America on the Screen

Nearly a century ago in a nondescript facility in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, an engineer with the unlikely name of Philo T. Farnsworth broadcast the first live electronic image across space, that of a simple black line inscribed on a glass plate and backlit by a carbon arc lamp. From that initial broadcast on September 7, 1927, ultimately followed I Love Lucy and The Twilight Zone, All in the Family and MASH, The Simpsons and Seinfeld, Walter Cronkite’s announcement of the Kennedy assassination, images of the Apollo moon landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the 9/11 attacks; The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Wire. Farnsworth, a periphrastic inventor and devout Mormon, was the first to receive the federal patent for a television, over competitors like Westinghouse’s Vladimir K. Zworykin.

Only a little over a year later Schenectady, New York’s W3XK would incorporate and broadcast “radiomovies,” which were simply moving images of actor silhouettes. Largely a curiosity for electronics enthusiasts, commercial TV debuted at the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens. Television still belonged to a spectacularly futuristic world and featured in just a few thousand homes in the United States in 1940; eight years later the number of households with a TV set was still under 1 percent. By 1955, that number had risen to an astounding 65 percent, and by 1960, 90 percent of households owned televisions, more than those with indoor plumbing. Today, the omnipresent smartphone is in all of our pockets.  

Television has been described as a narcotizing device and a machine for education, a propaganda font and an instrument of democratization, the “idiot box” and the medium which disseminated some of the great art of this and the previous centuries. “The mosaic form of the TV image,” wrote Marshall McLuhan in his 1964 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, “demands participation and involvement in depth, of the whole being.” Television was an immersive media which divided the world into a before and after in a manner that no technology had since Guttenberg’s printing press. Though the history of broadcasting is a global one—any fair appraisal is going to consider Programme One in the USSR or the BBC as much as CBS, ABC, and NBC—the television as not just an invention, but indeed is only matched in the United States by the automobile as a perspective, ideology, and lifestyle. In that way, it was unavoidable that my new book, American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States, would have to fumble for the remote.

I argue that a helpful way to think about American culture is as divided between the reality of the “United States,” that is the actual geographical polity that constitutes the nation, and “America” which is understood as something wholly more utopian (and unrealized). Culture in the United States is riven between the contradictions of the idealized revolutionary nature of the nation’s promise and our lived realities of injustice, inequity, and illiberality. As such, I have curated fifty instances of asynchronously structured “flash criticism” focusing on elements of American culture which provides glimpses of the New World that ought to have been despite the official machinations of the state. Afrofuturist Jazz and Jewish comics, Whitman’s long line and Dickinson’s dash all make their appearances, but so, too, does television. In Todd Haynes’s unconventional 2007 Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There, a character based on Allen Ginsberg says that “if your mission was to see whether you could do great art on a jukebox . . . then we all benefited.” Certainly, there’s been great art on the jukebox—and the boob tube too. What follows then are three excerpts from American Elegy which focus specifically on the utopian promise of that most American of mediums.    

Your Show of Shows (1950)

“Is there not, however, a definite ontical way of taking authentic existence, a factical ideal of Daesein, underlying our ontological interpretation of Daesein’s existence?” asked the German existential and phenomenological philosopher Martin Heidegger in his 1927 book Being and Time, to which the sarcastic answer must be “but, of course.” Heidegger, among the most influential of continental philosophers of the twentieth century remains, depending on interpretation and theoretical inclination, either the thinker who approached the intricacies of Being’s metaphysics closer than any other philosopher or a purveyor of unmitigated bullshit. To some, his inscrutable prose evidences the subtle profundity of Heidegger’s thinking, while to others it’s an exercise in vainglorious pomposity.

