Revisiting Normal

Car 54: When Laughter Was (Mostly) Innocent

I have often said that when I was a boy in the 1960s, it seemed that the world was beginning to shake under our feet. There were the political assassinations, the music growing angry and sometimes lewd, hard drugs seeping into our backwater town, the war in Vietnam, enemies in Russia and China committed to destroying us, the Catholic Church in upheaval, and the first divorce ever on either side of my very large family.

The Era of the Zany

You might think that humor in such a time would grow sour and bitter, but for the first six or seven years of that decade, it was not so. Instead, we enjoyed a brief flourishing of the zany—the crazy, the half-mad, a world of happy, imaginative absurdity. What would you get if Frankenstein and Mrs. Frankenstein and her father Count Dracula were the heads of a normal American family, such as the Cleavers were in Mayfield? You got then The Munsters. What would you get if a hillbilly from Tennessee struck it rich by accidentally discovering an oil field and went with his kinfolk and all his money, most of which he has no use for, to star-studded California? You got then The Beverly Hillbillies. What would you get if a smart guy from outer space, with retractable antennae, landed on earth and couldn’t get back again, but instead had to live for a while with a mild-mannered young fellow who had to keep your secret, calling you Uncle Martin? You got then My Favorite Martian.

These shows were everywhere, and they were by no means all of a piece. The best for gags was the spoof on spy shows and the Cold War, Get Smart. “Missed it by that much,” says Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, when the malefactor leaves the courtroom by leaping from the third-story window to an open truck with cushions waiting below. The best for the reversal of madness and sanity was Green Acres, set in some neverland called Hooterville, where a pig watches television, the county agent can’t speak a single sentence that makes any sense, you’ve got to climb a telephone pole to take calls, and the supposedly sane man, Oliver Wendell Douglas, successful New York lawyer turned very bad farmer, is the one person who never knows what the heck is going on. The Addams Family, Petticoat Junction, F Troop, Gilligan’s Island—such sprees of nuttiness were everywhere, alongside more traditional situation comedies, among them the flawless Dick Van Dyke Show.

Unjaded Comedy

But for my money, for sheer brilliance, quick pace, perfect and really quite human characterization, and plots with many a twist and turn so that the best joke is sometimes what you get at the very last moment and as a complete surprise, Car 54, Where Are You? bears away the bell. The jaunty song, sung by a quartet of male voices, is as good an introduction as any:

There’s a holdup in the Bronx,
Brooklyn’s broken out in fights,
There’s a traffic jam in Harlem that’s backed up to Jackson Heights,
There’s a scout troop short a child,
Khrushchev’s due at Idlewild—
Car 54, where are you?

That’s it. New York City, muscular and energetic and still a city made up of distinct neighborhoods, villages you may call them, with most of life carried on in the streets, with kids swarming everywhere, grocers with their produce out front, hawkers of this and that, policemen walking the beat or sometimes riding a horse and chatting with the tailor and the butcher and the shoeshine boy; a human life, and nobody knew at the time that its days were numbered.

The premise of Car 54 is deceptively simple. You put two cops in one car, and you make them the best of friends, though they are utterly unalike, and, what’s more, they aren’t really good at what they do, at least not on paper, but somehow, they always bumble into scrapes and out of them again, and the bad guys get caught.

One of them, the younger, is very tall, very shy, college-educated, a bit of a reader and an afficionado of classical music. That’s Francis Muldoon (Fred Gwynne, who would soon be the blundering flat-headed patriarch Herman in The Munsters). The other is short, squat, bullet-headed, and bug-eyed, not the brightest bulb in the marquee, but full of energy, wild imagination, and bad ideas. That’s Gunther Toody (Joe E. Ross). Toody gets Muldoon in trouble, time and again, but they still are fast friends. Set up against them both is the long-suffering chief of their precinct, Captain Block (Paul Reed), who would love to be rid of them, though there’s not a drop of malice in all three of those guys put together. And we’ve got Gunther’s wife Lucille (Beatrice Pons), who also has a lot to put up with from her nut of a husband, though the show will often enough give us situations in which the Captain’s the one who has blundered, or Lucille blames Gunther for something he didn’t do, and so forth. Add in Al Lewis (Grandpa in The Munsters) as another policeman, Leo Schnauser, who has brains enough but gets tangled up in the messes caused by Toody and Muldoon, and you are off to the races.

In Car 54, even the bad guys are not all that bad, and human beings are basically good, though their grasp on sanity is never firm. You laugh at their follies, but never at them for the fools they are—you like them too much for that. They are what you yourself would be, if your world were tilted just a little bit in the direction of the imaginative and crazy. The writing—with Nat Hiken in the lead, he who was the brains behind Sergeant Bilko (otherwise known as The Phil Silvers Show)—depends almost wholly upon character and plot, not upon one-liners and what we now call snark. There is nothing jaded about Car 54. Because Hiken was a genius at plot, you never really know how a thing is going to turn out, and what’s more, you can never be sure that you’re not about to get your expectations flipped upside down. Yet it all will come together perfectly, inevitably; and you’ll say, “It couldn’t have happened any better way, but I had no idea it would be this!”

There’s not a single clunker in the bunch, but of course we have our favorite episodes. There’s “Quiet, We’re Thinking!”, in which a small Boy Scout, Toody’s nephew Marvin, ends up solving an intractable chain of robberies at a warehouse and catching the hoodlums, all while helping another uncle and his business partner expand their works, and leading his troop in the big annual jamboree in Central Park. There’s “Boom, Boom, Boom,” in which all 163 precincts compete in barbershop quartets, singing the same song, “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” always preceded by a series of “booms” on different notes, and poor Jan Murray, overworked and on the edge of a nervous collapse, has to be one of the judges, and, well, the booms get into his fingers and eyelids and lip muscles and head. There’s “No More Pickpockets,” set outside of Yankee Stadium and the first game of the World Series, with Wally Cox playing a master pickpocket, and Benny, who always wanted to be a cop, so Toody lets him loose to round up all the pickpockets—with uproarious results, since it’s not only wallets that Benny can pinch, but police badges too. These are just from the first season; there are 60 episodes in all.

It’s winsome, the combination of intelligence in construction, a real roundedness of character in the principals, wildness that is often slapstick, no contempt, no one to be despised, and a lot of foolery.

A Fair Piece of Earth

You may ask, “Why should we bother with a television show?” If you do not watch any television, I have no quarrel with that. But you may want to show your children, through all the zaniness of this excellent comedy, what things were once taken for granted as normal. People walked the city streets without fear. Children could roam freely. Married people did not divorce. Boys and girls were boys and girls. The lewd and the garish were not constantly and everywhere on display. Cops were not armed to the teeth. Men took on their right duty as protectors. You liked your city and loved your country.

It’s not the kingdom of God on earth, but it never pretended to be. It was just a pretty fair piece of earth. These days, we all need to be reminded that such things did exist.