DOBIE GILLIS:
THE STRUCTURAL STRATEGY OF JUXTAPOSING THE TEENAGE
OUTSIDER AND THE MAINSTREAM SITCOM FAMILY
_________________________
It is not often that one can say that a television series is better
than the book that inspired it, but Max Shulman’s The Many Loves of
Dobie Gillis found its fullest artistic expression on the small
screen. Neither the book nor Broadway play that came before it, nor the
movie that came after were it’s equal in social commentary, creative accomplishment,
or cultural influence.
This article suggests some ways in which we may look at the "hip outsider"
as a continuing character in post World War Two youth culture. (Note
1) It describes in what ways The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
was a program that aimed directly at the new "teenage" generation of the
late 1950s. It draws some parallels between the costarring character of
Maynard G. Krebs (played by Bob Denver) and the character of the hip outsider
that appeared in several other television series of the time, especially
Edward Kookie Burns on 77 Sunset Strip. The importance of this lies
in the fact that if we can expose the structural strategy of juxtaposing
the hip outsider and the mainstream family we may begin to notice some
of the ways in which the 1950s sitcom succeeds or fails in deflecting challenges
to the family ideal that were brought forth by the cohort born shortly
after World War Two.
In attempting to understand the teenage outsider we will make reference
to the episode where Chatsworth Osborne Junior asks Dobie’s father, Herbert
T. Gillis, to teach him to become a man and respect all of the values of
rising early in the day, hard work, abstemiousness, and a serious attitude.
Dobie Gillis was a typical American teenager of the late 1950s, he went
to high school, the army, and then college. He was aided and abetted by
his mother, father, his "good buddy" Maynard G. Krebs, (the "G" stands
for Walter), Zelda Gilroy, the girl who pursued him, and Thalia Menninger,
the girl he pursued. (Note 2)
Dobie would often be found sitting in front of a copy of Rodin’s statue
The Thinker, from where he would engage in direct address to the audience,
about the philosophical, and psychological problems of his life; the life
of an American teenager. Nina Leibman points out that the popular media
of film and television did not hesitate to enter the debate on the role
of the younger generation in the post war family:
Teenagers, free from both the burdens of the Depression and the military
duties required of previous generations, were defining themselves on the
basis of music, dare-devil activities, specific consumptive habits, and
a rebellious appearance, which horrified and frightened their elders. Not
surprisingly, the American media was fairly bursting with advice and directives
on how the new American family was to see itself. (Living Room Lectures
250)
The episodes were often little morality tales, (situations) in which Dobie
and his friends would solve a problem in a "typical" All-American fashion.
The programs were not political, or even socially conscious, they did seem
to hue to the straight and narrow of mid-1950s, middle class, middle of
the road social codes. Not with any sense of a crusade, but simply because
that is the way things were done. There was something different about the
show, not unique, but different from most shows of the time. It was aimed
at the young audience, it had consciously taken the step toward "youth
appeal", that Jim Aubery was taking at the rival ABC, and for which ministrations
he would soon be brought back to CBS where he had developed Have Gun
Will Travel a few years earlier. The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
was both aimed at the teen audience and had an oddball, bohemian, character
who was totally out of step with the parental generation. Although most
of the programs in the series strongly reinforced the status quo, and preached
a typical fifties morality, Maynard G. Krebs was not included in the typical
morality of the "straight" world that Dobie and his friends inhabited.
(Note 3)
Alex McNeil refers to Maynard as Dobie’s "carefree beatnik friend, television’s
primordial hippie" (McNeil 202). But Maynard G. Krebs was not a hippie,
there were no hippies in 1959, we would have to wait until the Spring of
1967 for Time magazine to do a cover story on "Hippies" thereby naming
and identifying the group and legitimizing it as a fit subject for television
representation; and cooption. Maynard was a beatnik. He wore a goatee,
a loose fitting sweat shirt and said things like "like" to introduce a
phrase; "Like your Dad’s a grouch, Dobie."
