BANGOR, Maine — The history of the American sitcom will be the subject of a presentation at 3:30 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 11, at Congregation Beth Israel, 144 York St.
“Laughing Matters: From the Goldbergs to Seinfeld” will be presented by Peter Imber, 67, of Camden. It is a condensed 90-minute version of a 12-hour class he taught last year at Belfast Senior College.
Imber retired to Maine in 2010 after working for nearly 30 years as a producer for network news programs at ABC.
His love of the television genre known as the “situation comedy” began much earlier.
“I’m a baby boomer,” he said earlier this week. “I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s watching television. My favorite show was ‘Ozzie and Harriet.’ A few years ago in L.A., I bought a 40-episode DVD set of that show for about 12 bucks. I started watching them, and my wife says, ‘These are awful.’ I said, ‘I know it, but I still love them.’”
That exchange led Imber to begin researching the history of sitcoms and the role the shows have played in reflecting and influencing American society.
“The era that had the most impact was when I was really young in the early 1950s and into the early 1960s,” Imber said. “The shows really were selling a middle class way of life.
“The dad worked, the mom stayed home and the plot always included some sort of morality tale,” he continued. “The message was, ‘This is how you are supposed to behave.’ At the same time, I found how hard business was working to sell us all that we needed for that middle-class life.”
Many of those businesses selling the lifestyle also sponsored the shows, he said.
One of the nation’s best loved sitcoms, now considered to be classic television, “I Love Lucy,” revolutionized the industry, according to Imber.
“Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz gave up salaries to own the rights to the show, so they owned the syndication rights,” he said. “It was shot in Los Angeles, when everything else was shot in New York, on 35-millimeter film with a live audience using three cameras. That was unheard of then, but it is the standard used today.”
Imber said his program would document the change sitcoms underwent during the 1960s, when “All in the Family” and “M*A*S*H” became hits as “society became a lot more cynical.”
Although the title of the program includes two shows that prominently featured Jewish characters, the presentation won’t focus on those sitcoms, he said.
For more information, call 945-3433. The snow date for the program is Jan. 18.