Whatever the veracity of Being and Time, it’s a biographical fact that Heidegger was a member of the National Socialist Party from 1933 on. Many interpret the philosopher (who after World War II was totally unrepentant about his Nazi associations) as being irredeemably sullied, but there remain defenders content to separate his philosophy from his politics. For me, I find wisdom from another professor, who analyzed the same intricacies of subjectivity and personhood, arguing, “There’s a now, a was, and a gonna be. Now is now, and after now is a was. And what comes after the was is a gonna be. It hasn’t happened yet. It’s gonna happen as soon as the now is over. But if you have a good now, you’re bound to have a good was and a good gonna be,” to which the honest person must answer “but, of course.”

That insight was shared by Isaac Sidney Caesar of Yonkers—known professionally as Sid Caesar—when he appeared on a 1971 episode of The Dick Cavett Show. The intonation, the rhythm, the repetition, the confusing syntax—it’s like a working-class version of Heidegger with the added benefit of being comprehensible if you parse it out (the great German philosopher rarely has that benefit). On that same episode, Caesar appeared in character as one of his greatest inventions, a seemingly erudite but actually foolish German professor, who depending on whether he was intoning about space travel or cinema, would variously go by the name “Ludwig von Spaceman” or “Kut van Closeup.”

There is no evidence that the Professor character was based on Heidegger, though there is some synchronicity in the fact that in 1950, when the former Nazi philosopher was returning to a faculty position at the University of Freiburg, his connections to Hitler overlooked and his reputation and privileges restored with little personal repercussion, Caesar’s groundbreaking variety program Your Show of Shows was premiering on NBC. Equally known for physical comedy and impersonations—particularly Caesar’s nonsense-language poetry—Your Show of Shows was the seminal variety show of television’s first golden age, where the program’s creator explained, “When I did comedy, I made fun of myself. If there was a buffoon, I played the buffoon.”

Of course, a benefit of self-deprecation is that it makes it far more possible to also mock those in power. It’s a style that may be anxious and neurotic, but also iconoclastic. When Caesar donned the rumpled fedora and shabby frock coat of his imbecilic professor, he was lowering himself to also lower the object of derision. This type of comedic Judo is the essence of Ashkenazic humor in particular; Yiddish has as many words for buffoon as the Inuit do for snow. There is the incompetent fool, the schlemiel, the perennially unlucky schlimazel, and the particularly contemptible schmuck.

Archetypes of Yiddish theater with a direct conduit to Vaudeville, such stock characters were related to the badkhn, a type of jester employed as a host at Jewish wedding receptions in early modern Eastern Europe. The badkhn, who was sometimes a rabbi by training, was allowed to deride, mock, and scorn the assembled guests at the joyous occasion—especially the powerful—as a means of zestful critique. The badkhn shared a similarity with the jesters of Christian carnival, the various Abbots of Unreason and Lords of Misrule. But as modernity eliminated those roles in the Gentile world, this particular example endured in the shtetls of Poland and Lithuania. The omnipresence of antisemitism made the role of the badkhn even more crucial among Jews than their gentile neighbors, for the profound leavening of such humor provided both succor and subversion. In calling oneself a buffoon, there was a type of freedom: “Mock me? I can do it better than you can.” If the self couldn’t be spared mockery, then what hope did an Archbishop or a Czar have?

The tradition of the badkhn endures in Jewish comedy which, because of the byways of immigration, became the dominate form of American humor. There are other influential comedic traditions in the United States, none more so than black humor, which responded to different diagnoses with a different prescription—the blustery and proud comedy of an Eddie Murphy or Red Foxx, though figures as varied as Richard Pryor and Chris Rock are arguably “Jewish” comedians. But notice how different American standup and sketch comics are from their British cousins. The Englishman confuses the silly with the absurd and cruelty with wit, but American comedy dwells in the very abyss, for such a potent form of humor was born from the dispossessed. An American, after all, must always avail herself at all times with a sensible and critical Anglophobia. Ruth Wisse in No Joke: Making Jewish Humor describes a “pecking order of wit that is dominated by Jews to such a degree that their only competition is among themselves.”