In one episode of the series, wealthy Chatsworth Osborne Junior, who
lives with his widowed mother, Mrs. Chatsworth Osborne Senior, is tired
of being told by his mother that he is not a real man. He asks Dobie’s
Dad, Herbert T. Gillis, to teach him the values of rising early, working
hard and eschewing frivolity. He feels that because he has grown up surrounded
by servants and a doting mother he has not developed the intestinal fortitude
to become a real man. Dobie, his father, his mother and friend Maynard
are persuaded to move into the Osborne mansion while Mrs. Osborne pretends
to go off to India to hunt tigers. Mrs. Osborne, in an attempt to show
that even the Gillises are susceptible to the temptations of the easy life
instructs the servants to pamper the visiting family so that her son will
see how quickly they become accustomed to the privileges of wealth and
how easily they give up their work ethic when presented with an alternative.
Although she is the antagonist in this episode Chatsworth’s mother is not
presented as a villain, in fact, by the end of the episode she too is giving
lessons about the role of the woman in Fifties’ sitcom society. This is
in keeping with Nina Leibman’s (Note 4) conclusion
that "A complete castigation of motherhood would be inappropriate in a
medium which depended upon the mother-consumer for its financial success.
Instead, Mother was seen as the consummate domestic worker and comfort
for the husband, who bore the brunt of the emotive chores, taking charge
of the families psychological development and well-being." (Living Room
Lectures 255)
One could argue that most sitcoms, like soap operas including shows
such as Dobie Gillis, are geared to influence us to accept the way things
are. They do this by positing a world in which things are tranquil until
a situation occurs which threatens to turn the world upside down. The working
out of the plot is the process of deflecting the danger to the paradigm
and returning things to the status quo. The problems of the sitcom and
the soap opera are often problems that threaten to change the way things
are. Writing in the early 1940s Rudolf Arnheim offers some insights about
radio soap opera that might well apply to the Dobie Gillis show in the
1960s.
These problems stem from disturbances of static life situations, rather
than from obstacles to the accomplishment of goals. One could imagine plays
in which the characters were bent on achieving certain positive aims such
as educating children, fighting for a social reform, solving a scientific
problem. The "problems" would consist in conquering the forces opposed
to the realization of the aim. The typical radio serial situation, instead,
cannot be compared to a stream hampered by a stone thrown into it. The
attitude of the serial characters is essentially passive and conservative,
possibly a reflection of the role which the average serial listener plays
in the community. ( Arnheim 44)
Throughout the episode we are considering, Chatsworth is offered a series
of apothegmata of middle class virtues with which he should imbue his lifestyle
and system of beliefs.
When young Chatsworth gives wristwatches to his school classmates in
an attempt to be more popular, Dobie tells him, "You’ll never be a worthwhile
human being if you put money before character." And later, Dobie says,
"No one can depend on someone else to teach him the things he needs to
teach himself". The closing trope, the tag line of the show occurs when
everyone has gone to Dobie’s house for dinner and Chatsworth offers to
help clear the table. His heretofore imperious mother stops him, and as
she begins to help Mrs. Gillis clear the table she says, "Men are to sit
and talk, dishes are a woman’s work."
These life style epigraphs are offered to all and sundry but not to
Maynard. He is an outsider and is allowed to comment upon the affairs of
daily life without being involved in them.
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis is an early example of the baby boom
oriented shows that were presented on television in the late fifties and
sixties. And Maynard G. Krebs is an example of the out-of-sync bohemian,
speaking the language of youth and eschewing the values of the parental
generation in favor of a teenage subculture which seemed to spring up by
itself, and to be understood without explanation by a certain segment of
the population. That youth segment of the population seemed to have a huge
supply of discretionary funds, and it became more and more important that
advertisers be able to reach that market.
There may be some structural reasons for the success of Dobie and Maynard.
