Comedy Under the Influence

Drunks were funny. For centuries. There was a moment – short-lived in the world’s timeline – when they stopped being funny, “about the time,” according to web-ster Ron Tanner (an award-winning fiction and nonfiction author, at least, in his words), “Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) got its start.” That was 1980. Tanner pointed out 1981’s “Arthur,” starring Dudley Moore, as “the last of the drunk-is-funny showcases and it skirted controversy because Arthur never drove drunk (his chauffeur drove) and, in the end, when it counted, he sobered up.” Roger Ebert noted that Moore’s Arthur embodied “all the wonderful human qualities that drunks fondly, mistakenly believe the booze brings out in them.”

About two-and-a-half millennia before MADD, theater audiences in Ancient Greece laughed heartily at so-called satyr plays, comedies featuring the mythological half-man, half-goat creatures – gross, dimwitted and often drunk – who lusted after women and uttered the plays’ funniest dialogue at the expense of others. (Sound familiar?)

 

An ancient illustration of a bawdy satyr play- funny stuff, right?

Around 500 BC, the Festival of Dionysus, celebrating the god of grape-harvesting and wine (not to mention unbridled, drunken orgies), would be marked by a presentation of three tragedies in a row. The somber mood of the evening would be lightened by a satyr play, which poked fun at Athenian society with pranks, sight gags, brazen sexuality, and intoxicated merriment, similar to the bawdy spirit of old-time burlesque. (For hundreds of years, it was thought that the word “satire” was derived from satyr plays, while, in fact, the word came from the Latin “satura,” meaning “a dish of mixed ingredients.” On the other hand, satire certainly shares the nature of satyr plays as a source of subversion against the decorum of civilization.)

Subsequently, after the Greeks, the humorless Romans – whose idea of entertainment was pitting gladiators against each other in bloody combat in the Colosseum and feeding Christians to feral dogs (not lions) when they weren’t being crucified or burned alive – did not imitate the satyr plays, although inebriated characters did appear in Roman theater.

To be fair, Roman theater staged comedies, including farces by Plautus, whose plays would, centuries later, inspire the hit Broadway and movie musical “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” One of Plautus’ comedies, “Miles Gloriosus” (a featured character in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”), also known as “The Swaggering Soldier,” depicts a braggart whose actions are mostly confined to words, a standard comic figure in Roman theater upon whom William Shakespeare based, in part, the inimitable and imposing Sir John Falstaff, a fat, boozing, lecherous, vain, boastful, cowardly, thieving knight who appeared in three plays by Shakespeare, including the two “Henry IV” historical dramas.

Falstaff as envisioned by painter Eduard von Grutzner in 1896

Rarely far from a cup of wine, Falstaff acts as a surrogate father for Prince Hal, the future king of England. Norrie Epstein, author of The Friendly Shakespeare, wrote, “Hal basically belongs to two worlds, each a mirror of the other: the tipsy Falstaffian circus…and the magisterial world of his father, where he must take his place in history.” Ultimately, upon his coronation, Hal, now Henry V, severs his connections to his rowdy youth by rebuffing a crestfallen Falstaff with: “I know thee not, old man.” In Shakespeare A to Z, Charles Boyce described Falstaff as “physically huge, stunningly amoral, and outrageously funny…generally regarded as one of the greatest characters in English literature.”

"Falstaff: Chimes at Midnight" (1966) was a long-cherished dream project for
star and director Orson Welles, who adapted the screenplay from Shakespeare.
"Welles was born to play Falstaff," Roger Ebert noted. "Both lived long and
too well, were at odds with the powers of the court and were constantly in debt.
Both knew disappointment..."

It was only natural that the comedic characterization of drunks in plays would transfer to the presence of comical “drunks” on vaudeville and burlesque stages. When London-born Charlie Chaplin toured the American vaudeville circuit with a popular British music hall troupe, his most successful routine was as a drunk called the “Inebriate Swell.” In 1913, representatives of the New York Motion Picture Company invited Chaplin to join Keystone Studios after seeing him perform his drunk act.

