She seemed to have very little English, so what followed was entirely done via semaphore. Not long ago I was watching a guy buy a hot dog from a street vendor. I would like to comment on the first question in the poll. Those guys in the 1960s just weren't smart enough, or ambitious enough, to get there. The point is, "Let Gomer Sing" doesn't have to be deadheaded. As a kid she watched Red Dwarf, a British cult science fiction sitcom that did stuff like that. Manteuffel does not take credit for this idea. Sure, the actor can do it, BUT CAN GOMER? Is this just a wild dream? Does he in fact have no talent? Does he in fact have that talent but it will be forever unrealized? It's psychically pleasing: an epistemological dilemma. There are toilets to be swabbed, urinal cakes to be distributedĪnd Gomer sighs and goes about his mopping. His drill sergeant is standing over him with a mop. Leontyne Price is applauding, as is the famously selfish diva Maria Callas. Pavarotti is applauding, but looking worried about his future. In the audience are mayors, governors, and foreign potentates. He is met with a thunderous standing ovation. That stupid hick grin had been wiped off his face. With no explanation, no antecedent, Gomer appears in a white tux and tails, performing opera at The Met before a standing room only crowd. So I was mentioning the intractability of the Gomer Conundrum to Manteuffel, who is both a writer and an actor, and she said there are elegant ways around this, if anyone cared enough, or was talented enough, to propose it. ("Let's put on a show! In our garage! With some of the best dancers on Earth, who happen to be our neighbors here in suburban Westchester County, New York!") But even in these ridiculous scenarios, Mary and Dick remained (mostly) in character. It has happened before, in other sitcoms, perhaps most famously in the Dick Van Dyke Show, which constantly found reason to have the multi-talented Mary Tyler Moore dance in Capri pants. The whole thing was a special place-in-hell subset of Jumping the Shark. To accomplish this, all the actors had to abandon their characters and act in gawrsh-ma'am awe of Gomer, and thus such. How do you make use of this? The producers of the show took the easiest and most idiotic route possible: They simply wrote an occasional show in which Jim got to sing, in character, in scenarios so contrived they were preposterous. It turns out that Jim Nabors had a rich, barrel-chested baritone. They may or may not have known about it before Gomer was cast. The whole point of the show was that Gomer was a sweet-natured feeb who said things like "gawrsh ma'am" and "golly geezums" a lot, while surrounded by gruff Marines who treat him like the total dork he is (and likely gay guy, though this was never articulated or even hinted at.) Har har. It will happen again.īack in the late 1960s there was a sitcom named "Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C.," starring Jim Nabors as Gomer Pyle, a naive small-town hick who had enlisted in the Marines. You need some age on you to get the specifics of this one, but you'll recognize the phenomenon itself. I am forever seeking to attach my name to brilliant, iconic observations about popular culture, much as I once did with "Marrying Irving" and the concept of a "twoink." And so I got a little excitied the other day when I came up with the term "Letting Gomer Sing."
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