DOBIE GILLIS:
THE STRUCTURAL STRATEGY OF JUXTAPOSING THE TEENAGE
OUTSIDER AND THE MAINSTREAM SITCOM FAMILYNote 1
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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 two books nor Broadway play, nor the movie musical that came before it, nor the movie that came after were its equal in social commentary, creative accomplishment, or cultural influence. There were 142 episodes of Dobie GillisNote 2 in its five year run from 1959 to 1963. It was popular enough to be pictured on the cover of the November, 1960 issue of "Writer's Digest" and described in the accompanying illustrated article as, "One of the most amusing shows in production; almost every scene is a perfect, complete little gem of comedy." (Vogel p 37) (Figure 1, Magazine cover) (Figure 2, Rehearsal photo)
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. 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 3
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. (Debord 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.