ChiTownScion
Call Me a Cab
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Watching the clip, I see a woman who won’t take any bull from anyone.
1950’s or today.
Alice Kramden took crap from no one.
Watching the clip, I see a woman who won’t take any bull from anyone.
1950’s or today.
That is so true, Malapropisms rule. At the garage that takes care of my old MG, a customer was moaning about how costive classic car ownership was. "Hasn't passed a thing all day?" I enquired. He looked perplexed. "Can you get online with your phone?" I said. He nodded and showed me a google screen. "Type costive into the search," I suggested. "It means constipated," he exclaimed, adding, "oh I get it, not passed a thing all day."
"Spare me," I thought, as I walked away leaving him finger jabbing at his phone screen.
Alice Kramden took crap from no one.
Alice Kramden took crap from no one.
My sister in law proposed the hypothesis that Ralph Kramden is actually an abusive husband. Granted, he never took a swing at Alice... but his ranting certainly rose to the level of verbal abuse. It certainly never banked the fire under her boiler, of course, yet dealing with that unrepentant lout year in and year out had to take its toll. I doubt if a 2016 Alice would have put up with it.
I believe 1950s Alice didn’t put up with it either.
No matter how much steam Ralph made during the show, Alice stood her ground.
In the end of each episode he admitted his error with a kiss.
If it was me, I would’ve kissed that bum with a punch in the mouth.
Pow...zoom...bang...to the moon!
The whole "Ralph was an abusive husband" trope reveals someone who's never actually watched the program in any depth. It's painfully clear that Ralph is a desperate, helpless man lashing out impotently against a world that's ground him down so brutally that all he has left is his power fantasies, and he could no more ever act on those than he could actually make a million dollars selling can openers on late-nite TV. And I choose my words very specifically in saying "impotently" -- it's very telling that after fifteen years of marriage, the Kramdens have no children, and in fact seem incapable of having them.
"The Honeymooners" -- and in fact practically all the rest of Gleason's television work -- is only comedy on the surface. At its heart it's a harsh, bleak mirror to all those phony smiley-face postwar images, out of the same uncompromising emotional vein that produced "Death of A Salesman" and much of the work of Samuel Beckett.
Even Ralph's threats to hit Alice - as insanely politically incorrect today (meaning even to joke about it is beyond the pale today) - was, even to me as a kid, not a real threat as could be told by Alice's dismisses look. It's an example of something we talk about on this forum, judging something out of its cultural / time-period context. Joking about it was acceptable then, so to condemn those that joked about it at that time is unfair to the writers and actors.
I never saw anything funny or acceptable about Ralph’s behavior towards Alice, when I saw it originally
in the 50s or now.
Although at times I would laugh at other things Ralph said or did with Norton/Alice or whoever crossed
his path.
That he was shown for what he was always made me...
The "bang zoom to the moon" stuff was, IMHO, so obviously not a real threat and just him expressing his emotional frustration (thank you Lizzie), it just went by, not that funny 'cause it never was that funny and he did it 10,000 times, but for me, it just didn't feel at all dangerous.
I didn't grow up in household where my parents treated each other like Ralph and Alice, but even as a kid, after having watched enough shows and undressing the formula and dynamic, my interpretation was that they loved each other, he tried and failed to do things, she loved him despite his nonsense. Maybe I romanticized it, but to me those two loved each other and his bombastic behavior was comedy that was only funny sometimes.