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis premiered on September 29,
1959. Lou Cowen was President of the Network at the time but he was in
poor health and he was being engulfed in the flames of the quiz show scandals.
A conflagration that had been started in 1958 by Herbert Stemple’s revelations
about fixing of the NBC show Twenty-One. CBS, and Lou Cowen in particular
were responsible for several game shows, the $64,000 Question being
one of the most prominent. Meanwhile James Aubrey, "the smiling cobra,"
was building a youth oriented slate of shows at ABC, and was soon to return
to CBS to replace Cowen as Network President. Aubrey became president of
the CBS television network in December of 1959, after having spent a year
at ABC as vice president in charge of programming, where he helped develop
The Rifleman, with Chuck Conners as a widower with a sawed-off rifle,
and 77 Sunset Strip with Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as an educated private
eye, and Ed Byrnes as Gerald Lloyd (Kookie) Kookson the Third, as off beat
parking lot attendant with aspirations to become a private detective.
By 1959 the baby boomers were moving through the population and were
beginning to develop a taste and style of their own, a style or culture
that was not merely a children’s version of their parent generation’s culture.
Disneyland on ABC in 1954 and The Mickey Mouse Club in 1955, were both
aimed squarely at the, as yet, pre teen baby boomers. But I don’t think
we can say that they were old enough to have developed a world view that
would stand out as distinct from their parents’. But by 1959 the hormones
were kicking in and teenagers had begun to realize that they had a culture
of their own. They could look back to the recent past at Marlon Brando
in the Wild One, 1953, and James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause
in 1955. These actors had set the examples of young people estranged from
their society and facing the angst of a world that for them was no longer
post-war, but had yet to become psychedelicized. Allan Freed, and other
Disc Jockeys such as "Dandy" Dan Ingram, Murray "The K" Kaufman "Cousin"
Bruce Murrow, and Wolfman Jack had developed followings of young people
who were living the rock and roll lifestyle. Clothing styles featured tight
"pegged" pants and thin ties. The most important colors were black and
white. This teen cohort dovetailed with a somewhat older group of intransigents
whom the press called "beatniks."
In 1956 Lawrence Ferlinghetti published Howl and Other Poems
by Allen Ginsberg under the impress of City Lights Books. Ginsberg tries
to share with us the feeling of the "angel headed hipsters burning for
the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of
night." (Ginsberg 9) Maynard G. Krebs is that angel headed hipster connected
to the starry dynamo. In 1959 the supreme court ruled that Howl and
Other Poems was not obscene and could be sold without breaking the
law. In that same year The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis premiered
on CBS-TV.
Maynard has both the outward accouterments of a beatnik, goatee, baggy
sweat shirt, bop lingo, and slouching walk; and the inner qualities of
a gone cat, he is out of step, questions the work ethic of Dobie’s parents
(an ethic shared by the parents of most of the audience members); and is
attached to his friend Dobie, with much the same dedication that Allen
Ginsberg is dedicated to Jack Kerouac, the author of On The Road,
or Peter Orlowsky is dedicated to his friend Allen Gingberg.
In a popular book about his acting career Bob Denver tells us about
the character Maynard:
He was also a bona fide beatnik and jazz fanatic. This was the late
fifties and beatniks were the funkiest things around. I had been to coffeehouses
in L.A. where beatniks hung out, and they fascinated me. I listened to
their best poetry and jargon. I even tried to wade my way through the beats’
bible, On the Road by Jack Kerouac. During the first year of playing Maynard,
I was allowed to make up my character. Not too many of the writers knew
what a beatnik was like (Denver 15).
There is a disjunction between the way the actors and writers perceived
Maynard and the way he was perceived by the youthful audience. Although
it may have been an impossible struggle for the actor Bob Denver to "wade
through" Kerouac’s On The Road, the character Maynard was in the
groove.
Maynard’s authors, (writer, producer, actor) portray him as an ineffectual
outsider, who, although he is quixotically appealing will eventually be
relegated to a marginal and insignificant role, but he is received by the
audience as an existential antihero. A subversive reading, an antihegemonic
subtext of Maynard as hero, not fool, is projected onto the television
screen by the creative and resistant teen audience.
