Green Acres

I always thought that if Salvador Dali wanted to do a TV sitcom, he'd come up with something like "Green Acres".

This show was a lot of fun, and thank God it never took itself seriously. It was also one of the first to really break the "fourth wall", making self-referential remarks, such as the characters pointing to the credits as they rolled, or having the characters refer to background music being played--I don't think any sitcom had ever done that before! Anyway, Eddie Albert did a great job as perennial straight man to the lunacy around him, with everyone else in on the strangeness. I watched this show as a kid and never really appreciated Oliver's predicament, but now, as a middle-aged man, I know exactly how he feels.

Forty years after its heyday, the show holds up very well. Give it a look.

Many in my generation (too young to be a boomer and too old to be an "X"er) think this is one of the funniest shows ever. It doesn't have any deeper meanings or ramifications or redeeming social importance. It's funny, and for the sake of being funny. This show proves that humor rises from character. Too often a show gets by on a series of insults, or double entendres, or one-liners. "Green Acres" had characters who were rich and diverse, who might be funny by what they say, or by the fact that they're saying it, or just because they show up at a certain moment. "Hooterville" could, I suppose, be construed as a Kafkaesque construct where even the woman who doesn't want to live there understands what's going on there, and only the man who wants to live there can't comprehend what's going on, or understand what the pig is saying. But why bother with such interpretation? This show is funny, well-written, and performed by fine actors. Shot on a sound-stage, "Green Acres" nevertheless opens out where most shows seem claustrophobic -- there are fields, roads, houses, barns, cows, jeeps, tractors, and all the great outdoors. I'm a country boy myself, and I appreciate that, unlike most shows written by high-handed cityfolk that show country folk as either ignorant bumpkins whose foolishness is the basis of laughs, or makes them more sagely inscrutable than smugly-superior urbanites, "Green Acres" gives the people of Hooterville thier own mindset that is neither better nor worse, just different. And the show itself is different from anything else on television until the arrival of "Newhart" which, for all its humor, nevertheless remained stagey and claustrophobic. "Green Acres" is funny. Enjoy it.

When I watch "Green Acres" I can't help but think that this is what Vaudeville must have been like. There's Oliver Wendell Douglas in his three-piece suit and Phi Beta Kappa key standing in front of an obviously painted backdrop with the most pathetic looking stalk of corn "growing" nearby. Then comes onstage a series of the finest comedians doing their standup routine with Mr. Douglas as the straight man: Mr. Haney (Pat Buttram) with an endless supply of wacky things to sell; Hank Kimball (Alvy Moore) as the oh-so-forgetful farm agent ("Ah, Mr. Douglas! I have a message for you." "What is it?" "What is WHAT?" "The message!" "What message?" "MY MESSAGE!" "You have a message?"); Eb the farmhand (Tom Lester); on and on and on.

Love it.

This programme was traditionally thought of as just another of the cornpone country comedies that CBS used to be noted for, like "Petticoat Junction" or "The Beverly Hillbillies". But with its button-down straight man, Eddie Albert, surrounded by a wild assortment of extraordinary oddballs, "Green Acres" looks both backwards to the screwball comedies of the '30s and ahead to the Bob Newhart series of shows which followed a similar premise.

I am a fan of the British absurdist tradition, as exemplified both by university humour, like "Monty Python" and "Fawlty Towers", with its basis in the antics of the Goons (and Alfred Jarry), and by John Lennon's disassociated imagery, with its basis, probably, in Edward Lear (and Hilaire Belloc), but I personally happen to believe that this particular show belongs to a distinct comedy continuum, one that's entirely American. But I do agree completely that where these two styles are concerned, fans of one are bound to appreciate the other.

Watching this as a child during the late 1960's I didn't like this show. I didn't find it funny because it frustrated me! With all of the locals frustrating Mr. Douglas endlessly, they frustrated me too. Stumbling upon the show years later, the frustration was gone and I could finally enjoy the humor of it all. This was light years ahead of the tame (and boring) "Pettycoat Junction." This was life with "The Three Stooges." I always loved the on-going home improvement projects with the closet doors opening to the outside, the telephone poll phone, the over-blown big chic New York City furniture stuffed into a little farmhouse, Lisa's pink appliances, her cooking, Arnold the pig and many more. When they say they don't make 'em like they used to, they don't, and that's a darn shame.