Posted on 05/06/2009 5:01:29 PM PDT by ConservativeStatement
Native of Eugene Oregon and living at a popular gay enclave on the Oregon coast.
Oregon Ping.
Ring Lardner Sr. was a very funny short story writer who started writing about sports. His most famous book, You Know Me Al is about a baseball player. Most of the rest of the extended Lardner family were writers of one sort or another and generally on the left, though I doubt Old Ring Sr. had been very political.
His son, Ring Lardner Jr., was a screenwriter who'd been a Communist in the 1930s and one of the "Hollywood Ten" who refused to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1940s. He was blacklisted until the 1960s. He wrote the movie M*A*S*H.
H. Richard Hornberger wrote the novel Mash: A Novel About Three Army Doctors under the name Richard Hooker. I gather from the thread that he was pretty conservative and didn't agree with everything in the film and the television series.
I'd say he was stuffy and pompous more than anything else, but it was tough to say back in those days. It wasn't something shows announced to the public. How could they with censorship and the broadcasters'code?
Paul Lynde the actor was certainly homosexual, but were the characters he played in the 1960s? If you watched Bewitched back then, you probably found Lynde's "Uncle Arthur" a very funny character.
Just what "funny" meant was up to you.
Very interesting. Thanks.
You know, where the hell are people’s brains?
Paul Lynde made no bones about being gay back in the 1960’s and 1970’s — and no one cared. We loved him, he was hysterically funny. We didn’t have to approve of his lifestyle to love him.
Liberace? Sure, his “momma wanted him to find a nice girl” — I didn’t believe that then and I was nine years old when I heard it!
My own very straight-laced parents went to Finochio’s in San Francisco once back in the 1960’s — a club with female impersonators who sang like Carl Channing and Ethel Merman, and it was a “wow, that’s cool!” for them and their friends.
And yet, here we are almost 50 years later going “oh my!” over people coming out of the closet. Who cares? If they aren’t in my bed and I am not married to them, it’s not my problem!
Funny, I hadn't read your post when I mentioned Paul Lynde, too. He was pretty unforgettable!
The tone of the show would change as one of the central characters was written out and a new one came in, but I think it was smart of the writers the way they maintained continuity when invoking new characters so much different from the ones they replaced. And I think Stiers did as well in the Winchester role as Linville did as Burns, Morgan as Potter, Stevenson as Blake and so on. The show didn't have any real duds in it's entire run, and that was great.
The preaching in some of the later seasons was transparent sometimes, but still it was believable that some folks in those environs would carry those attitudes. Most of them were supposed to be conscripts, after all.
Bad time to be doing that if the rumors are true about the camps. They'll be the first ones rounded up, just like always.
He has a great voice.
As a kid, I always liked Radar, Klinger and the old colonel with the horse. I never liked Hawkeye or Margaret Houlihan.
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