The Best of Frasier Crane

As I've mentioned several times throughout this blog, my Dad was a no-nonsense kinda guy. He never pretended his role was to be my "buddy" or "pal;" his job was to put bread on the table and scare the hell out of us. Although he very rarely administered the beatings himself, I'm fairly certain that the reason I wasn't a huge troublemaker as a kid was the prospect of going home to him and having him literally kill me and bury me piece by piece under the shed out back. Handel's "Messiah" quietly playing while he shaves the skin off my bones in his easy chair as my mother serves him a bowl of butter pecan ice cream. Like the Fonz he never lost his temper or hit anyone, but he had that old-school air of well, maybe that could all change at any moment. And these were the "old days", ie if another adult plowed over me with a car my dad would yell at me for getting in the way of the car while refusing to bring me to the hospital.

So it always cracks me up on sitcoms when the father is a funny, goofy gentle sort, always kidding around with the kids and being silly, and one of the kids does something to get himself in trouble and we gotta go through the motions of "Dad's gonna kill me!!!!!" Siblings laughing, "wait til Dad get's home, you're DEAD!!" Really? I haven't seen this dad be mean once in all the seasons, he's usually always trying to be funny. You're really scared of this person? And then when you see the father find out, and the kid is cringing, awaiting the father to kill him...and the father starts cracking jokes et al. Now me, even to this day, if I fuck up and the person who should be pissed starts laughing instead of yelling, I enjoy this much better and indeed try to add as many laughs as possible. But on these sitcoms, the kids are required to act chagrined they're getting laughed at, acting pissed/embarrassed. Instead of "thank god, I'm gonna live!!" they almost challenge the father to punish them. Whack.

One of the worst offenders of this is my show of shows, "The Cosby Show." How many times did we hear "ooooooh, dad's gonna KILL you when he finds out!!!!" only to have Cliff stroll in, look serious, and then riff for 5 minutes at the kid's expense? Not once did my father do that; before being punished I was never treated to a few minutes of him warming up for his Catskills Tour. "...a D in geography, son? can you not locate your brain on a map?" (cue laugh track, bowl of butter pecan appears.)