Author Max Shulman did not see a political side to his characters. He
tells us that, "As for the differences between rich and poor, that’s always
existed. I don’t think you’re going to find much sociological content in
Dobie Gillis." (Shulman 158)
The French Situationalist Guy Deboard offers an insight into why the
sociological, one might even say ideological, content of Dobie Gillis
remained transparent to its creator:
Even the role of specifically ideological labor in the service of
the system comes to be considered nothing more than the recognition of
an ‘epistemological base’ that pretends to be beyond all ideological phenomena.
(Deboard 213)
Those responsible for the show may not have intended the character of Maynard
to become a locus for resistant readings of the sweet love stories of Max
Shulman’s domestic comedy, but indeed he did. The character somehow found
a resonance with the teenage viewers that far exceeded the expectations
of the author.
I shudder to think of it-Maynard wasn’t even in the original pilot script.
But then I saw that I had to have someone for Dobie to talk to. Of course,
the beats were very much in the news and in the forefront of things. So
I wrote Maynard in very late…When the mail started coming in, it was so
heavy for Maynard that we kept building the part. And by the time the series
was in its second, third, fourth years, of course, he was a co-star, really.
Although he didn’t get the billing or the money. (Shulman in Hamamoto 159)
Corporate economies and the sociology of the generation gap conspired
to keep Bob Denver’s part a minor one, but as authors have discovered since
Shakespeare’s Falstaff, characters’ resonance with the audience sometimes
causes them to take on a life of their own. While the author saw Maynard
as a narratological device, viewers saw him as an example of the transgressive
alienated drop out.
Back in the 1950s I thought I knew what was happening, I thought that
these kids—I called them "The new delinquents"-I thought that they were
just trying to devil their parents. I didn’t realize that they were going
to get into drugs and politics and serious business. I didn’t think they
would. But they did. (Shulman in Hamamoto 165)
The tonsorial and satorial style of these youth shows was different from
what had previously been on television, but more important than that was
the age of the characters. They were young, practically teenagers. These
people had not been in World War II, they were part of the post war baby
boom and were at least reflecting the ethos of their generation, and probably
helping to shape, the ethos of the 1960s and 70s. The big hair heroes of
these shows spoke to the largest population group in the nation, they drew
that group to the screen and held it until the sponsor arrived.
Perhaps the earliest of these shows was 77 Sunset Strip. It was first
telecast on October 10th, 1958 on ABC. Other shows that developed
the new look included, Hawaiian Eye and Bourbon Street, both of which premiered
in the same year as Dobie Gillis. 77 Sunset Strip was aimed directly at
the "hip" young audience, and developed a prototype for the cool private
detective in what McLuhan would call a relatively cool medium. It revolved
around the adventures of two suave private eyes that worked out of their
offices on Sunset Strip. Among the regulars on this series was Ed Kookie
Burns who played the part of a parking lot attendant in the restaurant
next door to the detectives’ offices, and who we might see as a role model
for both Maynard G. Kregs and, much later, the Fonz on Happy Days. Kookie
was always combing his hair, and making up a jive lingo that somehow caught
the spirit of the times. Foe example: "the grinchiest" (the greatest);
"piling up the Z’s" (sleeping); "keep the eyeballs rolling" (be on the
lookout); "play like a pigeon" (deliver a message); "a dark seven" (a depressing
week); and "headache grapplers" (aspirin).
Kookie Burns and Maynard G. Krebs were initially thought of as comic
relief. But as character actors have occasionally done throughout the history
of the theater, they were able to steal the show, Kookie was not slated
to be a regular character but the audience response was so strong that
he was given a bigger part. The lines we remember are the colorful neologisms
that seemed to confound the "old folks" and which the "kids" seemed to
intuitively understand.
