What I watched: The eighteenth episode of The Life of Riley, an early sitcom. The episode starred Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Sid Tomack, John Brown and Lanny Rees. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds, and written by Irving Breecher, Reuben Shipp, and Alan Lipscott. “The Gambler” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, January 31, 1950, and is available to watch on the Internet Archive.
What happened: Riley comes home looking for Junior. Peg doesn’t know where he is, but frequent home invader Gillis does. He says that Junior is at the candy store, playing the slot machines. Candy stores were a lot different in 1950, I suppose. Riley is very upset by this development, fearing that his kid will soon become an addict.
Riley and Gillis confront Junior at the slots. He’s trying to get money so that he can take Marilyn to the dance tonight. Gillis wants to whip him, which is treated as humourous. Riley tries to teach his son a lesson by gambling the money that he’s set aside to buy Junior a new bike. Of course, he hits the jackpot, and coins come spewing out.
Back at the house, the adults are still trying to prove to Junior that gambling doesn’t pay. They pick a lame horse for him to bet on. Riley listens to the race over phone, which was apparently a thing. They taunt Junior about the money they’re losing him, but the bad horse ends up winning after being stung by bees, with Riley and Gillis’s.eyes bugging out (10:00).
Junior now has $200, which I assume is enough money to retire on in this era. Riley decides that this is because he’s a “born winner” and has “the golden touch.” After an abrupt cut, his Italian friend Tony comes over. Riley takes the $40 that Tony has set aside to pay rent, as well as some money from an old lady who saved it for a train ticket to visit her daughter. He asks Junior to take the money down to the bus station and bet it on an underdog boxer.
When she hears about this, Peg is furious, but Riley is convinced he can’t lose. His boxer gets off to a great start, but predictably gets knocked out. The old lady slaps him, with a corny coconuts-knocking sound effect. But it turns out that Marilyn interrupted Junior on the way and stopped him from placing the bet. So in the end, everything returns to the status quo. Hurray?
What I thought: When you watch enough sitcoms — which is more than, say, two or three — the jokes start to become predictable. This episode of Life of Riley, for instance, is structured around the comedic “rule of threes” — the comedian or writer forms a pattern with two things, and then breaks them with the third. It’s the third element which is generally the punchline — for instance, a lot of Star Trek goes like “He’s a great general, in line with Alexander, Napoleon, and Zynon the Conqueror.”.
Hence, it becomes immediately obvious that Riley’s first two gambles will be successful, and his third one will fail. Moreover, all of Riley’s efforts will go against his stated intention — that when he wants to fail he will succeed, and vice versa. That the episode lays it on pretty thick establishing the inevitable outcome as improbable only makes it more predictable and tedious.
This is not to say that the overall plot structure and the jokes being predictable necessarily ruins a show. For many viewers, the appeal lies less in novelty of the writing and more in the “chicken fat” elements of comedy, the offhand wordplay or Jackie Gleason’s bug-eyed reactions. For others, the predictability of a sitcom is precisely the point: it is a familiar habit, where you always know what you’re going to get.
There’s also the question of how familiar this really was at the time The Life of Riley aired. The sitcom genre had only been established twenty years prior with (ugh) Amos ‘n’ Andy, and was still almost entirely new to television screens. I doubt that even a 1950 audience would find these jokes novel, but the structure may have not yet seemed rote to them, in the same way large numbers of people today are still engaged by the twenty-year-old superhero movie genre.
One other thing I found interesting in this episode was how it portrays the culture of sports gambling. Gambling on most sports was illegal, but the kind of illegal that was generally seen as harmless enough to show sitcom characters doing. Nevertheless, “The Gambler” makes a clear point of ultimately imparting the lesson to the audience that Riley tries to impart to his some: that gambling is reckless and leads to ruin.
It’s interesting to look back on such a storyline in a period where gambling is being decriminalized and destigmatized, but at the same time is being medicalized as an addiction. What would a contemporary version of “The Gambler” look like? Well, to find out I would actually have to watch contemporary sitcoms, so I guess I’ll just have to wait until this project reaches 2019 to find out.
Coming up next: We enter Feburary 1950, which looks a lot like January but with a new game show.
The Eternal Couch Potato 