burning building or the pirates at the gate.
You can keep the blarney and the Bumstead for the perpetual teenagers. What nearly all of us want is that "real Dad", represented by those characters, to make our world safe, sound and happy.
sinanju| 2.16.11 @ 1:45PM
The mention of "Arrested Development" suddenly moved me to recall something vaguely similar but more rooted in reality--BBC's "Monarch of the Glen" (2000 - 2005) in which a young restauranteur in London, Archie MacDonald is recalled to his family estate in the Highlands of Scotland because his dotty father Hector has run it to the verge of bankruptcy. Archie also comes from a Thurburesque, dysfunctional family and household staff. He only wants to get back to his glamorous girlfriend and s**t-hot career in swinging London but duty and responsibility win out in him against his will and the rest of the series is basically about his heroic struggles to keep the family estate solvent with much ensuing drama and hilarity.
Archie's a youngish, regular-guy only trying to do right but somehow that makes him more attractive than James Bond and women keep falling for him right and left.
Adidas | 8.11.11 @ 6:03AM
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العاب بنات | 4.10.12 @ 12:31PM
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