Antennae (in a Freudian sense)

Newman's first chapter, "Burlesque with an Antennae" works to combat the notion that the landscape of 1950's, American television was littered with compliant housewives, mud-pie smudged children, and a reining patriarch wrapped in his tweed cape. She make a very good argument for the presence, and even domination, of working class, urban ghetto comedy. Borrowing form the familiar, notably Gleason and his incredibly popular characters, Newman works to legitimate the buffoons and drunks that made us laugh, cry, and identify.

I agree with Alexa and her desire to understand more of the audience. I, more than wanting their political perspective, am craving more of a demographic approach to the audience interpretation. During the years before Donna Reed and June Cleaver cleaned up the backdrop of American television, who was tuning in? How many people owned a television and where are the largest concentration of sets? If the new technology was expensive, and according to the website tvhistor.tv/tv-prices.htm the ranged from just over $100 to more than $1000 in this decade, can we presume that the audience was divided by class/income? If television was limited to people who had never lived in the ghettos or obtained the economic means to escape, was lowbrow 1950's television a form of white minstrel entertainment? Can we not view characters like Ed Norton, Sgt. Bilko, and the poor Italian immigrants as white-face (albeit sometimes with an olive complexion), soft-shoe, dance for your money poor man stage show?

I want to concentrate on Newman's title and the a larger theme of the decade we have studied this semester, the role of gender and the American social/domestic space. The most compelling arguments of this chapter, following a well researched historical perspective of lowbrow television production, appear in the conclusion. On page 66 Newman writes, "Lowbrow comedy offered a challenge to the suburban, middle-class hegemony of the 1950's." She then follows this with a discussion of the role of women in lowbrow entertainment and the difficulty these women present for the contemporary, domesticating movement. What I find in these last couple of pages is the real grit of the argument, postwar America was moving toward a female oriented, suburban social structure, but not without a fight. These burlesque comedians, emerging out of the "nudie" clubs of postwar New York, brought to the small screen a sense that it was still a man's world. The problems facing the characters, whether male or female, were masculine concerns; income, work schedule, and attainment of wealth. Whereas the suburban setting of later shows represented the female domain early 1950's television located life in the urban/male jungle of daily complications. I think a further exploration of the idea that "...mainstream culture was not ready for women to be lowbrow and left - to reject class aspirations, domesticity, materialism, and family-in fictional narratives..." will provide a better understanding of the cultural transformation in the 1950's.

On a more gendered psychological note, Newman does bring up the animated satirization of the Honeymooners through the Flintstones (1960-1966). This show may only further the argument that television promoted the feminization of the domestic sphere when it relocated a popular urban/male sitcom to the stone age. I hope we have an opportunity to watch/read some examples of the satirization on the 1950's in later American culture and look at how lowbrow 1950's culture is represented decades later.