Rant #1,659: How Times Have Changed (?)

I came home from work yesterday, and since my wife was at the dentist--yes, she needs a crown too--I was left on my own to cook dinner for myself.

And yes, I had matzoh, this time with an egg.

Not matzoh brie, just had them separately, and I have to say, it came out really, really good.

As Lucy Ricardo said years ago, "And it's tasty too!"

I want to look at another character from TV history today, a character on one of the funniest shows of not just its own era, but of all time.

"Sanford and Son" was a situation comedy that ran on NBC on Friday nights in the early to mid 1970s, when television really was changing forever.

Gone were the family oriented comedies, where pretty much everyday life was talked about in a G-rated way.

Enter the more in-your face comedies, where much more could be talked about, although they still had to walk their way around certain subjects--and this was done very creatively.

If "All in the Family" set the tone for this era, "Sanford and Son" was certainly a byproduct of this more open type of comedy.

The show starred Redd Foxx, a veteran comic who had made his living on the old "Chitlin' Circuit," because network TV wouldn't and couldn't have a comic like this on the air in less open times, and a younger performer, Demond Wilson, who had actually appeared as a guest star on "All in the Family."

If you remember, they played father and son junk dealers, and the array of characters who were introduced on this show--most of them played by fellow Chitlin Circuit veterans--made the show an enormous success.

During the show's third season, when it was at its peak, there was one show that sticks out in my mind, one that shows just how far TV had come at that time, and it also shows how permissive the medium had become back in 1973.

The episode had to do with Lamont arguing a traffic ticket in court. He did not want to go to court, simply wanted to pay the fine, even though he was in the right, but Fred wanted him to pursue the case in a court of law.

So Lamont and Fred went to court, and with Fred's buddies in tow--Bubba, Grady, and even former Our Gang member Stymie--Lamont had his day in court.

The last 10 to 15 minutes of this particular show are incredible. It was run on Antenna TV yesterday evening, and as I ate my dinner, it made me remember just how open TV had become at that time, in particular for certain subjects, including race.

Lamont waits to be called for the court to hear his case. Fred is happy, because the judge is a "brother," or a fellow black man, so he feels that Lamont will get a good shake and beat his case.

All the while, Fred is taking bets with his friends that Lamont will win his case.

Lamont gets called, and he explains that yes, he broke the law, but sometimes, one has to do things like this in order to avoid an accident.

The police officer who gave Lamont the ticket was present, and Lamont wants to ask the officer a question.

The judge said that he would need counsel to do that, and Fred tells the judge that he is Lamont's counsel.

The first utterance out of Fred sets the tone for the rest of the show. Fred says to the officer, "Why don't you ever arrest white people? What do you have against blacks?"

The officer says that he does arrest white people, but Fred continues. "Why don't you like black people?" he says.

The judge tries to get order in the court, but Fred continues to rile up things.

He then says some other stuff related to the cop, including, "Look, nobody in this court will get a fair shake from you, because we're all black in here. Heck, there are enough n---- in here for a Tarzan movie!"

Yes, the "n word" was spoken on network TV, and it was actually used several times during this episode. Watching it more than 40 years after the fact last night, I had forgotten that this word was bandied about like it was on network TV, as were other racial epithets of the day, but the n-word ... still steeped in controversy, yet used to elicit laughter all those years ago.

To make a long story short, Lamont gets off from paying a fine, but Fred is held in contempt of court and must pay a fine for disrupting the court.

Not for the use of the n-word, per se, but because whatever he did cumulatively upset the court and the judge.

Looking at this from a perspective of 2016, this was a pretty raucous episode, one that could not be staged the same way today.

And I applaud Antenna TV for not editing this word out of the dialogue. In today's PC world, that took a lot of guts to do.

On network TV today, sex is the subject that is bandied about as it it were chewing gum. Just about every network sitcom is steeped in sexual talk of one nature or another. Current TV's top comedy, "The Big Bang Theory," with all of its supposed scientific, high-brow talk, is steeped in sexual talk, and I cannot think of any other sitcom running today that is any different.

But back in 1973, race was the taboo that was being dealt with in a way we had never seen.

I guess "All in the Family" really did open the floodgates, and when race talk was exhausted, sex talk was next in line to be explored.

I don't know what purportedly taboo subject is next in line to be explored by these shows, but I don't know if you can say that we have progressed--or regressed--when we have shows steeped in this talk.

But I have to say that that episode of "Sanford and Son" was absolutely hilarious, and the racial humor really made the show.

I guess there is a time and a place for everything, and yes, there is a time and place for this type of humor.

1973, yes, just not 2016, where the PC Police would be down producer Norman Lear's throat on shows like "Sanford and Son" and "All in the Family" for doing and saying things that were off the PC path.

Today, there seems to be no taboos, whether on TV or in life, but in 1973, that particular episode was really, really something extraordinary.