Gilligan's Island

Gilligan Goes to Carnival

56 Gilligan’s Island America is the radio, which cloyingly connects the castaways to the mainland, yet never helps them find a way back. It is the parody contraptions, not the radio or the abandoned ship, which dominate the visual aesthetic of Gilligan’s Island. To do laundry, the Professor builds a bamboo washing machine, but like its midcentury modernist equivalent back on the mainland , the device causes as much work as it saves: Gilligan must pedal like a lunatic for the machine to work. In short, the green world of Gilligan’s Island offers a direct assault on CBS corporate branding, even more aggressively than the rural sitcoms that surround it. Gilligan Goes to Carnival Ever since 1960s telefilm sitcoms entered incredibly successful syndication on early morning and late afternoon local television stations, they have been much reviled for their appeal to children. Indeed, I fell in love with Gilligan’s Island as a child watching after school syndicated reruns day after day in the 1970s on Boston UHF channels. These exhibition contexts cloud the status of Gilligan’s Island as a virtual textbook of comedy in the Western tradition. Indeed, early in “St. Gilligan and the Dragon,” Mrs. Howell invites Ginger and Mary Ann to move across the island by invoking Aristophanes’s Lysistrata (411 BCE). Explaining that the Greek women engineered a sex strike to stop the Peloponnesian War, Mrs. Howell convinces the women to build their own hut. Most important, Gilligan and the Skipper continue a tradition of partner comedy from vaudeville to Hollywood to the television sitcom. Most obviously, Gilligan and Skipper replay Laurel and Hardy, an earlier comedy duo consisting of a thin guy who annoys his portly compatriot. Vaudeville and silent cinema traditions would become staples of the television sitcom , from Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton on The Honeymoon01 Metz text.indd 56 1/20/12 12:00 PM 57 Gilligan Goes to Carnival ers (CBS, 1950–51) to Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza on Seinfeld. However, I believe there is a deeper significance to the comedy in Gilligan’s Island. In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin argues that medieval carnival served as a kind of safety valve for Western civilization in which a celebration of the lower bodily strata of human bodies temporarily overturned the normally oppressive social hierarchy. A literary scholar, Bakhtin argues that the radical tradition of carnival continued in literature , through François Rabelais’s series of sixteenth-century novels about the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel. Contemporary media scholars have seen such carnivalesque interventions in the American sitcom. Kathleen Rowe, for example, argues that Roseanne Barr is a carnivalesque figure whose overweight body produces a similar celebration of the lower bodily strata to Rabelais’s novels. At first glance, Gilligan’s Island seems the complete opposite of the carnivalesque. When Schwartz discusses his show in his many books and interviews, he celebrates its clean storytelling. With pride, in the commentary track to “The Producer” on the recently released DVD set, Schwartz proclaims that his show was never blue, dirty, or racy. Thus, there is very little scatological grotesquery on Gilligan’s Island. However, several episodes of Gilligan’s Island feature Rabelaisian comedy open to Bakhtinian cultural analysis. The most significant episode in this regard is “Pass the Vegetables , Please” (season 3, episode 71, September 26, 1966) in which Gilligan fishes a box of radioactive seeds out of the Pacific Ocean. Since he makes the box, which is labeled “Danger, Experimental Radio Active Seeds,” into a stool, the castaways do not know the seeds are contaminated. Delighted to be able to grow vegetables for the first time on the island, Skipper, Gilligan , Mary Ann, and the Professor plant the seeds in a garden. In three days’ time, the vegetable plants grow to gargantuan proportions. Mary Ann harvests a huge, four-pronged carrot, 01 Metz text.indd 57 1/20/12 12:00 PM 58 Gilligan’s Island which she jokes is the size of a cow udder. The cucumbers are a yard long. Skipper jokes that the corn, which has grown so long as to circle back on itself, must be “budget corn—it makes both ends meet.” The castaways sit down to a huge, carnivalesque feast. They consume the vegetables with delight. When each castaway cannot reach the serving plate containing their favorites quickly enough, the Professor suggests that they move the plate right next to...