TV Humor: Barbarians Are Storming the Gates . . .

The producers of a new sitcom, incapable of creating actual wit of the sort weekly provided by “Cheers” or “The Cosby Show,” decide to go with the current flow, despite the fact that that flow is carrying us all along right into the sewer. They make an innocent 5-year-old say, “It sucks.” The very sort of language parents forbid their children to use is now being encouraged not only by anything-goes cable entrepreneurs but the once high-minded networks. We may therefore paraphrase the ancient moral admonition about money to read: Love of Ratings Is the Root of All Evil.

We’re not just talking about television here. Much of modern entertainment already involves vulgarians addressing barbarians. But the underlying questions are vastly more important. Why are ratings important? Because they translate into dollars. The bankers, corporate executives and country-clubbers who own network stock, plus advertisers, far from resisting the present aesthetic and ethical collapse as their class would have in times past, are actually abetting the ugliness.

Marketplace factors are already largely responsible for having thoroughly debased popular music, a billion-dollar industry, since the tastes of poorly educated teen-agers with discretionary income dominate the field. Most of today’s punk and heavy-metal lovers have yet even to hear such names as Gershwin, Porter and Rodgers. Forget Beethoven.

The best humor, when it is not simply purely playful, says something witty and wise about the issues it confronts. Among the horrifying problems of American civilization at present is the collapse of the American family, which has assumed such proportions, that many now react to the word family as if it were just another noun like roller skates or television. Humans can do without roller skates or TV but they literally cannot long survive, as a rational, emotionally healthy species, without a secure family structure.

The reason, to belabor the obvious, is that the family is the soil in which each year’s new crop of humans grow. It is mostly the failed family, therefore, which has produced our present millions of prison inmates, rapists, drug addicts, burglars, muggers, sexual psychopaths, non-professional whores of both sexes and general goofolas.

Very well--agreed; that is the problem. The solution of today’s comedy specialists, with few exceptions, is to make vulgar light of what is, in reality, tragically heavy. As for those trying to treat as deep a wound as our society has ever suffered, far from encouraging them, today’s comics deride them. That even those who acknowledge the right rules of social conduct will often fail to live up to their own honestly professed codes is sadly clear.

But what the dominant voices of a culture--with their access to popular music, radio, TV and the comedy concert circuit--now are saying is “F--- virtue.”

If you think our society is sick now--stand by.

This relates, of course, to the debate about censorship and the question as to whether the large segment of American society that perceives the moral dangers in totally unrestricted artistic expression has any say at all concerning the use of public funds by the National Endowment for the Arts. The question is a perfectly fair one: Though artists have the creative right to produce work that may express racial, sexual or religious hatred, does the state have the correlative obligation to endorse such expression with already inadequate taxpayers’ money?

The matter is by no means justly resolved by reflexive condemnations of censorship, which in any event already exists, in law, or are slander and libel perfectly acceptable?

Even the maligned networks do censor their programs. When the Prince of Filth, Andrew Dice Clay, appeared recently on that bastion of free speech, “Saturday Night Live,” several of his more revolting remarks were, quite properly, censored.

High time.