English humor is very much about putting people in their place (even if the “piss” is being taken out of someone), whereas Jewish humor, and by proxy American humor, disrupts all absolutes and turns the world upside down. Compare the anarchic liberty of the Marx Brothers to the self-satisfaction of a Jimmy Carr or a Ricky Gervais. There are exceptions to this; Peter Sellers and Sacha Baron Cohen speak the Queen’s English, though they’re also Jews, of course. Meanwhile, Glaswegian humor is similar to Jewish humor, perhaps because so much of it comes from Irish Catholic comedy which, while more understated, shares a sense of the absurdity generated from national trauma. One should note the common Borscht Belt combination of a Jewish male comedian and his Irish Catholic wife, whether George Burns and Gracie Allen or Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara (there is a reason why James Joyce made Leopold Bloom a Jew).

The Borscht Belt, that string of summer resorts and hotels across the Catskills where Jews denied entry to WASP clubs would congregate, is to American humor as the Mississippi Delta is to the blues. Before Your Show of Shows (notice the Hebrew parallelism in that name, so similar to “The Holy of Holies”), Caesar got his start performing to Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens vacationers at Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel in the late 1940s. Other Borscht Belt comedians during that time included Mort Sahl, Jerry Lewis, Buddy Hacket, Joey Bishop, Rodney Dangerfield, and Jackie Mason. When Caesar graduated to NBC, he turned his variety show into a veritable university of Jewish comedy, its writers room home to Carl Reiner, Woody Allen, Neil Simon, and Mel Brooks, the later of whom was the Battle of the Bulge veteran who told the German newspaper, Der Spiegel, in 2006 that “by using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths.”

While Catskills’ comedy risked atrophy, the limiting syllogism of the one-liner threatening to veer into cringe more than cackles, the badkhn is ever-versatile. Due in part to the avant-garde standup of figures like Lenny Bruce and Andy Kaufmann, Jewish comedy fully embraced an absurdism that surpassed the seriousness of French (or German) existentialism. Jewish humor is American humor, for as no less a tummler than Sigmund Freud would write in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious that shtetl humor “recognizes no distinction between lords and serfs.” Just as jazz is the story of black musicians, so is American comedy a Jewish narrative—of Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo, of Joan Rivers, Don Rickles, Gilda Radner, Milton Berle, Gary Shandling, Albert Brooks, Jon Stewart, Sarah Silverman, Billy Crystal, Adam Sandler, Bette Midler, Jerry Seinfeld, and Larry David. A tradition dating back to the patriarchs, for it’s said in the Talmud that Abraham’s father Terah was a fashioner of pagan idols. Asked to guard his father’s statues, the nascent monotheist took a hammer and smashed all of the idols, save for the largest, in whose hand he placed the implement of destruction. In a midrash of Rabbi Hiyya, it’s said that upon Terrah’s return, the father demanded to know who had destroyed the idols. Abraham pointed to the largest idol, holding that mallet, and said, “It was him.” Get it?     

The Muppets (1955)

Kermit the Frog originally had a cruel streak. Before he learned to be the kind and compassionate, if slightly neurotic, amphibian that is so widely loved, Kermit was a sadistic jester initially named after the eponymous product in a series of commercials made for Wilkins Coffee by the visionary puppeteer Jim Henson. Screened throughout the Washington, D.C., media market—where in 1955, Henson premiered the regional comedy show Sam and Friends, which first featured his innovation known as the “Muppets”—the vaguely reptilian Wilkins tried to force the globular, furry monster Wontkins to partake in the caffeinated beverage, a method of convincing which included the proto-Kermit stabbing, electrocuting, shooting, and defenestrating his adversary. On a black and white television set, it’s hard to tell if it’s not easy being green, or if he’s even green at all, but otherwise the physical elements of Kermit are already there: the high-pitched, nasal voice, massive eyes, triangular mouth, and spindly arms, apt to flail at a moment’s notice.