"A man's true character comes out when he's drunk." - Charlie Chaplin;
(above) Chaplin vs. his tiger skin rug in "One A.M." (1916)

Chaplin would portray drunks several times during his film career, including “Mabel’s Strange Predicament” (1914), his second movie and the first appearance of his signature Tramp costume; “His Favorite Pastime” (1914) and “The Rounders” (1914), both costarring Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle; “A Night Out” (1915), with Ben Turpin; “The Cure” (1917); and “One A.M.” (1916), the first film Chaplin appeared in alone (except for a brief bit by a taxi driver), playing a staggering homeowner who wages a slapstick war with household furnishings on his inebriated way to bed.

Buster Keaton in "Three Ages" (1923)

Drunk humor was a silent comedy staple from which Charlie Chaplin’s rival, Buster Keaton (known as “The Great Stone Face”), tried to refrain. The only extended drunk scene he performed in a silent film was in 1923’s “Three Ages,” the first movie he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in: a boy meets girl-loses girl-gets girl comedy set alternately in prehistoric times, ancient Rome, and the Prohibition era of the 1920s. In the latter, Keaton sits in a nightclub where he unwittingly drinks from a carafe of illegal booze dumped by a couple at a nearby table.

Buster Keaton and Thelma Todd share an
intimate moment in "Speak Easily" (1932).

After the advent of sound motion pictures, Keaton found himself paired with Jimmy (“Schnozzola”) Durante, a ragtime jazz pianist and vaudeville comedian, in a series of comedies, including 1932’s “Speak Easily.” Keaton plays a nerdish professor who inherits a fortune and decides to finance an awful musical for a debut on Broadway. The film features a hilarious, falling-down drunken rendezvous between the naïve Keaton and platinum blonde vamp Thelma Todd.

Thelma Todd was a very talented screen comedian, initially under contract to producer Hal Roach, who had her appear with Laurel and Hardy, and, among others, Harry Langdon. Roach later “loaned” her out to costar with Keaton, as well as the Marx Brothers. She was particularly memorable as a campus seductress sparring with Groucho Marx in “Horse Feathers” (1932). Sadly, Todd passed away under mysterious circumstances in 1935 at age 29. Her body was found in her car inside a garage belonging to the ex-wife of Todd’s boyfriend-business partner.

In the early 1930s, after an ugly divorce and after losing creative control of his pictures when he signed a contract with MGM, Buster Keaton lapsed into a lengthy period of alcoholism.

Harold Lloyd and frequent costar Mildred Davis in "High and Dizzy" (1920);
Mildred Davis married Lloyd and remained his wife until her death in 1969

The bespectacled Harold Lloyd, who deservedly stood alongside Chaplin and Keaton as one of the silent era’s most popular comedians, portrayed a tipsy doctor who tries to rescue a sleepwalking patient from the ledge of a skyscraper in 1920’s “High and Dizzy.” A subplot involves Lloyd and a fellow doctor getting drunk from a homemade still and avoiding a Prohibition-era cop.

Prohibition figured prominently in a 1930 comedy starring Laurel and Hardy. In “Blotto,” carefree bachelor Ollie convinces henpecked Stan to elude his shrewish wife for a night on the town at the swank Rainbow Club. When she finds out that Stan is planning to sneak in her hidden bottle of hooch, the wife replaces the liquor with iced tea, pepper, and mustard. The boys live it up at the nightclub, convinced that they are getting riotously drunk from the “booze,” until Mrs. Laurel arrives with a double-barreled shotgun. The pathetic look of doubt and disgust on Hardy’s face as he realizes they aren’t really drunk is priceless.

Laurel and Hardy in (left) "Blotto" (1930) and in (right) "Fra Diavlo" (1933)

“Fra Diavolo” (1933), also known as “The Devil’s Brother,” loosely based on a century-old comic opera by French composer Daniel Auber, cast Laurel and Hardy as the bungling manservants of a singing bandit who disguises himself as a marquis. The inimitable Thelma Todd costars as the flirtatious wife of a rich, doddering cuckold. William K. Everson, the author of The Films of Laurel and Hardy, noted, “Unquestionably…the funniest single gag in ‘Fra Diavolo’ was a repeat of one of their best routines. Hopelessly drunk from sampling all the wares in the wine cellar, they collapse in helpless laughter. Everything that happens, including their own arrest and threatened execution, merely spurs an even greater laugh reaction.”

Stan Laurel, Mae Busch, Oliver Hardy enjoy the "mineral water"
in "Them Thar Hills" (1934).

