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OTR: cancelled
A Wisconsin public radio troupe performed old radio scripts, reviving old stories for new audiences. It was popular for years, and you can imagine what fun the actors had – tearing into the chunks of ham on the page, or recapturing the timbres and slang of a previous era.
No more; it’s been cancelled. In the old and new senses of the word.
Wisconsin Public Radio is canceling its long-running weekend program “Old Time Radio Drama,” with station officials citing the “racist and sexist material” present in many of the plays of the Golden Age of Radio.
“Many of these plays and productions were produced more than 60 years ago,” Wisconsin Public Radio director Mike Crane said in a statement on Friday. “Despite significant effort over the years, it has been nearly impossible to find historic programs without offensive and outdated content.”
This is . . . remarkable.
The statement relies on the audience’s ignorance of the material. It depends on people thinking “well, yes, those are old shows; surely they’re shot through with racism and sexism,” without knowing anything about the subject. It’s the past! Ergo it’s gotta be offensive.
I’ve no idea what percentage of old radio shows survive in transcribed form, but we have a lot, mostly from the 40s and 50s. Yes, Amos ’n’ Andy was, well, Amos ’n Andy, but it was a rare show built around African Americans. For the most part they were invisible, aside from a few domestic servants – and we’ll get to that in a moment. You could say that the exclusion of Black voices from radio was racist, but that’s different than saying the material was racist.
“Life with Luigi” was an Italian immigrant comedy, complete with stereotypical characters who-a speak-a the cliched mama-mia lingo. But it loved its characters, and Luigi, for all his comic faults, was proud to be in American. But okay, it’s racist against Italians, so take that one off the table.
The Goldbergs: same thing. Fine, don’t do those, eliminate the most prominent Jewish sitcom, for reasons.
And that’s about all I got, at the moment. If some of the Hispanic accents in the 50s were a bit too broad, it might be because they were usually played by the same guy – it was his speciality – but the Latin cops with whom Johnny Dollar dealt were always smart and on the level. As I noted in another old radio thread, the 50s Westerns at their best were explicitly anti-racist when it came to the American Indians. If Tales of the Texas Rangers did a story about a murder that looked like the immigrant guy did it, the plot was guar-an-fargin’-teed to find blame with the jealous white rancher. Joe Friday, week after week, was pulling in white guys – I can’t think of a single ep in which the bad guy was a minority, and yes, I’ve listened to them all.
About those “domestics” – two of the most long-running series had prominent African-American actors as “servants,” and in neither case were they subservient. Eddie “Rochester” Anderson had Jack Benny’s number cold. Birdie, the maid on The Great Gildersleeve (played by Lillian Randolph) started out as a cliche, but in the hands of good writers – including John Wheedon, grandfather of Marvel writer-director Joss Wheedon – she became the de facto mother and wife of the household, and the only person who could tell the truth to Mis’t Gildersleeve. I’m not defending the fact that she was a servant – I’m saying that in the context of the times, in the late 40s and early 50s, an African-American character was consciously elevated to the role of the household’s indispensable pragmatist and emotionally centered adult, because the writers invested her cliche with humor, dignity, and humanity.
As for “sexism,” well, here’s a news flash: women in the old radio shows were unapologetically feminine, and occasionally confessed to silly desires for romance and marriage. But the medium also abounded with smart, canny sidekicks – detective shows, from Let George Do It to Mr. District Attorney to Micheal Shayne to Casey, Crime Photographer, were expected to have a clever, resourceful female assistants who helped solve the crime, and they were invariably more resourceful than the bullheaded Oirish cop who couldn’t tumble to what was really going on. In the anthology mystery shows like The Whistler, you were more likely to find razor-sharp women who cut their way through a man’s world to make their way. In the comedies, women were often the voice of reason – sardonic, knowing – in a way that makes the menfolk blustering fools.
There are literally hundreds of hours of mysteries and adventures and romances and sci-fi shows that still work today. And even if there’s an element that abraids modern sensibilities, isn’t it instructive to experience the tropes and conventions of a prior age, so one might know what the culture was like?
Or are we expected to assume that everything Old was Bad, and take their word for it, and nod as the Old and Bad is put in the vault, because the actual evidence would be so horrifying we couldn’t even? Are people today so fragile they cannot survive contact with examples of the old culture – but we’re supposed to believe them when they say they know exactly what the old culture was like?
I love this art form, and have been studying it for years. The idea that one can’t find enough scripts that aren’t racist and sexist is not only absolute nonsense, it’s a casual dismissal of vast swaths of American pop-culture history. It’s a libel, and its ignorance is matched only by its cowardice. You want to cancel the show, cancel the damn show. You want to quit your job at the Library of Congress, quit your job. Just don’t throw a lit match over your shoulder as you head for the exit.
Published in General
Quick! Before they’re gone: https://archive.org/details/oldtimeradio
When I learned that “Silence is violence!” I gave up on trying to communicate with the Progressives.
