What the sitcoms of yesterday and today teach us about humanity.
By: Shawn Fleetwood
Laura Petrie:
[after kissing Rob] Darling, are you all right?
Rob Petrie:
Yeah, I'm just fine. Why do you ask?
Laura:
Well, I know it sounds kind of silly, but, uh... your lips were very cold.
Rob:
[after nervously feeling his own lips] My lips are regular lip temperature. It may be your lips are running a fever.
The witty banter that encompasses The Dick Van Dyke Show is legendary to many. For well over fifty years, the classic black and white sitcom has kept audiences laughing and entertained decades after its prime. But The Dick Van Dyke Show is hardly the only old-timey sitcom to transcend the test of time and remain a comedic masterpiece years later.
Upon searching for the top 100 sitcoms of all time, I came across a Rolling Stone article that surveyed the greatest comedic programs to grace our television screens. While historic and notable sitcoms like Cheers and Seinfeld were ranked high on the list (as expected), I began to notice that many of the highest-ranking sitcoms on the list were made before colored television was even a known concept.
Black and white programs such as I Love Lucy and The Andy Griffith Show found themselves in Rolling Stone’s top 15, at 2nd and 14th place, respectively. Despite their age and old-timey aesthetic, these classic sitcoms are still keeping people entertained well over half a century after their original release.
I decided to conduct a little experiment to better understand why these sitcoms still remain incredibly popular after all these years. For one whole week, I would give up The Office and Parks and Rec in exchange for five seasons worth of The Dick Van Dyke Show.
Unlike many sitcoms and television series today, chronological order is meaningless on a show like Van Dyke, so randomly picking and choosing episodes across five seasons seemed like my best bet. The first episode I stumbled upon was titled “The Curious Thing About Women,” wherein Rob Petrie (Dick Van Dyke) gives wife Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) a hard time for reading his mail before he does.
As I sat watching the episode, something that became apparent very early on was how natural the comedy flowed. Whereas some of the shows on television today have jokes that feel forced and humorless, the writing for The Dick Van Dyke Show was genuinely funny. While the inappropriate and often crude moments of The Office’s Michael Scott holding an impromptu “diversity day” will certainly make you cackle, the light-hearted hilarity of Rob and Laura Petrie takes you back to a simpler era of comedy that remains lost on much of the world today. While much of the comedy we see today touches on crass and sometimes intentionally offensive content, the programming of the Van Dyke era offers viewers a show that can be enjoyed by the whole family.
But as I continued on my Van Dyke binge, the funniness (if that’s not a word, it is now) and quick-witted humor of the show slowly began to touch on a facet of my life that has always been a sort of home-base for simplicity and purity: the more I watched the antics of Rob and Laura Petrie, the more I realized how much the show reminded me of my grandparents.
Watching Rob gleefully kid Laura over her irresistible desire to read his mail quickly conjured up an image of my grandfather teasing my grandmother over her obsession with Facebook. As grandpa puts it, grandma likes to “know what’s going on down at the beauty parlor.” Moreover, the episode where Rob hurts himself skiing despite Laura’s warnings and his continuous attempts to hide his injuries from her to avoid the “I told you so” from his wife was a dead ringer for grandpa (sorry Pa, but when Ma’s right, she’s right).
Not simply was the character dynamic and teasing nature of Rob and Laura’s marriage very similar to how my grandparents joke around with one another, but watching the show gave me the same sort of “feel” of being at their house. Whenever I’m visiting my grandparents, a sensation of calmness washes over me as if all of my troubles just vanished at the doorstep to the house. As I take off my shoes and settle into the recliner next to grandpa’s, everything in the world feels simple, with the chaotic nature of my academic, intern, and work life gone in an instant.
Coming towards the end of my week-long experiment, I decided to call up my grandparents and ask them why they thought old television programs that were popular in their youth (once television became a thing anyways) remain so well-liked today. During our conversation, my grandmother told me that for her, rewatching old sitcoms like I Love Lucy takes her back in time to when she was just a little girl in Nebraska.
“My brother and I would sit on the living room floor, with our parents sitting on the couch behind us,” she said. “Television was a treat back then. It wasn’t something that was universally owned by a lot of people. So, for me, whenever I see a show like Lucy on TV, I’m taken back to those days of just being an innocent kid without a care in the world.”
But as I began to think over our conversation afterwards, I realized that life during that time wasn’t as happy-go-lucky as television made it out to be. Throughout the 1960s, the United States was experiencing some pretty historic changes and events in society, such as the Civil Rights Movement and the nationwide debate over America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. And who could forget the ever-pervasive threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union?
Flash forward and we find today’s generation dealing our own issues, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. But while each generation had own respective struggles, they shared a distinctive similarity: they both employed the sitcoms of their time as a form of escapism.
I came to realize that in some ways, sitcoms paint a rosy picture of the times we live in. Whatever the issues of the day may be, sitcoms take us into a world where we’re allowed to “tap out” for 30 minutes and just enjoy the absurdity of humanity. Whether it’s the comedic bickering of Rob and Laura Petrie displayed on a black and white television, or the offensive humor of Michael Scott watched on an iPad, sitcoms provide us with an avenue to evade the problems we don’t really want to deal with.
Just as my grandmother would flip on Lucy during her youth as a way to decompress, so too do I often find myself watching The Office or King of Queens to take my mind off of the stresses in my life and the daily chaos of our modern world. And much like my grandmother, I don’t doubt that decades from now, I’ll find myself reminiscing about those first times watching my favorite sitcoms and laughing along without a care in the world.