“Them Thar Hills” (1934) finds Laurel and Hardy taking a trip into the mountains as therapy for Ollie’s gout. The boys rent a trailer and set up camp in the woods beside a quaint old well, where a gang of fugitive bootleggers dumped their booze. Ollie explains the water’s peculiar taste by saying there’s “iron in it.” The campsite is visited by a stranded couple (played by Laurel and Hardy regulars Charlie Hall and Mae Busch) whose car has run out of gas. While Charlie returns to the car with gasoline, Mae remains to enjoy Laurel and Hardy’s hospitality. Charlie returns to find his wife and the boys hopelessly drunk from the “iron-enriched” water. The husband is not amused, and within minutes, a classic Laurel and Hardy tit-for-tat skirmish develops, turning the peaceful campsite into a battlefield. The mayhem was so popular with audiences that for the first and only time in their career, Laurel and Hardy made a sequel, appropriately titled “Tit for Tat,” doing battle once again with the slow-burning Charlie Hall, with Mae Busch returning as Hall’s wife.

Arthur Housman in the 1935 Laurel and Hardy short "The Fixer Uppers"

A frequent player in Laurel and Hardy comedies, Arthur Housman, who started his acting career as a leading man in silent pictures, became popular as one of Hollywood’s most recognizable drunks in small roles in both feature films and comedy shorts, including a number of Laurel and Hardy shorts, notably “Scram,” “Our Relations,” and (the title role in) “The Live Ghost.” Housman had a drinking problem in real life. Stan Laurel once recalled, “I never saw him sober. But not the way he was in the pictures, of course. That was wonderful acting and really good comedy.” One of his last roles before his death at age 52 in 1942 was as, naturally, a saloon drunk in the 1940 Marx Brothers comedy “Go West.”

Another actor familiar for his portrayals of drunkards, Jack Norton (above), appeared in 184 films between 1934 and 1948, working with Laurel and Hardy and The Three Stooges. In real life, however, Norton was a teetotaler who often followed drunks to study their movements so he could duplicate them. His best known role is probably A. Pismo Clam, the drunken movie director whom W.C. Fields is hired to replace in 1940’s “The Bank Dick.”

Ah, yes, W.C. Fields. While it’s true that several of the screen characters he portrayed exhibited a fondness for alcohol, which became the dominant factor in the Fields legend, many oft-repeated quotes about drinking have been erroneously attributed to him, such as his refusal to drink water “because fish fornicate in it,” or something to that effect. In his last starring role, playing himself in the deliriously surrealistic comedy “Never Give a Sucker an Even Break” (1941), he did tell his niece (played by movie musical starlet Gloria Jean), “I was in love with a beautiful blonde once…She drove me to drink. That’s the one thing I am indebted to her for.”

W.C. Fields and Gloria Jean in "Never Give a Sucker an Even Break" (1941)

During his early career as a vaudeville juggler, Fields abstained from drinking because he didn’t want to impair his agility. The growing loneliness of constant travel on the vaudeville circuit eventually led Fields to start keeping liquor in his dressing room as a lure for his fellow performers to socialize with him. And then he began drinking regularly.

The opening sequence in "The Man on the Flying Trapeze" (1935) finds W.C. Fields
joining two burglars and a policeman in a basement chorus of the old ballad
"On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away" while sipping Fields' home-brewed
hooch. (That's a young Walter Brennan, second from the left.) Fields ends up
getting arrested by the cop for distilling liquor without a license.

On movie sets, Fields would pocket a vacuum flask of martini cocktails, referring to it as his “pineapple juice.” By 1936, his heavy drinking triggered a marked decline in health. Within a year, he had recovered enough to make one last movie for Paramount, “The Big Broadcast of 1938” (below), but his disruptive behavior kept producers at bay, and he remained professionally idle until his successful venture into radio broadcasting. By then, however, he was chronically ill and suffered from delirium tremens.

W.C. Fields died in 1946 at age 66 from an alcohol-related stomach hemorrhage, on the day he claimed to despise the most, Christmas. Before exhaling his last breath, he winked and smiled at a nurse, then put a finger to his pursed lips.

W.C. Fields’ singular visage and physique naturally lent themselves to caricature, and he was routinely lampooned in a number of animated cartoons from the 1930s into the 1960s...

