Ignorance is profitable

TV ushers in the

By Tom Shales Washington Post

WASHINGTON -Television is leading up into a new age of Dumb. Show after show presents us with characters whose stupidity is suposed to make them comic, adorable, even enviable.

The happy punk has become TV's most popular sit-com cliche, and it reflects a philosophy that says it's all right to be stupid as long as your head is together.

Obviously the Fonz on "Happy Days" made the stereotype fashionable, and now many programs feature Fonzian toughs who are ignorant, uneducated and unintelligent, but who earn the adoration of others by being cool and taking command of situations through the threat of force.

John Travolta as Barbarino on ABC's "Welcome Back, Kotter" a program that celebrates communal as well as individual punk clownishness is the most obvious Fonz clone running amok on the airwaves, but there are many others, at least one of them a member of ABC's pitiful new low-brow comedy "The San Pedro Beach Bums."

ABC leads the way in reverence for this character type, but the CBS comedy "Busting Loose" has its little Fonzie on the premises as well. Like the other Fonzies, this one is not only adorably dumb, but his dumbness is seen as a sexual asset; he has no trouble getting girls. In the land of the New Dumb, it's sexy to be an inarticulate clod.

Allen Rucker, a producer with the ambitious Los Angeles video group "TVTV, calls this new trend "Dumb Chic" and thinks it has developed partly because it's now considered sexist to portray women as "Dumb blondes" on comedies. Even the Georgia Engel character has wised up a little in the step from the late “Mary Tyler Moore Show" to the current "Betty White Show."

Male dumb symbols also tend to be

age of unreason

male Symbols, I

sex notes, — and perhaps this is just a case of equal time for men after years of slandered women in pop pop entertainment. “In series after series, the Barbarino character isn't just dumb but a leader; he's a leader for being dumb," says Rucker. "These shows tell you it's necessary to be dumb to be cool."

The success of the movie "Rocky" put the final imprimatur on the virtues of dumbness and fastness with fists. A stereotype hero seemingly dead was gloriously exhumed. Commercials have always been dumb, of course, but now we see the "Rocky" and Fonzie influence there as well, with athletes or leather-jacketed types threatening violence to those who don't agree with their worship of a product.

"

Muhammad Ali is certainly not a symbol of dumbness, and yet his commercials include the clear implication that we'll have to answer to him if we don't concur on the virtues of a particular hamburger. Ads for shaving creams, deoderants and, most of all, beers carry this suggestion even further. We're being bullied, not coaxed, into obedience and compliance.

Women's lib was supposed to help destroy the idea that a guy can't be manly unless he's also a little bit of a dumb brute. Suddenly the concept is returning to fashion, perhaps as a reaction to so much media talk about homosexduals and the apparent influence of homosexual lifestyles on mainstream society.

There is more to the New Dumb. through, than the re-emergence of the hero oaf. Television programming seems more dominated than usual this year by foolish, proudly witless escapism The new season is the silly season, glutted with such strictly non-think new shows as "The New Adventures of Wonder Woman "Carter Country" (a ratings smash in its

Television

and radio-

bow last week), Operation Petticoat," "The Man from Atlantis" and "The Love Boat."

One thing has become apparent from this quick drift into gibberish: threshholds of consciousness. mean nothing in television. Many of us. thought the success of “All in the Family" would put an end to irrelevant or at least non-humanist come-

dy shows. With "Happy Days" and all its

reactionary imitations, ABC has kick u

this theory to bits.

It would be naive to think that TV's glorification of the cheerfully stupid doesn't affect audience attitudes and reflect wider trends in society. Religion, for one. In a Saturday Review piece on "The Jesus Mania," writer and preacher's son Dwayne Wells finds the current pop-religious fervor sweeping the nation marked by "the persistent element of anti-intellectualism, the retreat from reason back to mysticism and emotionalism.”

"Given the trends in American life," Wells writes, "it is reasonable to conjecture that 'church religion' might ultimately be replaced by disembodied voice and faces on radio and TV sets The Jesus movement, with its demonstrated affinity for pop culture, would be right at home in such a setting

You put all this together and it begins to look as if appeals to reason will be falling on more deaf ears and blind eyes than ever Perhaps it will soon be possible when watching television. literally as well as figuratively. to worship at the Shrine of the New Dumb