I have a most peculiar complaint about Mrs. Hobson's complaint [see excerpt above]. Nigger, kike, and sheeny were the words she found missing from in "All in the Family," which, according to her, made the show dishonest. But there is another word some bigots use—some liberal bigots. You know the word they use. The one word, the hideous word. Don't even print it. No, Mrs. Hobson, not nigger. Schwartze.

I have a most peculiar complaint about the bigotry in the hit TV comedy, "All in the Family." There's not enough of it. Here, spade, spic, coon, Polack—these are the words that its central character, Archie Bunker is forever using, plus endless variations, like jungle bunnies, black beauties, the chosen people, yenta, gook, chink, spook and so on. Quite a splashing display of bigotry, but I repeat, nowhere near enough of it.

I was … taken instantly with [the] clever show [All in the Family], and count myself today as one of its many yet unjaded enthusiasts. Part of my delight in Lear's scripts is traceable, I suspect, to my longstanding admiration of Sinclair Lewis' work: surely Archie Bunker is the McLuhanesque counterpart of the Gutenbergian George Babbitt of half a century ago. The American appetite for social satire is, it seems, nearly as voracious as the English: indeed, every American social class wi...

Suddenly we have a new American hero. He's not an Audie Murphy or a Charles Lindbergh or an Ike or a Huck Finn or anybody like that. He's a wholly ignorant, lower middle-class, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, beer-bellied bigot. This hero, this St. Archie [of All in the Family], must be dealt with seriously for he has become much more than a mere television character; he has become a social force engaging the minds and hearts of vast millions of Americans—many of them the people who still...

All in the Family we have always with us. It is now reduced to buttocks humor—at the expense, of course, of Archie's arse. The latest episode showed him sitting on a knitting needle and later getting pinched on the backside. The poor guy can never do anything right, at least not until his immaculately liberal Gloria and her husband the Meathead have conspired with humiliating Experience to show him the light. It's an old TV joke—sit-comdaddies are always feckless …—...

To assert, as the program's apologists do, that "All in the Family" is satire like "Till Death Do Us Part" is plainly to misunderstand what satire is. The kind of laughter which Bergson once described as "froth with a saline base" can hardly rivet 60 million people to the television set Saturday nights. This is not to criticize the escape that situation comedy provides. Laughter for its own sake is an important part of television. Great comedians like Abbot a...

Tonight the Columbia Broadcasting System Television Network will find out if Americans think bigotry and racism, as the prime elements of a situation comedy, are funny. It is funny, for example, to have the pot-bellied, churchgoing, cigar-smoking son of Middle America, Archie Bunker, the hero of "All in the Family," fill the screen with such epithets as "spic" and "spade" and "hebe" and "yid" and "polack"? Is it funny for hi...

"All in the Family," is kind of like wishing for a little more frankness in political dialogue and getting your wish in the form of Spiro Agnew. A working-class family situation series with a message, "All in the Family" is vulgar and silly. And after the disgust-at-first-shock wears off, the vaudeville clinkers passed off as humor are totally predictable, both in themselves and as means of conveying the show's moral: All prejudice—racial, class, sophisticated again...