Warner Bros. had a Fields day with W.C.: (left to right, top to bottom)
"Hollywood Capers" (1935), "At Your Service, Madame" (1936), "Porky's
Road Race" (1937); "Little Blabbermouse" (1940); Disney caricatured Fields
as Humpty Dumpty in 1938's "Mother Goose Goes Hollywood" (Fields had
portrayed HumptyDumpty in an all-star 1933 screen adaptation of Alice in
Wonderland); the popular comic strip "The Wizard of Id's" depiction of shifty
lawyer Larsen E. Pettifogger was inspired by Fields' character Larsen E.
Whipsnade in 1939's '"You Can't Cheat an Honest Man"

Beyond such particular sendups, “Drunkenness seems to be one of the most popular of themes in Golden Age animation,” Steven Stanchfield, an animator, educator and film archivist in Ann Arbor, Michigan, noted.  Like a lot of children crouched before the television on Saturday morning, Stanchfield “never really understood why characters would act bizarrely once they had drunk something.”

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em: Porky Pig in "Trap Happy Porky" (1945)

“Farm Relief,” a 1929 Columbia Pictures cartoon, depicting a bootlegger who sneaks onto Krazy Kat’s farm and manages to get all the animals drunk, “is perhaps one of the funniest drunk cartoons ever,” according to Stanchfield, who also claimed that another animated feline, Felix the Cat “is perhaps the cartoon world’s drinking champ – he’s a fairly heavy drinker if one is to calculate the cartoons he’s drinking in versus the ones he doesn’t.” Speaking of cats, in the 1947 Tom & Jerry cartoon “Part Time Pal,” Tom gets drunk on hard cider and mistakenly befriends Jerry.

The drunk stork was a recurring character in Warner Bros. cartoons
and could be counted on for consistently mixing up deliveries.

Warner Bros. cartoons featured drunk characters nearly from their beginning in the 1930s, while, in Stanchfield’s summation, “Perhaps the (Walter) Lantz studio (home of Woody Woodpecker and Chilly Willy) wins the award for most drunk characters.” Comedic drinking was also featured prominently at the Disney studio in a number of animated shorts, as well as the features “Pinocchio,” “Fantasia,” and “Dumbo.” “There just isn’t a studio that didn’t have characters get drunk at one point or another,” Stanchfield noted. The Hays board, which enforced motion picture censorship at the time, “seems to never have a second thought about these ideas appearing in entertainment for children. There’s nothing in the Production Code that objects to sloshed characters.”

In 1957, British comic strip artist Reg Smyth introduced “Andy Capp” (above), a working-class bloke in an English harbor town who rarely works but still manages to come home late, from darts, snooker, soccer, cricket, rugby, and, more often than not, getting soused at the local pub – seemingly permanently pixilated as indicated by a prominent red nose and disheveled clothes.

Although Andy Capp's knockdown drag-out bouts with his wife, Flo, were
depicted in cartoonish dustballs, the couple eventually sought marriage
counseling to reconcile their differences.

London journalist Paul Slate noted, “Andy in his day has been a wife-beater, an habitual drunk, a 40-a-day smoker, a longtime welfare scrounger, a gambler, a cheat, a bully and a liar.” However, the comic strip has remained phenomenally popular decade after decade.

A statue of Andy Capp was erected in Reg Smyth's hometown (and
subsequently Capp's hometown) of Hartlepool, England, in 2007.

Reg Smyth recollected, "My father was an Andy, cap and all." In 1973, cartoonist Al Capp, the creator of “Li’l Abner,” called Smyth “the most popular English humorist with Americans since Charles Dickens.” Smyth has been honored with several awards, including, in the U.S., the National Cartoonists Society’s Best Strip Award.

The legacy of "Andy Capp" is honored by Steven Pastis' comic strip
"Pearls Before Swine" (top) and by a cameo appearance in Seth McFarlane's
animated series "Family Guy" (bottom).

When Red Skelton, who started his comedy career as a teen on the vaudeville circuit and as a circus clown, was given the opportunity to star in his own radio show, “The Raleigh Cigarettes Program,” in 1941, he resurrected a routine he’d been doing since 1928 as a spokesperson for “Mellow Cigars” who grows increasingly ill as he smokes the sponsor’s product. Cigarette makers Brown & Williamson, the actual sponsors of the radio program, asked Skelton to change the routine. 