How violent an approach to take.
You joke, but those are in the process of being cancelled as well, as James wrote about last week. And the censors are very proud of their work.
Let’s talk atonement. Wisconsin Public Radio broadcast this horrible filth for years. Broadcast the racist, misogynist bigotry without shame. Everyone, without exception, who works there should resign and sign over their pensions and 401k and IRAs to BLM so they can never ever enjoy the poisoned fruits of their labor. Canceling the shows isn’t enough. They must cancel themselves.
Remember, it only takes one mistake, one solitary single Thoughtcrime, no matter how small, to destroy an entire life’s work. It all has to be purged for it is all tainted by Sin.
Take this is as a helpful hint: If you look forward each Christmas to cocoa, popcorn, tissues, and It’s a Wonderful Life, you should buy your own copy right now. The housekeeper is a black woman in George Bailey’s family.
We cannot understand today without a knowledge of our history. By erasing history we are eliminating our ability to know who we are, why we believe what we believe. We also invite the future to eliminate us, making our current existence meaningless.
And the next statues to go will be those of Thomas Jefferson because he had 600 slaves.
Monticello is a testament to their work and expertise, but that won’t matter. Jefferson will have to go.
Already happening.
I have long thought the “Rochester” character on the Jack Benny show was an extremely effective tool for countering anti-black racism, in part because it was so subversive. Although he was a “domestic servant,” usually he was the only character who had a clear view of what was going on, and in the end the only one who made sense. The listener (in the era) gets to the end of the episode and realizes, “Hey, that Negro chauffeur was the smartest, most clear-eyed character on the show. Maybe I need to rethink my encounters with the Negroes I see in real life.”
Of course, the “servant who is wiser than the master” is a very common story, and present in all races and cultures and eras. It is one of the ways that storytellers lift up the lowly and bring down the haughty and make us all equal.
I guess we can’t have that anymore.
Because that would imply that the servant was ever considered lower than the master, and that’s WrongThink.
There is a lot in this – the forcing of laughter to the purpose of applause – as if laughter can no longer be a natural reaction. I bet there’s a lot of faked orgasms in this crowd too.
Live PD was cancelled.
COPs was cancelled.
But my personal favorite in this madness…..
Parody can’t stay ahead of a self-parodying movement.
In the old days, when networks were seeking large audiences, niching yourself into appealing only to a small segment of the potential audience would mean cancellation. But the networks have convinced advertisers a small, loyal audience with disposable income is all they can hope to maintain in the modern era of multiple entertainment options. So the networks (and big metro newspapers like The New York Times) have opted to cater to the people who think the most like them.
That allows them to put on multiple late-night talk shows all trying for the same viewers, all with the same jokes and now, in this heightened era of cancel culture, all willing to get more and more ideological and less and less funny to preserve their status (and a good way to know if a comedian is a hack is if they’re fine with canceling other comedians or comedy shows for not being the ‘approved’ type of comedy, even if it was OK just 1-2 months ago. Asking the current late-night hosts about cancel culture would be interesting and depressing).
Remember when Mitch McConnell warned Harry Reid not to kill the judicial filibuster because some day the Democrats would need it? Didn’t take because Reid and the Dems never thought they’d ever lose control of the White House again, due to changing demographics — they didn’t need the filibuster because there would never be another conservative judicial nominee from the White House.
Same deal with those wanting to erase the past today. They don’t care if past history is eliminated in favor of their prepared narrative, because they think they’re going to be in power in perpetuity, and their narrative will be the one everybody will have to live by until the end of time. Cancel culture can never envision their own current pet ideas — or themselves — being cancelled by the mob.
Hey, Gary! How about another Ricochet Silent Radio, on Zoom, of a real old-time radio script that anyone who wants to participate can do so. Let’s have some fun with this!
The Shadow would be good. I have the laugh.
Wow.
Uh huh. As Freberg said, “First, satire has to be funny. Otherwise it’s just whining.”
So they’re saying that by silencing OTR, they’ve done violence?
Rochester was a very positive character. So was Ebony White in “The Spirit” comic strips and books. Eisner caught a lot of grief for Ebony in the Fifties, and briefly replaced him with an Eskimo but realized that no matter what the ethnic sidekick, someone was going to get offended. So Ebony, the world’s fastest taxi driver (who always seemed to be too young to have a license), returned to his role.
Seriously
Public Radio is inherently racist and need to be eliminated.
I do try to remind my friends who are eager to erase history (usually because of some tie to slavery) that the day will come when something they said or did would be considered unacceptable, and that they too will be erased. I continue to be amazed at the self-assurance they express that such erasure will never happen to them. They consider it impossible that any opinion they have today might in the future be considered unacceptable.
They need to revisit Dr Suess, like the Sneetches, or the Butter-Battle Book and learn just how arbitrary opinions can be.
Apparently not.
I’d settle for defunded.
Plus, Jack Benny made Eddy Anderson one of the highest paid black actors in Hollywood.