ALAN writes:

I agree with your recent remarks and those of Anthony Esolen regarding “destroying the imagination” with modern toys and games. They prompted these thoughts:

On ordinary evenings in 1952-’54, my grandmother held me on her lap as she enjoyed the weekly half-hour episodes of “The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show” on our black-and-white television. She had been born long before television, before commercial radio, before automobiles and airplanes.  She was quiet, conservative, straight-laced, and a lifelong Catholic.  She enjoyed the kind of humor offered on television in the 1950s by Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, Spring Byington, Eve Arden, and Art Linkletter. She also enjoyed TV westerns because she knew they incorporated an iron moral code and would never permit evildoers to go unpunished.

Little things can be powerful reminders. The melody of the 1920 song “Love Nest” was used as the theme music for the Burns and Allen show.  Hearing that melody every week while sitting there on her lap is one of my oldest and earliest memories. The voice of announcer Harry Von Zell – distinctive, warm, soothing, never frenzied – is also part of that memory.

Doubtless my grandmother remembered Burns and Allen from their radio program and motion pictures.  Of course I, at ages three to five, was too young to appreciate George and Gracie’s humor.  At that age, I didn’t “get it.”  All they did was talk.  Or so I imagined.  But that is the key to their charm: The imaginative interplay of words, characters, and situations, expertly written and polished.  In a career spanning four decades, all they ever did was talk.  Though they achieved success in television and motion pictures, George and Gracie’s humor appealed more to the ear than to the eye.  Gracie’s “illogical logic” (as George described it) depended both upon words (furnished by the writers and spoken with meticulous timing and inflection by George and Gracie) and a healthy imagination (furnished by their audience).

By contrast, the imagination of American audiences today is not nearly so healthy because it has been weakened by the increasing emphasis over the past half-century on seeing rather than listening.  I venture that many Americans today would not “get” much of the humor in Burns and Allen because they are less literate, less articulate, less comfortable with the spoken word than American audiences were in the pre-television years.  They would look upon Burns and Allen as “just talking.” It had no “edge”, they would say; it had no “message”, no provocation, no bombast, no profanity, no promotion of the right (which is to say, the Left) causes.  Their lack of imagination prevents them from understanding what Burns and Allen did have:  Talented writing, measured speech, restraint, polish, an implicit moral code, and a desire to entertain their audiences, not agitate them.

In effect, such people are brain-anesthetized.  They have a wealth of advanced technology, a world of prepackaged entertainment, and a poverty of imagination.  I believe this is one effect (by no means the only one) of planting children in front of television screens from infancy onward, a habit that American parents told themselves was as “educational” as it was convenient.  It was, but not in the way they expected.  A child’s range of imagination is enhanced by the development of a conceptual frame of mind, made possible by learning to read, write, and become comfortable with words, ideas and abstractions.  Even listening to radio in its golden age required imagination.  But watching an endless parade of ever-changing images on TV screens has a very different effect.  It requires only the ability to see, not to think or imagine.  It fosters and reinforces a perceptual frame of mind whose range of imagination is far less than that of children in the pre-television years.   Such people now run this nation.  Their poverty of imagination is on display in many forms, not least in the witless, imbecilic, vulgar drivel that they call comedy.

This – the tone and texture of American comedy – is just one reason why life in the 1950s was better in many ways than what it is today.   Recordings of Burns and Allen or Jack Benny, whether from radio or television, offer a goldmine of self-effacing humor and wordplay which Americans, in a better time, once understood and loved.   My grandmother was one of them.  If she could see what passes for comedy today, she would be appalled.  That so few Americans are appalled by such drivel is one measure of their moral bankruptcy.

My grandmother enjoyed Burns and Allen because their humor was gentle, often understated, never overbearing, never mean-spirited or degrading, and light years distant from anything vulgar.  It was the same kind of self-effacing humor that endeared Jack Benny to his listeners.  (I agree with what Thomas Bertonneau wrote about this, here.)

On the end wall of an old, two-story, red-brick row-house in south St. Louis, there is the faded remnant of a huge painted sign with letters five foot high advertising “Carnation Milk, the Milk from Contented Cows.”  The sign likely dates from the 1930s or ‘40s.  When I discovered it by chance one day ten years ago, I stood there transfixed for a moment because it reminded me instantly of those evenings sixty years ago with my grandmother.  It was Carnation Milk who sponsored “Carnation’s own contented couple, George and Gracie”.  (Gracie never could figure out how they got milk from carnations.)

Where today is there an entertainment team so beloved over so many years?  Where today is there a team with such discipline and polish and who never stoop to vulgarity?

Sixty years from now, will today’s children remember songs as heartwarming as “The Love Nest” or entertainers as charming and talented as George and Gracie?  Why do I doubt it?

Please follow and like us: