From The Comic's Comic

Whenever I hear anyone, especially comedians, complain about how they cannot joke aout anything these days, I find my way back to Norman Lear.

Lear died yesterday at age 101. He was an icon and a paragon of television, comedy, free speech and civil rights. Lear’s situation comedy run in the 1970s was unprecedented and remains unparalleled, beginning with All in the Family in 1971 and including Maude, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons, and Good Times. But he continued working even upon hitting the century mark, collaborating with Jimmy Kimmel to stage live revivals of his classic sitcom episodes with all-star casts, winning back-to-back Emmy Awards for Outstanding Variety Special (Live) in 2019 and 2020.

Born July 27, 1922, in New Haven, Conn., the Jewish son of a Ukrainian mother and Russian father grew up in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York City, and attended Emerson College in Boston before dropping out in 1942 to enlist and serve as a radio operator and gunner on bombing missions during World War II.

I had the opportunity and privilege to meet and talk to Lear twice. Lear was 79 when he was feted by the 2002 HBO US Arts Comedy Festival in Aspen with along with several other comedians and creatives for standing up for free speech (this coming in the months after 9/11 when many were quick to police speech as unpatriotic and declare “irony” “dead”). In October 2016, when Lear was 94, he sat down with me to talk about his life and career as PBS was celebrating him with an American Masters documentary.

Lear had just served as executive producer of a Latina re-imagining of One Day at a Time for Netflix, so he was putting that question of joking about serious subjects to the test, and lauding Jerrod Carmichael for his NBC sitcom as well as Kenya Barris for what he was doing with Black-ish. “I think both of those shows are terrific,” Lear told me.

Spending a few days in Aspen with Matt Stone and Trey Parker led to an invite for Lear to meet with the South Park crew on a writing retreat in Arizona, resulting in the 100th episode celebration, “I’m A Little Bit Country,” wherein Lear voiced Ben Franklin. Lear also told me about his very beginnings in TV comedy with another writer named Ed Simmons (their wives were friends), recounting his journey from door-to-door salesman to comedy writer for Danny Thomas. Lear recalled how All in the Family survived two failed pilots with ABC before breaking through with a 13-episode order on CBS in 1971, and how the Bunkers begat both Maude and The Jeffersons, and how Maude’s maid led to Good Times.

His shows tackled race, class, war, feminism, abortion, civil rights, even trans rights some 45-50 years before we somehow today have forgotten how to talk or even think about these issues.

A couple of months after that episode of The Jeffersons aired in 1977, All in the Family broadcast a two-parter “Edith’s Crisis of Faith” revolving around a friend of Edith’s, Beverly LaSalle, who gets murdered because she was trans. In 1977.

Lear also spoke about buying and later selling the Declaration of Independence, touring the 50 states with it in between, and warned of the dangers of Donald Trump in the month before the 2016 election. Lear compared Trump to Benito Mussolini, recalling how the world considered Mussolini a joke before he took over Italy. On Trump, Lear said: “This guy is a joke. But you’ve got to take these jokes seriously.”

We would do well to remember Lear’s words, his deeds and his works.