3D Strike Back

http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/movie-talk-star-wars-in-3D-will-it-work-for-audiences.html

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The Most Impressive Piece of Performance Art I have Ever Seen

Dave Letterman Was In On The Joaquin Phoenix Hoax, Too

Class Notes 09/15: 70s Cultural Television explosion

MONDAY: Seinfeld was the rated the #1 TV show of all time by TV Guide. We will watch I Love Lucy on Monday, at which time, your 2nd journal: reflections on 50s TV will be due for Tuesday.

TUESDAY & WEDNESDAY: We will watch some episodes of the Twilight Zone for the sake of pointing out the transitional nature of TV from the 50s into the 60s. Rising divorce rates and youth movements through the 60s pushes executives to illustrate "less traditional" families, think the difference between the shows we've watched when compared to the more "fantastic" shows that rules the 60s like Bewitched (we will watch in class) & Beverly Hillbillies. (watch on your own).

Journal #3: Reactions to 60s TV due Thursday.  

On your own, consider the explosion of urban and ethnic themed TV in the 70s. Chico and the Man. Welcome Back Kotter. Good Times. Sanford & Son.

For help, consider the following excerpt from Christine Acham's book: Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power.

Moreover, Acham is able to draw stylistic and textual linkages between this history and black television in the seventies. This lineage is more than theoretical, as some of the performers on black television in the sixties and seventies were shaped by their involvement in these black performance spaces. Redd Foxx, a comedian whose Los Angeles comedy club was a venue for comedians ranging from the more mainstream Bill Colby to the controversial Richard Pryor, was also no stranger to controversial and “blue” material. While he apparently did not have a large white following, NBC saw the lucrative potential in brining him on board to star in Sanford and Son, a comedy starring an African American family based on a British sitcom. Redd Foxx played a widowed patriarch and his son Lamant was played by Demond Wilson. The two lived on a meager income in Watts, Los Angeles, made famous by the black uprisings there in 1965. While many criticized the show for its “negative” stereotypes about blackness, Acham points out that Foxx was able to use the venue to offer a showcase to a number of lesser known black artists who would make appearances on the show. Additionally, she points out that the white character was far more caricatured than the black characters and therefore, his portrayal represented a form of social critique.
Acham argues that the types of humor seen on television in the 1970s have their origins in “communal black spaces,” which were produced by the color line and Jim Crow segregation. Acham sees the emergence of these performance traditions from these spaces to the publicity of television as an emergence into the public sphere. She argues that this transition from African Americans laughing amongst themselves to sharing humor with a multi-racial television audience challenged white racism, celebrated working class black aesthetics, and made middle class blacks very uncomfortable.
While the forms of Black humor originating on the black theater circuit signaled resistance to white norms and white oppression, these forms were not designed with a white audience in mind. Thus, Acham argues, when comedies with their roots in this theater tradition began to circulate on television, a middle class concern with racial uplift informed critics’ dismissal of African American comedies such as Sanford and Son.
While her historical interpretation is based in secondary sources, Acham’s original contributions are evident in her close reading of the programs. Her class-based argument allows for new readings of texts that have been maligned and dismissed. Despite the tremendous structural racism in the television industry, Acham sees a possibility for resistance, and is able to demonstrate it convincingly. Significantly, she also focuses mostly on comedies, and situates enjoyment by black viewers as, itself, a possible form of resistance. She sees this enjoyment as politicizing rather than palliative.

“I highlight the many ways in which black people used the media, specifically television, for community purposes, as a political voice for social change, for enjoyment and for self affirmation” (Acham 20).

In the move from the near invisibility of African Americans on television in the forties, fifties and sixties to what Acham terms the “hyper blackness” of the late sixties and 1970s something important happened. Where some middle class critics see “jokesters,” Acham finds the possibility of resistance. Building on cultural history such as the work of Kevin Gaines, Acham ties the notion of uplift to middle class African Americans. She claims that middle class ideologies dominate the critical dialogue around black televisual representations in the seventies and lead towards dismissal. This is a mistake, as television was doing important political work during this revolutionary period in black history.

Extra Credit for answers to the following questions:

1. Who is Chico's famous son?

2. What role is "The Man" famous for?

3. Which sweathog graduated from Rowan?

4. What was John Travolta's famous catch-phrase before he stole the world's heart in Saturday Night Fever?
5. What is the man who played Jethro on the Beverly Hillibillies most famous for?

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