Vital Viewing (Regional Cadence Edition)

Jim Nabors 1930-2017

Between 1870 and 1920, eleven million Americans moved from rural areas (villages or hamlets surrounded by countryside) to urban areas (cities surrounded by villages or hamlets, i.e., suburbs.) Additionally, the twenty-five million immigrants who arrived on these shores chose to settle in cities, so that by 1920 more Americans lived in urban than rural areas for the first time in US history. Now, this majority living in cities didn't necessarily forget about those few that had remained behind. Indeed, they took great interest in them. Or rather, they took great amusement in them. An amusement stoked by various forms of pop culture, from comic strips (Li'l Abner, Snuffy Smith), radio (Lum and Abner, Fibber McGee and Molly) movies (Ma and Pa Kettle, No Time for Sergeants), animated cartoons (Foghorn Leghorn), and, especially, television. So much television, I'm not even going to put it in parenthesis: The Real McCoys, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Hee Haw, The Andy Griffith Show, and Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C. It was last two TV shows that plutonium-powered Jim Nabors' pop bottle rocket-ascent into stardom.

As a comic actor, Nabors' range was pretty narrow. He could only play one character, and it wasn't all that original of a character. The simple-minded but good-hearted country bumpkin had been a comic trope since Artemas Ward, who had a great influence on Mark Twain and is sometimes described as the first standup comic. Ward (real name, Charles Farrar Browne) died is 1867, but his basic shtick, a mixture of bad grammar and wide-eyed boondocks innocence, lived on in, among others, Abner Yokum, and even early Andy Griffith, the man who gave Nabors his big break. Griffith's original claim to fame was a best-selling comedy record titled "What It Was, Was Football", and then the TV, stage, and movie version of No Time For Sergeants, in which he portrayed a Gomer Pyle-like character. More recently, on the otherwise sophisticated Cheers, Woody Harrelson did a Midwestern variation of the same comedy stereotype. However, with all dues respect to Griffith and Harrelson and anyone else with same vacant look and/or dumb smile on their face, Nabors was just plumb funnier. As Nancy Walker did with the Jewish mother, Danny DeVito with the tyrannical boss, Goldie Hawn with the dumb blond, and, to show you I keep up with the times, Jim Parsons with the high I.Q. geek, Nabors took a commonplace comedy persona and made it his own.

Especially on The Andy Griffith Show where I found him slightly funnier than when he played Gomer on his own series. Don't get me wrong. I thought he was great as a Marine (because he was so inept as a Marine), but being the protagonist instead of a secondary character meant that the TV audience occasionally had to relate to him, and they sure wouldn't relate (whether they should or not) to someone who was a complete moron. So Gomer's I.Q. was raised a notch as he became a more well-rounded person. All that was to the good, because it gave the sitcom new avenues to explore during its five years on the air, if not quite as many belly laughs. No such requirement for the Griffith Show, where Nabors could be so hilariously over-the-top he even forced Don Knotts to take on the unaccustomed role of straight man in their scenes together.

After Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C went off the air (at his own instigation) Nabors hosted a variety show that did almost as well in the ratings, was always in the Top 30, yet was canceled after only two years. Why? Well, remember that old story from childhood about the country mouse visiting the city mouse and the former deciding he should hightail it back home because of a cat? Well, that cat was nowhere as menacing as the emerging art of network demographics. It was no longer how many people were watching a show that mattered to advertisers but also their spending habits. People with disposal income willing to try new products weren't watching such otherwise highly-rated shows as The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, Mayberry RFD, Hee Haw, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, and The Jim Nabors Hour in large enough numbers, and so the shows were systematically taken off the schedule in what's become known as the Rural Purge. Or, as Pat Buttram, Mr. Haney on Green Acres, put it: "It was the year CBS canceled everything with a tree—including Lassie."

So what was with all these people with disposable incomes willing to try new products anyway? They they lose all interest in what was going on in the sticks. I don't think so, but the television's depiction of comings and goings of rural types had become dated, even anachronistic, by the 1970s. Terms such as country bumpkin, hillbilly, hick, hayseed, clodhopper, rube, and yokel, all gave way to a new term, redneck. The city slickers were still very interested, but just that they saw such a person less as a charming innocent and more willfully ignorant menace...

  
 ...and not all that amusing.

So what happened to Nabors after the Purge? Throughout the 1970s he was still a presence on talk shows and other people's variety shows. He appeared on The Love Boat. He and Ruth Buzzi had their own Sid and Marty Croft Saturday morning show for a while, called The Lost Saucer,  where they played robots in an out-of-control time machine. In the 1980s, Nabors appeared in a couple of Burt Reynolds movies. There was an Andy Griffith Show reunion movie where he played Gomer one final time. And then that was kind of it. I think the entire 1990s went by without me ever catching him on television, though he did do live performances for a while. As for his personal life, a friendship with Rock Hudson came to an end after the latter became spooked about a joke making the rounds ("Did you hear Rock Hudson married Jim Nabors and changed his name to Rock Pyle?") Nabors did end up marrying his longtime partner Stan Caldwaller earlier in this decade once it was legal to do so in the state of Oregon. That was the last time Nabors was in the news, I believe.

Here's Jim Nabors at this best:

Well, that's about it--Oh, wait, I almost forgot. Earlier I told you Nabors had a narrow range. I meant as an actor, as he could only play one character, but as an entertainer, it's a different story.  Jim Nabors could sing. 

Listen:

Not bad for a country bumpkin. Surprise, surprise, surprise!