The Kisses Are Hers and Hers and His Sunday, September 14, 2003

Frank Sinatra belting out "Stormy Weather." What a deep, thick, rolling voice--he sounds like he invented thunder.

Anyway, I promised to talk about "Three's Company" and sex. This is probably the first time I've written about sex as such, apart from an appalling section of "Black Sails Over Freeport," which reads like a Lifetime movie from an alternate universe ("Not Without My Undead Daughter!"). So forgive any stumbles. This happens to every guy the first time, right?

Let me start, as usual, by dragging in Dr. Percy, this time from "Love in the Ruins":

No one ever expects the English to be rascals (compare Greeks, Turks, Lebanese, Chinese). No, the English, who have no use for God, are the most decent people on the Earth. Why? Because they got rid of God. They got rid of God two hundred years ago and became extraordinarily decent to prove they didn't need him. Compare Merrie England of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A nation of rowdies.

To unpack that a bit, Percy, like G.K. Chesterton, believed in orthodoxy. The constraints and rules of tradition made true freedom possible--because those limits defined the world for the believer. Without those definitions, the logic goes, people do as they please and then become a slave to their appetites. Which is not freedom at all.

So, in the quote above, the God-fearing Englishmen were free to play. Right and wrong were clearly defined, but there were lots of laughs to be had skirting the sulphur. Without God, there is no guiding star to reach for, no sulphur to avoid; so they putter along on tepid politeness. Chaucer's sinners are lustier than any Profumo, because they know they're taking on heaven; but Chaucer's bridegrooms are lustier still, because they have the mandate of God to make love. Trust me on this--I have a degree in English.

Which brings me to "Three's Company." The culture that produced it had its head so far up its ass it could peek out of its own mouth. But it still insisted on some admittedly arbitrary rules for popular entertainment--let's call those rules, for now, the Mandate of Heaven. "Three's Company" was a jiggle show powered by lousy gay jokes and plot devices so creaky they would've gotten cut out of "School for Scandal" during rehearsals. But it wasn't dirty. The show's creators understood they were operating under the Mandate of Heaven and used those limits as a spur to creativity.

To see just how creative it was, compare it with "Man About the House," the British sitcom that inspired it. There, the characters are gritty and gap-toothed and awful to each other, like they just wandered over from the "Trainspotting" lot. On "Three's Company," the men are trying to bed everyone in sight, the girls are fighting off everyone in sight, but it's all in good humor--like a wife out of Chaucer, they know where heaven and hell are located, and they like skirting the sulphur for yuks. The pallid wastrels on "Man About the House" have never heard of either place, and just shuffle along under the stars.

(By the way, I realize that the real-world version of that Regal Beagle joie de vrie had serious consequences. I'm just talking about TV here.)

As part of its creativity, "Three's Company" was discreet about sex. Yes, there was jiggle; yes, there were unsubtle jokes about Greedy Gretchen. But there was a lightness about it, not casualness--as there is on "Seinfeld" or "Friends" or "Sex and the City." By eliding the seamy stuff, by redefining sex as bikinis and jokes about canteloupes, the show was somehow more adult and knowing than "Seinfeld." In other words, the show knew that it was being unrealistic; and it knew the audience would know that too. So it was free to play. As opposed to shows today, which go into clinical detail about jacking off and the taste of jizz, but somehow miss the point of sex: the fun, the playfulness, the mystery, the sly risque stuff. If you can sit in a coffee shop and talk about giving head, the mystery's gone and embalmed.

Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't trade one episode of "Seinfeld" for all of "Three's Company" and "Laverne and Shirley." And that's the kick in the head. I'd rather have the stuff that's funny and clinical, but reflects a world without a compass, than a lusty merrie show that puts every impulse in its proper place but sucks like a collapsar. The same way, as Percy observed, Kafka's buddies would listen to him reading his godawfully depressing stories and laugh out loud--because they recognized the world he was describing and the familiarity of it cracked them up. The same way "Touched by an Angel," and the other gnostic fantasies of the Tiffany network, appall certain cranky religious aesthetes. That ain't life, baby!

One of Percy's big questions was, Why do we feel so good when things are bad and feel so bad when things are good? Because we don't believe that things make sense anymore, because for all the frank clinical talk about neuroses and blowjobs the modern world can't tell us a single damned thing about how to live and be happy or even just human. So thanks and goodbye, Mr. Ritter; you put things in their place for half an hour a week.

Tune in next time, when I use Thomas Aquinas to deconstruct the Rachel Ray pictorial in this month's FHM.

@ 8:37:00 PM,

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