“Even as a kid, I felt isolated,” Henson told the Boston Globe in 1989, a year before his death at fifty-three from a streptococcal infection. “As a kid, I felt I was the only person who was like that.” The Christian Scientist child of an agronomist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture who was stationed in Greenville, Mississippi (which is why Kermit has such a prototypically Southern name), Henson later lost his faith but acquired a commitment to a type of strange wonder embodied by the furry, bizarre, monstrous, and yet totally lovable Muppets. “There’s a good side to isolation,” said Henson. “It makes you sensitive, and sensitivity is part of the creative process.”

From Wilkins Coffee advertisements and Sam and Friends, Kermit and the rest of the Muppets would move to the stages of The Ed Sullivan Show and Saturday Night Live. In addition to Kermit, there was the porcine Primadonna Miss Piggy, the Borscht Belt failure Fozzy Bear, guttural Rolf the Dog, proboscis-curved Gonzo, and the countercultural rock combo of Dr. Teeth’s Electric Mayhem. Animal on drums was a dead ringer for Keith Moon, and there was also Janice, who looked like Joni Mitchell made out of felt. The Muppets were mainstays of American popular culture in the last half of the twentieth century, appearing not just on The Muppet Show but in films like 1979’s The Muppet Movie, 1984’s The Muppets Take Manhattan, and 1992’s The Muppet Christmas Carol, not to mention how Henson’s technically innovative and visionary puppeteering was deployed in non-Muppet fantasy films like 1982’s The Dark Crystal and 1986’s Labyrinth, where his creations performed opposite rocker David Bowie.

The key to the Muppets’ appeal is that they’re shockingly not creepy. They can be sweet and scatological, adorable and profane, but there is none of the Howdy Doody uncanniness about them, no Pulcinella marionette uneasiness. No small victory in this, to take a form of artistry as fundamentally unnerving as puppetry and to make it so universally beloved. “Henson gave his creations such vivid personalities, wit and expressions it was easy to believe each had a beating heart beneath the felt,” said Whitney Matheson in a 2015 retrospective from ET Online, and there is an undeniable truth to the assertion for anyone whose can’t help but feel that there is more to Sam the Eagle, Statler and Waldorf, or Pepe the King Prawn than fake fur and feathers.

Of course, a large part of this is because so many Americans were raised on Henson’s most enduring contribution in the form of the creatures and monsters that were residents of Sesame Street. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s children’s show, which was part of the civic works that made Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs the greatest investment in the American people since FDR’s New Deal, was designed to teach about not just the alphabet and numbers, but also empathy and kindness. Central to the program were the various Henson Muppets that were designed to live on the titular street, so that children who lived in the inner-city could see for the first time a reflection of their own lives, featuring alleyways and fire escapes, graffiti and liter, and not just idealized small towns or nostalgic rustication. On Sesame Street lived a variety of urban archetypes: latchkey kid Big Bird and the enigmatic immigrant The Count; the gentrifying couple Bert and Ernie and the addict Cookie Monster; homeless Oscar the Grouch (and Kermit visited sometimes as well). In initial test views, notes Michael Davis in Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street, children rejected the premise of the show, until Henson’s Muppets arrived, having “provided the missing alchemy in the summer of 1969.” Davis adds that “Henson began sketching a bird puppet that would be so oversized that a six-foot-tall man, hiding within it, would be required to work its long neck and mouth with an outstretched arm.” Henson ultimately created the “grandest and most ambitious experiment in children’s television.”

