I have to be honest: I’ve been feeling a little guilty over the past couple of weeks. When I fell in love with The Dick Van Dyke Show, I wrote something which tried to explain at least some of what I loved about it. With The Mary Tyler Moore Show, I leapt straight into stupid production minutiae. I feel like I’ve given poor Mary a bit of a bad rap.
So let’s try to redress things a little. I want to talk about one of my very favourite scenes in the show. No, it’s not from “Chuckles Bites the Dust”, which is clearly an amazing episode, but has been talked about far too much by this point. Instead, it’s the closing scene from “Mary and the Sexagenarian”, first broadcast by CBS on the 12th February 1977, and written by Glen and Les Charles.
The whole episode up to this point has been about the trials and tribulations of Mary dating a man 30 years older than her, a topic which could have been potentially queasy, but is dealt with in the show’s typical sensitive fashion. And then we get the final scene of the show. What have we learnt today?
And instead of answering that question, Mary Tyler Moore expertly skewers TV’s propensity for giving life lessons and issuing moral guidance.
LOU GRANT: You take two very different people. Different backgrounds.
MARY RICHARDS: Different outlooks.
LOU GRANT: Right, right. One more than 30 years older than the other. You bring them together. With all the odds against it. Even though the whole world ridicules it. It can still turn out to be… an utterly worthless experience.
MARY RICHARDS: Thank you.
There are so many reasons why I love this. Firstly, it was slightly surprising even to me to find a US sitcom from 1977 be quite so relentlessly cynical. This feels more like a gag from The Simpsons than anything else. Sorry Simpsons, Mary Tyler Moore already did it.1
Secondly, I adore Mary Tyler Moore’s performance in this scene. True, it’s a scene which is more about selling an abstract idea than an emotional beat. But the actors have to make that idea work within an emotional context, and they do a magnificent job. Mary looks so revolted and defeated as she leaves the office, and she never gets enough credit for just how good she is at those kind of scenes. The very opposite of “turning the world on with her smile”.
We dumb down Mary Tyler Moore into being merely a bright, smiling, all-American gal at our peril. When needed, she brought as much edge to that show as anyone.
But thirdly, and perhaps most importantly: the scene is a reminder to me that I truly love comedy with what I like to call “an evil, beating heart”. I sometimes worry that people misinterpret what I mean by this; that I’m specifically referring to, say, racist or homophobic gags, or at least material which goes into those kinds of areas. But that’s not what I mean at all.
Instead, it’s something a little more subtle: that I enjoy comedy which does not always have a pleasant meaning behind it. Here, it’s the idea that we can all go through painful experiences, and there truly is no real lesson we can learn from them. The pain has been for nothing.
It reminds me very much of one of my favourite jokes from Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em:
FRANK SPENCER: As my mother used to say – a trouble shared, is a trouble doubled.
A joke which, as friend of the site Mike Scott pointed out, is amusing because of the rhyming trouble/double; it just sounds funny. But what I love most about it is that it talks about a real truth which we would all prefer to ignore. Of course we should talk about our problems… and of course that has a bad side too. By sharing a problem, you literally are giving a piece of it to someone else.
And that’s life. Some troubles just have to be doubled. And sometimes, a relationship you had was an entire waste of time, and there’s nothing positive you can take from it. Sucks to be you.
But maybe comedy like this does have a message after all. It sucks to be all of us.
With thanks to Tanya Jones.
The James L. Brooks connection is not lost on me. ↩