Maynard also had a series of "couch words" or "running gags", that the
audience would wait for and hen repeat the next day at school; (it was
school, not work, for most of Dobie and Maynard’s followers). Maynard would
suddenly appear when his name was mentioned and say "you rang"; whenever
the word "work" was mentioned he would shudder and shout "Work?", his voice
dripping with fear and anxiety. When things were going well Maynard would
turn to his friend Dobie and say, "That’s right good buddy". He would often
say "like" or "like wow". "like wow" was not a phrase made up for the show
by the writers, but one taken from the common parlance of the beats.
In 1963, 77 Sunset Strip started to lose its ratings appeal,
and Jack Webb was brought in as the new producer. Changes were made but
the revamped show could not regain its sea legs, and it went into reruns
and then off the air in September 9, 1964. Jack Webb was the producer of
the serious, laconic, police drama Dragnet. Dragnet was a
show which may have seemed similar to a high key lighting of the private
eyes on 77 Sunset Strip.
In 1963 Dobie also had troubles, enough to drive the show off the air.
The sea change was coming. The teenagers were becoming young adults, and
losing the innocence that had characterized the earlier youth oriented
shows. They discovered that Presidents could be assassinated, wars could
be immoral, and most undercover investigators work for the government,
not as freelance super heroes.
In their compendium on Television Comedy Series, Eisner and Krinsky,
tell us that, Dobie Gillis is not a typical comedy; it represents the youth
of America in a period of our society that shunned young people and their
ideas. (Eisner and Krinsky 213) "I would suggest that Eisner and Krinsky
overstate the case. Dobie Gillis is indeed a typical comedy, in the mode
of the typical 50s situation comedy world; except for the fact that it
is one of the early shows to consciously appeal to the teen audience. So
much so that when Happy Days the show that gave rise to that Maynard-like
character "Fonzie", premiered in 1974, John J. O’Connor, writing in the
New York Times, likened it to Dobie Gillis and other "typical" situation
comedies. "Happy Days is something that could be good but evidently has
decided to go the familiar route of Dobie Gillis, Father Knows Best, Henry
Aldrich and Andy Hardy "(O’Connor) (Note 5).
But the intention of the authors is not always the message that is received
by the audiences that collect around a television program, and even "typical"
characters can take on a life of their own. In Tele-Advising, Mimi White
points out that television does not simply reflect the cultural practices
that it portrays. "As the exemplary mode of contemporary cultural expression,
television significantly rewrites and transforms the cultural and social
practices that it references and recombines" (White 180).
In the preceding few pages we have seen the 1959 television program
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis was an early, (although not the earliest)
program aimed at the baby boom audience, and how we can begin to locate
that program in the larger culture of the time. We have also seen how Maynard
G. Krebs might fit into the role of the alienated teenager, existential
soul, hippie, beatnik, outsider that had run through American popular culture
since World War Two.
We have considered how the structural strategy of juxtaposing the hip
outsider and the mainstream family can support readings of the domestic
comedy as a cautionary tale, teaching the rules of the dominant culture,
or on the other hand, the world of the comedy can be read as a locus of
resistance.
George Gerbner’s cultivation theory suggests that the reiteration of
cultural lessons and examples in the electronically mediated bitstream
of contemporary life inculcates us with a sense of the way the world ought
to be. We learn to see as normal the roles we will play as they are determined
by media portrayal of, among other things, our gender, age, ethnicity and
physiognomy. It is often the best economic interest of the culture industry
to take advantage of and to perpetuate those stereotypes.
Whether or not the recurring character of the hip teenage outsider became
a locus of resistance and provided youth culture of the fifties and sixties
with a rallying point for rebellion, or if the character served as a safety
valve, deflecting political energy into manageable forms of rebellious
posturing remains a moot question.
But we can say for certain that such a character exists and that study
of that particular character type will offer perspectives on societal expectations
of teenagers, outsiders, wives, husbands, families and friendships in mid-century
American life.
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