At their core, what makes the Muppets so wonderous is that they’re playful. They are not afraid to be goofy, to be silly. And playfulness is a manifestation of love; for our friends, for our family, for our children, for being alive. The children who watch Sesame Street may come from loving families or desperate situations, they may live in pristine suburbs or dangerous ghettoes, but for an hour they can be enveloped in the love of the show, a love which takes them and their lives seriously, that acknowledges them as not just children but as human beings with their own hopes and fears, their own agency. Johan Huizinga, the great German philosopher and historian, writes in his 1938 Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, that the “eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination.” Play, as Huizinga argued, is the only true poetry. “Someday we’ll find it,” sings Kermit in an echo of Huizinga, “the rainbow connection, the lovers, the dreamers, and me.” For it’s in play that we discover each other and discover love. That’s what Kermit learned, so far from his commercial origins, when in 1972 a delighted little girl named Joey, singing the alphabet song alongside the frog, told him that she loved him and kissed him on the face. Despite being made of felt, Kermit’s green face almost seemed to blush. 

Star Trek (1966)

On November 22, 1968—fifteen months after the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that state bans on interracial marriage were unconstitutional and eight months before an American would be the first man to walk on the moon—the NBC science fiction series Star Trek aired the tenth episode of its third and final season. “Plato’s Stepchildren” is by all accountings a rather middling episode wherein the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise starship discover a planet inhabited by telekinetic aliens who’ve based their civilization on that of ancient Greece. This entry has none of the pathos of episodes like “City on the Edge of Forever,” with its doomed romance time travel plot, or the psychological complexity of “The Enemy Within,” save for a few seconds-long kiss towards the end of the episode between Captain Kirk, as played by the white Toronto-born actor William Shatner, and Lieutenant Uhuru, performed by the black Illinois-born actress Nichelle Nichols. This was the first scripted interracial kiss to air on television, at a moment when many states (contrary to the Supreme Court’s rendering) still enshrined anti-miscegenation laws.

The censors at NBC, worried about disturbing Southern viewers, filmed the kiss in a purposefully obfuscating manner, insisting that Shatner and Nicholls’s lips not actually touch. Nonetheless, it was a profound moment, an expression of what Nicholls describes in her memoir Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories as not a “wild futuristic utopian fantasy,” but a faith that human beings “would progress, always reaching for their highest potential and noblest goals, even if it took centuries.” This was the salience of the scene, for nothing was fraught about the kiss (beyond Kirk and Uhura being forced into it by telekinetic extraterrestrials that is). The implication was clear—even if it took until the twenty-third century, there would be a moment in which a black and white couple embracing would hardly be unusual.

Premiering in 1966 and running for only three years, Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek would become the most significant American science fiction franchise of the twentieth century, with several spin-off series, dozens of movies, and a vibrant community of sometimes-mocked fans. True to his own progressive politics, Rodenberry envisioned Star Trek as an exploration of not a utopian future per se but one whose idealistic ethic was expressed by Kirk in every episode’s opening credit voiceover about the “voyages of the starship Enterprise. It’s five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before!”

The most famous split infinitive in pop culture, this imperative to “boldly go” into “space: the final frontier” was among the greatest flowerings of optimism in American history. From historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s mourning the close of the liminal western edge during his celebrated lectures at the 1893 Columbian World’s Exposition to John F. Kennedy’s declaration of the nation’s need for a “new frontier” in his presidential nomination acceptance speech at the 1960 Democratic National Convention, the organizing principle of the country’s mythos has been space. There is a quip, with some accuracy to it, which holds that in Europe a hundred miles is a long distance while in the United States a hundred years is a long time. Where the Old World is consumed with the past, the United States is with the future. Whatever the veracity of the stereotype, it’s telling that in the great post-war speculative phantasmagorias, Britain’s Doctor Who is a time traveler, while the very American crew of the Enterprise is concerned with space.

The crew of the Enterprise is American precisely because it’s comprised of many peoples. Kirk, as played by Shatner with hammy efficacy, is the shoot-from-the-hip Iowa farm-boy; Uhura, whose name is Swahili, is a xenolinguist and a citizen of a future United States of Africa rendered with cutting elegance by Nichols; calm and collected Sulu, portrayed by George Takei, (who was interned during World War II along with his Japanese-American family); the hard-drinking but dependable Scottish engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, played by James Doohan; Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, an “old country doctor” from the American South, performed with both sarcasm and empathy by DeForest Kelley; Walter Koenig as the junior science officer Pavel Chekhov, a Russian alongside Westerners in a world where the Cold War is ancient history. And, of course, Mr. Spock, the indomitable, logical, rational half-human, half-Vulcan played by Leonard Nimoy, a character that in his brilliance, loyalty, and bravery was a direct rejoinder to those who believed “miscegenation” to be “unnatural.” A melting pot of a ship, like the United States itself.

