Not everyone is Homer Jay Simpson

Since its commercial release in the 1930’s television has captivated the American public with entertainment to news and everything in between. Over the years television has grown from a luxury to a necessity. Often people make the claim that we are a generation that was raised on television. Many parents placed their kids in front of the “boob-tube” to distract them for hours on end with mindless entertainment in order to get a moments rest, hence why many call it a babysitter. Knowing this it’s not hard to believe that television is a pedagogical force. Many of us are “brought up” on television shows and like all kids we absorbed it like a sponge. Because of this absorption we without a doubt learn from it whether we like to believe so or not. The important thing though is not that we learn from it but rather what we learn.

Television, especially sitcoms, tends to create or rather reinforce stereotypes of men, women, race, and religion without a hesitation. This has been on going for as long as the sitcom has been around. For example Pepi Leistyna in “Social Class and Entertainment Television” cites shows like The Goldbergs, which ran in 1949-1955, and I Remember Mama, which ran from 1949-1957. Both of these depicted immigrant families the first a Jewish one and the second a Norwegian.

The stereotype that I find most predominant in today’s television is that of the incompetent working class father. The characters are as funny as they are misrepresentative. Too often has television sitcoms depicted the blue-collar dad as a bubbling buffoon. They are represented in this way in order to reinforce the idea that the only reason that they are in the working class is because they’re dumb or have poor work ethics. This represents the entire working class whether or not it is meant to because it is the dominant character. Now I have a problem with this. Yes, in many cases there are those who don’t take their jobs seriously or are in fact incompetent, I do not deny this fact. I simply would like to point out that for every one of those people there are tons of others that putting in all the effort they can but to no avail due to other circumstances. The sad truth is that while yes there is class mobilization in the United States, the vast majority of people stay in the same class they were born into. People point to success stories like Oprah or Barack Obama, however regardless of their prominence in today’s society they are the minority.

Despite my feelings toward the misrepresentation of the working class father I don’t really see a need for it to change drastically. I, like millions of others, have fallen in love with shows like The Simpson’s and Married with Children partially because of the buffoon father figure. I agree that television places ideas in our heads of what a certain type of people are like but I would like to believe that we have gotten to the point where we can make the distinction between reality and entertainment.