The Honeymooners

The Honeymooners is one of television's best-remembered and most imitated comedies in the history of television. Although the series ran for only one year in prime time (during the 1955-1956 season on CBS), it has succeeded remarkably in syndication and on videocassette. Generations of viewers have identified with Jackie Gleason's portrayal of Ralph Kramden, the aggravated bus driver from Brooklyn, whose dreams of advancement were continually upended.

The Honeymooners was among the last of the urban, working-class comedies on 1950s television. As the nation experienced postwar prosperity, so did the families on television. The Nelsons on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriett, the Andersons on Father Knows Best, and the Cleavers on Leave It to Beaver all lived in the tree-lined, secure suburbs. By 1955, even the prototypical proletariat family, the Goldbergs, had moved out of the city. The Kramdens, however, were the exception. Ralph and his exasperated wife, Alice (Audrey Meadows) were stuck in the urban chaos—a cold-water apartment above a noisy, New York street, without any creature comforts of Eisenhower conformity. Their main possessions were a plain dining table and a depression icebox. They shared their lower-class frustrations with the upstairs neighbors, the Nortons. Slow-witted Ed (Art Carney) worked in the sewers, while his wife Trixie (Joyce Randolph) commiserated with Alice about their common hardships. Unlike the suburban couples on television, the Kramdens and the Nortons were childless, just trying to keep themselves above water.

Much of the comedy revolved around the couples' schemes to get rich quick. In the classic episode, "Better Living Through Television," Ed and Ralph appear in a television commercial to sell Happy Housewife Helpers. The yearning to get out of near poverty reflected Gleason's own boyhood: he had grown up in the same Brooklyn environment as Ralph. Gleason wanted his show to be based in reality so he instructed his writers to "make it the way people live. If it isn't credible, nobody's going to laugh."

Gleason introduced Ralph and Alice (first played by Pert Kelton) on his DuMont variety series, Calvacade of Stars. Gleason's original writers, Joe Bigelow and Harry Crane, wanted to call the sketch "The Beast," but Gleason understood underneath Ralph's blustery exterior was a tremendous need for affection. In the opening monologue of this October 5, 1951 telecast, he saluted another Ralph, Ralph Branca of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who served the infamous homerun pitch to Bobby Thomson during the 1951 playoff game against the New York Giants. Like his namesake Branca, Kramden would suffer the blows of fate; but no matter what, his love for Alice endured. From the beginning, Ralph proclaimed to her, "Baby, you're the Greatest!" The six-minute live sketch, also featuring Art Carney as a policeman, proved so popular that Gleason and company created new struggles for the couple. Soon afterwards, the physically agile Carney joined the regular cast with actress Elaine Stritch as the first Trixie.

A year later, William Paley of CBS stole Gleason and his staff from the downtrodden DuMont network. Gleason was given a much larger budget to produce a weekly live extravaganza on Saturday nights. A younger actress, Audrey Meadows, was hired to replace Kelton, who suffered from heart difficulties and political accusations. Gleason had created many memorable characters—Joe, the Bartender, the Poor Soul, and Reginald Van Gleason, III—but the audiences wanted more of the Kramdens. During the first three years, The Honeymooner sketches grew from ten minutes to over 30.

In 1955 the Buick Motor Company offered Gleason six million dollars to produce The Honeymooners as a weekly situation comedy for two years. The corpulent comedian formed his own production company and used a new film technology, the Electronican process, to record the series live on film. The program was shot two times a week before an audience of 1,100 people. During the first season Gleason was disturbed by the amount of rehearsal time and felt that these recorded episodes lacked the spontaneity and originality of the live sketches. He discontinued the series after 39 programs and decided to return to the live, variety format. He sold the films and syndication rights to CBS for a million and half dollars.

The Honeymooners remained a prominent part of Gleason's succeeding variety series with the writers trying to do something unusual with the trusted material. During the 1956-1957 season of The Jackie Gleason Show, the Kramdens and the Nortons took a live musical trip to Europe. At the end of the season, Carney left the series, and Gleason did not revive the sketch until his 1960s extravaganza, The American Scene Magazine. When Carney was available, Gleason revived the sketch on videotape, often with new cast members. Sue Ane Langdon and Sheila MacRae played Alice, while Patricia Wilson and Jean Kean were recruited for Trixie. Despite the changes, the familiar catchphrases remained: "One of these days … Pow! Right in the kisser!"; and "Bang! Zoom," Ralph's stock phrases to Alice as well as Ed's greeting to Kramden, "Hiya there, Ralphie boy."

After his variety series ended in 1970, Gleason produced four more Honeymooner specials with Carney and the returning Meadows. But Ralph Kramden remained fixed in the popular imagination because the 39 episodes of The Honeymooners were a perennial success in syndication. For over 20 years a local station in Manhattan played them every night. There was great celebration among fans when The Museum of Broadcasting and Jackie Gleason unearthed the live sketches during the mid-1980s. Those "lost" episodes found another life on cable television and the home video market.

Whether as a recorded situation comedy or a live sketch, The Honeymooners is a comic reflection of urban, postwar America. America is a land of opportunity for dreamers like Ralph Kramden, even though success remains elusive. The search for the American Dream turned Arthur Miller's salesman, Willy Loman, into a tragic hero; the same quest made Gleason's bus driver a comic archetype. His bravado and anxieties can be felt in all subsequent, working-class underdogs on television—Fred Flintstone, Archie Bunker, Roseanne, and Homer Simpson.

—Ron Simon