Word: kramden
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Divorced. Jackie Gleason, 58, TV comic whose role as Bus Driver Ralph Kramden became a classic; and Beverly McKittrick, 42, his former secretary; after four years of marriage-his second -no children; in Fort Lauderdale...
...nothing new, A whole raft of similar situation comedies rose and fell in that era--Life of Riley had its own working class hero, Dobie Gillis's father ran a small grocery (his mother worked in the store) and the best of them all--The Honeymooners--featured Ralph Kramden the busdriver and Ed Norton the sewer worker. Although alternatives to My Three Sons and Beaver Cleaver were rare, they existed, and Archie breaks no new ground in this direction...
...phony realism is not one of them. All television shows--comedy and tragedy alike--are ridiculous and are perceived as such by their audiences. A show like Bewitched would be the paramount example, but even Beaver Cleaver is as obviously stereotyped as Jackie Gleason-Ralph Kramden. TV forces its audience to pay obeisance to the unreal, but not to believe...
...working-class, some New York City ex-ad-men fashioned Joe to play right into the fantasies of the more naive paranoids-and found themselves with the '70's first box-office smash. It is Peter Boyle's image of a gun-toting psychopath that has replaced Ralph Kramden as a symbol of the "lower depths" for the upper and middle classes. There hasn't been a decent manual laborer since, not even in Five Easy Pieces, which made the only repressed figure an ex-concert pianist. Even Brando's heroic dockworker from On the Waterfront would be a welcome...
...good deal different, but Gleason's new Honeymooners is a lot better-better, in fact, than any other comedy series on the air. Dressed up now and then with music and dancing, the adventures of gullible Brooklyn Bus Driver Ralph Kramden (Gleason) and goofy Sewer Worker Ed Norton (Art Carney) rock with a screwball spontaneity that puts the team in a class with the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy. At the same time, they are never so far out that the audience has the slightest trouble identifying them as a couple of ordinary likable slobs. "This...