Star Trek arguably reimagined Manifest Destiny without the genocidal crimes of imperialism, whereby the mountains of skulls that littered the American frontier were white-washed in the halcyon fantasy of the United Federation of Planets’ “Prime Directive” whereby the crew is not allowed to interfere with the “social, cultural, or technological development” of the civilizations they encounter (though of course they violate this rule all the time). More than a do-over of the United States’ past, Rodenberry’s show was an attempt at envisioning an idealized future, of considering the possibility that where we’re going could be better than where we’ve been. M. Keith Booker, in Star Trek: A Cultural History, describes how the show engaged a “reconceptualization of outer space as a locus for utopian imaginings.” If one can look beyond Shatner’s histrionic acting and the shag-carpeted set, the interstellar shipmates in uniforms that look like pajamas and the buxom blonde green-skinned alien sexpots, what emerges is a strikingly radical dream for the future.

Because while it’d be easy to see Star Trek as an extension of U.S. Cold War foreign policy, with the Federation a kind of space NATO and Kirk uttering State Department bromides against the Klingons and Romulans, it mustn’t be forgotten that the twenty-third century is materially post-scarcity because it’s post-capitalism. The future envisioned by Star Trek: The Original Series, and in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993) is without poverty, wealth, or even money. It’s the hyper-capitalist Ferengi, intended to replace the bestial Klingons, who were villainous.

Nor is Star Trek unproblematically utopian. There is some truth in the idea that the franchise across all of its iterations has the crew arriving at a faux-utopia that’s really a dystopia; that the show interrogates the problems of ideology. Kirk and Spock come to a planet of ancient Greek aliens; Kirk and Spock come to a planet of Nazi aliens; Kirk and Spock come to a planet of Chicago gangster aliens, etc. But the show isn’t beyond critiquing its own assumed principles, as when in an episode of Deep Space Nine, the cunning Ferengi bartender Quark gives a draft of that most American of carbonated beverages to the Cardassian Garak. Both aliens appraise root beer to be “vile,” but as Quark opines, this “bubbly and cloying and happy” drink that’s “just like the Federation” is most dangerous because “if you drink enough of it, you begin to like it,” as salient a critique of the threat of neoliberal Western globalization as has ever been uttered on television.

Most tellingly, though, Star Trek has always been a utopia for eccentrics, oddballs, and outsiders. For as much as people love Captain Kirk or the stoic Captain Jean-Luc Picard on The Next Generation or the dignified Captain Benjamin Sisko on Deep Space Nine, it’s characters like Spock or the sentient android Data, who only wishes to become human, or the shape-shifting alien Odo, who desires to learn his forgotten origins, whom are most beloved. The universe of Star Trek is one of exiles and refugees, of a search not just for strange new worlds but for home. An understanding that belonging is intrinsic to curiosity and connection.

In the weeks leading up to the filming of “Plato’s Stepchildren,” Nicholls had wavered on whether or not she would try and renew her contract, but she was convinced to sign after meeting with a Star Trek fan who believed that the Uhura character was too important for her not to continue. That unlikely Trekkie was Martin Luther King, Jr., who told Nicholls at an NAACP event that Star Trek was the only show that he and his wife let their little girls watch.

When the time came to finally film the embrace, the producers insisted that Kirk and Uhura shouldn’t touch lips, but as Nicholls revealed in her autobiography, her and Shatner’s kiss was very real.     

Excerpted from American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States by Ed Simon. Copyright © 2026. Available from Ig Publishing.