On the Right - The Laughter of Archie Bunker.(appreciation of legendary character and actor who portrayed him)(Brief Article)

NEW YORK, JUNE 26

The series starring Archie Bunker was the most devastating ideological scam in the cultural history of television. Archie Bunker was the conservative. He was ignorant, semi-illiterate, racist, mean, cowardly, and a sycophantic bully. Viewers were invited to assume that these were properties of everyone who resisted any civil-rights initiative, who thought favorable notice might be made of anything done by President Nixon, or thought the Vietnam War defensible.

The program's success was owing to two factors: the conceptual genius of Norman Lear, and the theatrical genius of Carroll O'Connor.

If you grit your teeth and decide that all references to ethnic minorities will be done in street language, and that they will be fullthroatedly extravagant in expression, then what you will need to bring it all off is the leaven of humor.

Norman Lear and his writers get all the credit for that-in episode after episode, the exchanges were hilarious. They were all done in the disciplined framework of Archie, house bully; "Meathead," idealistic, argumentative son-in-law; "little girl," blonde daughter, loyal to her liberal husband; and "Dingbat," Archie's wife, moronic and endearing.

The obituaries on the program mostly take the line that the program did the service of calling to the mind of its viewers the egregious prejudices of urban working men. The pilot program showed Archie seated in the chair that would become famous because of his proprietary attachment to it, unlit cigar in his hand. He gives his calling card: "I'm white, I'm male, I'm Protestant. Where's there a law to protect me?"

Archie Bunker ran with that. Non-whites were inferior, non-males accessories, non-Protestants suspicious, though so were such Protestants as attended with any fidelity to the practice of Christianity. Archie's was a once-a-year-in-church religion. Faith, hope, and charity-especially charity-were as instinctively suspect in Archie's world as Hebes and Coloreds. Archie was a saintly exhibit of the anti-Christian. By multiplying his deeds and attitudes, you could come up with something like 95 Antitheses of the Protestant faith.