So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[ChiTownScion]

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.

 

[tonyb]

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.

Might it be that people think they sound more learned when the use more syllables?

Sometimes I think that's it. And, often, the fancier word is the less descriptive one. I'm reminded of official spokespersons given to saying "individual" rather than "person." A rock in my flower bed is an individual. So is my car. And my left shoe.

I got nothing against five-dollar words, by the way. Sometimes they're the best words to use. And sometimes they aren't.

 

[Fading Fast]

Alice Kramden took crap from no one.

It wasn't done in a culturally "approved" way by today standards, but I watched that show in reruns growing up in the late '60s / '70s and it was very clear to me that Alice was the boss and smarter than Ralph (and that, deep down, he knew it). There was a similar dynamic with the Nortons. In both families, it was clear the women were smarter - doesn't fit our present stereotype of the how the '50s were.

 

[2jakes]

Alice Kramden took crap from no one.

That being the reason why I posted the image which can be also be said
of my friend LizzieMaine.
Although she might have something else to say about this.

Alice & Lizzie can punch me to the moon...
and I’d go with a smile on me face!

 

[ChiTownScion]

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.

 

[2jakes]

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!

 

[ChiTownScion]

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!

Of course, if she'd said dosvedonya to the guy, it wouldn't have been much of a comedy series, would it?

 

[LizzieMaine]

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.

 

[LizzieMaine]

While driving home from a doctor's appointment today I was thinking about Gleason's TV work in general, spurred by this thread, and it occurs to me that he is one of only a very few American comedians who consistently used their work to lay bare their own psychological issues and fears. Buster Keaton did this in silent pictures, Woody Allen's been doing it for the past fifty years in modern movies, and Gleason did it every week for twenty years on television. All of his characters, one way or another, come out of his own inner demons, and it's fascinating to examine them in that light.

Ralph Kramden expresses his fear of ending up as what he constantly feared growing up -- just another hopeless Brooklyn moax in a crummy apartment with a dead end job and no money.

Fenwick Babbitt and the Poor Soul, neither of whom could ever seem to do anything right, expressed his sense of inadequacy and his fear of public failure.

Joe the Bartender is his whitewashed nostalgia for the old neighborhood, remembering only the good times and none of the bad.

And most interestingly, Charlie "The Loudmouth" Bratton and Reggie Van Gleason III are pointed metatextual critiques by Gleason of Gleason himself -- expressing in a comic way his own worst traits. Charlie is his dominating, aggressive side that never shut up, and Reggie, as a working-class fantasy of what it would be like to be rich, is Gleason's subconscious critique of his own excesses -- the women, the liquor, the extravagant clothes and opulent surroundings exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness.

Once you think about his work in this way, you can never look at it in the same way again. Only Keaton and Allen ever exposed their inner vulnerablities more completely in the guise of comedy.

But yeah, they were funny, too.

 

[2jakes]

After knocking around a bit in this world & having seen many &
I tend to go with the latter.

 

[Fading Fast]

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 dismissive 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.

 

[2jakes]

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...

Ditto with Archie Bunker, although in his case,
there was more than what was on the surface.

 

[Fading Fast]

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 understanding 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.

 

[2jakes]

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.

I grew up in similar house where the parents treated each other like that.
I would agree they probably loved each other.
But something that as kid was a difficult pill to swallow .

Thank goodness, I lived with my grandma who showed me love
and understanding about things all around when I was growing up.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Everybody in my family talked like Ralph Kramden. If I had a nickel for every time my mother threatened to kill me, beat me to a pulp, or lay me out in lavender, I'd be able to afford a really swanky cemetery plot. But I knew she never would, and I just snapped my fingers at her and kept on doing whatever it was I was doing. I took all this for granted, because everybody on our block sounded the same way.

The Bunkers were so like us it was uncanny. I'd never seen anything like that on television before, and I was absolutely transfixed by that show. I was only eight years old when it first came on, and a lot of the political stuff went over my head, but the sheer *atmosphere* was exactly like the world I knew. I knew exactly what that house smelled like, what the furniture felt like, what the doors sounded like when they slammed -- and I'd never had that sense with anything else I'd ever seen on TV. And I never have since.

 

[2jakes]

I also lived in that situation. But to my way of thinking.
Why would I turn to the television when I could see it for real every day?
To have it shown to me on the TV was not entertainment.
I had no choice but to watch what the grownups preferred or go
outside & play with the kids.

I mostly enjoyed the westerns or Laurel & Hardy on the TV.

 

[LizzieMaine]

On another note, while sitting in the doctor's waiting room today I saw a woman come in with a little girl about five years old -- on a leash, strapped into a harness like she was a wire-haired terrier or something. I can understand this with a toddler -- but jeez, when I was five years old I was walking upstreet to the store and school by myself. If anybody'd tried to put a leash on me, there'd have been hell to pay.

 

[2jakes]

Sounds ancient, but for the most part going to school, I walked.
Not until my senior year when I bought a used 1956 two-tone Bel Air.

That was a solid heavy built chassis.
I still remember the odor of those cars when
real gasoline was used.

That may sound odd, but smells take me on trips.
Just like remembering the cut grass on the
blades of the push-type lawnmowers in the summer
doing yard work.

Or when the rain first hits the earth. Nice!

 

[Trenchfriend]

@LizzieMaine

Market-economy and parents, which see their kids as their "property", like toys. And market-economy's diapers for every age...

 

[BlueTrain]

There was no TV comedy (or drama either) that was anything at all like the household I grew up in, although there were others in the neighborhood that were pretty close. But I rarely got to watch Jackie Gleason because he was on another network we didn't get. Mostly, though, I don't like to read too much into entertainment, be it a boxing match or a comedy show. In fact, give me a song-and-dance show any night. Not many of those on anymore, if any. The ones I watch are on Swiss TV.

What I did see was a father who cared for his family and never used profanity, alcohol or tobacco; never raised his voice or criticized anyone. That was my father. My mother was an invalid. He outlive her and his second wife, too. I didn't think other families in the neighborhood were so lucky. One father was a weekend drunk; another was very abusive to his son. But nobody every killed anyone or got arrested.