What I watched: The tenth episode of The Life of Riley, an early sitcom. The episode starred Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Lanny Rees, Sid Tomack, and Tito Vuola. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds, and written by Irving Belcher, Reuben Shipp, and Alan Lipscott. “Night School” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, December 6, 1949, and is available to watch on Youtube.
What happened: Junior is writing a composition, and asking his father about the spelling of various words. Meanwhile, Riley is preparing for his own assignment: an exam for the night school class he’s taking. Gillis comes by to offer him tickets to a wrestling match, but Riley refuses to “play hooky.” He says that he’s studying so that he can understand what his kids are saying.
It turns out that Riley can’t even operate a mechanical pen, and sprays a bunch of ink on the wall. He and Gillis conspicuously stand against the wall to cover it from Peg’s view, but she figures it out pretty quickly. Junior rats him out, much to Riley’s consternation. He swears that he’d never squeal on someone else.
Riley meets up with his friend Tony (Vuola), a fairly stereotypical Italian guy, and they head off to school together. In class, Riley has trouble concentrating on questions like “what is a noun” due to Tony’s constant muttering. The clock hands speed by in a time-lapse effect. After the test, Riley notices that Tony has an English grammar book hidden under his desk, and quickly hides it behind his back. The British-accented teacher finds him with the book, and expels him for cheating. Man, night school is serious business.
Riley comes home, and Gillis has already heard the word that he was expelled. Because he’s a sitcom character, he decides to hide this failure from his wife and fake going to night school. But this ruse doesn’t last long, as after a couple nights Peg finds his books hidden in the closet. She interrogates Riley when he comes home, and uncovers the truth. At first, he says that he quit, but the whole truth quickly comes out.
Following his previously-stated creed, Riley still refuses to tell anyone that it was Tony who cheated. The teacher Mrs. Clyde comes in, saying that she’s changed her mind about Riley. It turns out that Tony has written a composition that essentially confessed to the cheating and described Riley covering up for him. Everyone is proud of our guy for lying and protecting his friend.
It turns out that he was covering for Tony because his citizenship exam was a few days later — in fact, it’s tonight. He can recite the Gettysburg address from memory, which apparently was a big thing back then. Tony and Riley both read the Pledge of Allegiance in a surprisingly po-faced moment, and Tony becomes a citizen. We even get canned applause.
What I thought: This week’s Riley episode is a bit of a strange one. To begin with, it uses a plot which should really belong to the kids, a story of cheating at school and a stubborn adherence to the anti-snitching code, but puts man-sized Jackie Gleason at the centre of it. Maybe there are night school classes that have such a primary-school atmosphere, but I haven’t been to one. But of course, Gleason was the star, and they hadn’t invented subplots yet, so he had to be the protagonist of this school drama.
It’s not a bad episode, for the most part. This is one of those sitcoms which decides, for a week at least, to actually take the dumb dad’s stupidity seriously as something which he is aware of and which brings him shame. In this light, much of the oafishness we laugh at (or are supposed to laugh at) every Tuesday becomes a semi-tragic indication of the lack of education available to the pre-WW2 working class. Many of them would, like Riley, end up raising kids who took college as a given and gradually came to despise their gaffe-prone parents. The episodic nature of the sitcom even makes this plot point more tragic — we know that Riley will never catch up to his kids. But, you know, with jokes!
Fortunately, we abandon this uncomfortable material pretty quickly for an easier-to-swallow story about friendship and the American way. I was a little surprised to see the episode so firmly side with Riley’s decision not to tell on his cheating friend. In a few years, not ratting your buddies out would come to be seen as distinctly un-American. But in ’49, I guess that snitches still got stitches.
In Tony, we have an almost comedically ideal immigrant story. From Italy, he loves America, a land where “everybody gets the same.” Of course, as an immigrant it’s okay to laugh at his malapropisms, and it’s only to be expected that he might cheat or get you in trouble. What matters is that he reinforces the nation’s legendary self-conception of itself as a land of equality and opportunity.
It’s the second time in the last TV-month that we’ve seen a comedic segment take a sudden dive into gravelly-voiced Americana, and it’s no less disorienting here than it was on Perry Como. Many things could be joked about, but the nation was not one of them. For TV writers, just as with politicians, the flag was an instant way to get oneself out of a corner and conjure an obligatory tear in the listener’s eye. Perhaps it’s laziness more than anything else that makes nationalism so contagious.
Coming up next: Speaking of national myths, it’s time for another installment of The Lone Ranger.
The Eternal Couch Potato 