Unlikeliest comedy show still going strong

Press, 9 June 1980, Page 17

Unlikeliest comedy show still going strong

By WILLIAM HENRY, of the “Boston Globe,” through NZPA.

Thirty-seven days after United States combat troops left Vietnam, 51 days before America elected Richard Nixon over George McGovern, and 25 years after Milton Berle “invented” network television on Texaco Star Theatre, Americans first saw “M.A.S.H.” the unlikliest television show of 1972.

It was scarily appropriate to the times — to appropriate for benignly irrevelant Television. In this “situation comedy” laughs were few. Hospitals were sweatshops, doctors made gallows jokes about the war, and people died. Married men automatically cheated on their wives. Unmarried women didn’t even pretend to be virgins. Everyone treated the authorities, both military and political, with justified contempt. And a fair number of the sardonic one-liners in the dialogue presumed the audience had read books.

The story of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital defied the fundamental rule of serial television, that every story must be about an actual or metaphorical “family” whose primary allegiance is to one another. The people in “M.A.S.H.” wanted to go home. They hated the war, the sufferings, the bureaucracy, and they were not much relieved by love of each other. They were always thinking about their “real” lives elsewhere.

Nothing in “audience research” and nothing in the American consciousness, not even the success of the film from which the series grew, suggested “M.A.S.H.” would be more than an experiment recalled fondly by cognoscenti. Nothing suggested it would find an audience faithful enough to tolerate half a dozen changes in time slot, the departure of several leading characters, and repeated episodes that did not remotely attempt to be funny. Above all, no-one expected the show could survive a national upheava 1 about Vietnam. “M.A.S.H.” was about Korea. Its researchers conducted hundreds of interviews with veterans of Korea. They never researched Vietnam, and the producers and performers insisted they meant no comment on Vietnam. But Alan Alda, star and occasional writer and director, described the Korean War as “a rehearsal for the Vietnam War.” And from the first, “M.A.S.H.” had the same values and viewpoints as the moderate protest marchers then massing in Washington.

As the show ends its eighth season (“We have run more than three times as long as the Korean War did,” says the producer, Burt Medcalfe) “M.A.S.H.” is still an unexplained but universally admired hit. It is described by executives of all three networks as the best made, most intelligent, and bravest show on the air. It has inspired many imitations, not only in the obvious sense on opening network television to series based on Vietnam, several of which may make it to air next season, but in the subtler sense of encouraging other situation comedies to experiment in form.

“M.A.S.H.” set aside not only the comedy but also the situation. Often an episode had no plot, no harebrained scheme, no problem suitable for neat solution in 24 minutes. Instead, it would be quiet -strung together as a letter home; or the central character’s word--less amnesia as he wanidered the Korean countryside; or a black-and-white “documentary” in .which cast members one

by one talked spontaneous!}' to the folks back home about what it meant to be away at war, interwoven with newsreel footage of merriment in a faraway America that thought it was at peace. “M.A.S.H.” often transcended television but never quite forgot television’s rules, never forgot the need for bawdiness and silliness. Needing an injection and hoping to humilate the ever-desired, ever-despised “hot lips’’ Houlihan, Alda would lean against a table or door and say, “I want it in my t

Radar O’Reilly, the shrill, nervous mascot of the camp, once raced his pet mouse against a rodent from another base. Klinger, the metaphor for all those 1960 s resisters who would claim any madness to get out of the draft, pranced around in a dress, playing a lunacy discharge, but also for laughs. One week the writers fell back on having everyone in the camp apparently jinxed by Friday the thirteenth. Even the flimsiest story about human foibles, though, took on a sense of menace . from the inescapable awareness of war. Alda says every episode of the show has had at least one scene set in the operating room, “and many have never - left there.” He played largely

slapstick, he says, in a story about having ,to perform surgery for 18 hours after having bled himself to provide transfusions. But because he and the others have long established the reality of their shortness of staff and supplies, the story never lost urgency. A political purist could complain that “M.A.S.H.” is technically narrow. All the characters have AngloSaxon or Celtic or Teutonic names. No-one is an Italina or a Pole, not even the characters played by the Italian Alan Alda (born Alphonso d’Abbruzzo) and the Polish Loretta Swit.

No-one is black, no-one is Hispanic, no-one is oriental. “M.A.S.H.” tends to reinforce the quirky popular notion that minority groups did not exist in this country until sometime during the 19605, when Earl Warren’s Supreme Court brought them into the mainstream, somehow, in “M.A.S.H.” as in “Happy Days” when television looks at the 1950 s it seems to feel a need to resume the values of that era.

Alda’s character, moreover, started as, in his phrase, “a sexual Archie Bunker,” a good doctor and loyal friend who would nonetheless seduce any woman on sight. At Alda’s insistence the scripts tone down that trait, then altered it enough that within a couple of years the “New York Times” was writing about his “courtly” treatment of women. Alda has been the main reason “M.A.S.H.” has survived so long, and he, as much as anyone, has insisted it be decent, compassionate, aching in resentment of a crazy world. As Alda put it in an interview, “M.A.S.H.” is special because it does not take place in a surban setting with surburban cares, it takes place at the outer limits of human endurance, the characters are trying to meet a ’ horhendous situation, inside a competitive bureaucracy, with a set of human values.

‘“My .character is more of a smart-ass than anyone can be in real life.