“Guzzler’s Gin” has the announcer becoming sloppily intoxicated as he continues to sample and tout the liquor. It became one of the comedian’s most popular bits, which he reprised on TV’s “The Red Skelton Show.”

Red Skelton rolled out his drunk act in a cameo as a sloshed freeloader in a saloon
in the star-studded 1956 extravaganza "Around the World in 80 Days."

Another comedian famous for playing a drunk, Frank Fontaine was well known for his appearances on “The Jack Benny Show,” “The Tonight Show,” and, notably, “The Jackie Gleason Show.” The son of circus performers (his father was a strongman, his mother a trapeze artist), he made an early appearance on Jack Benny’s radio show as a bum who asked the host for a dime for a cup of coffee. Fontaine’s distinctively goofy laugh and cartoonish voice were such a hit with the audience hat he was brought back on the program several more times in the early 1950s, and he later appeared on Benny’s television show.

On “The Jackie Gleason Show,” he played the tipsy Crazy Guggenheim in Gleason’s “Joe the Bartender” sketches (above). Despite his trademark bug-eyed, lopsided grin and silly laugh, he would end the skits with a song, exhibiting a surprisingly pleasant singing voice.

Frank Fontaine's album "Songs I Sing on the Jackie Gleason
Show" reached #1 on Billboard's Top LP's chart in 1963.

Stan Freberg’s skewed voice characterization for Pete Puma in Looney Tunes cartoons was based on Fontaine’s character of Crazy Guggenheim.

Pete Puma gets his lumps from Bugs Bunny.

Fontaine, a nondrinker in real life, provided the voice for Rocky the Rhino for Disney’s “The Jungle Book.” If you don’t remember Rocky the Rhino, it’s no surprise, since the character didn’t survive the final cut. Fontaine died of a heart attack at age 58 in 1978.

Undoubtedly one of the most recognizable television “drunks,” Foster Brooks stumbled onto the stage of the syndicated “Steve Allen Show” of the 1960s as an inebriated movie producer, convincing the other guests that he was really plastered. Brooks started his career in radio in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, and later worked in local TV broadcasting in Buffalo and Rochester, New York, before moving to the West Coast to try his luck as a standup comic and character actor.

Foster Brooks poses with Lucille Ball (trying to hide her
cigarette) in an undated publicity photo.

Perry Como gave the comedian his big break in 1969, choosing him as his opening act. In the 1970s, Brooks frequently appeared as the likable boozer on “The Dean Martin Show,” for which he garnered an Emmy nomination in 1974. He subsequently appeared regularly on “”Dean Martin’s Celebrity Roast” broadcasts. Boasting that he and Dean Martin were charter members of the DUI Hall of Fame, Brooks, in character, asked Martin to join “Alcoholics Unanimous.”

Brooks drew upon his early struggles with alcohol for his act, but at the height of his popularity, he rarely drank. He once said that in 1964, someone bet him $10 he couldn’t quit drinking. “I haven’t had a drink since. At the time, I needed the $10.”

Foster Brooks released the hit comedy album "The Lovable Lush" in the early 1970s

By the 1980s, public sensitivities had changed regarding alcoholics and public drunkenness, and Brooks shifted away from the drunk act. He continued to make guest appearances on television, demonstrating, not unlike Frank Fontaine, a beautiful singing voice. Foster Brooks died in 2001 at age 89.

Dean Martin (above), incidentally, did drink but purportedly not as much as he acted on his variety and roast shows. More often than not, that was apple juice he was drinking onstage, although Phyllis Diller maintained he was downing the real thing.

The stars of "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In"

In 1952, another Martin, Dick Martin, and Dan Rowan formed a comedy team and played in nightclubs across the country and overseas. Their first routine, with Martin as a drunk heckling a Shakespearean performer (Rowan), was an immediate hit and became a mainstay of their live act for years. During the first season of the popular TV show “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” which aired on NBC from 1968 to 1973, Dick Martin and series regular Ruth Buzzi would appear in recurring, hilarious sketches as a pair of soused barflies named Mr. and Mrs. Swizzle.

Walter Matthau (above) portrayed one the most incongruous comedic drunks who ever staggered across the big screen, as awkward comic relief in the 1974 disaster epic “Earthquake” (presented in Sensurround!), starring Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy, and Genevieve Bujold. Matthau happened to be a friend of producer Jennings Lang and accepted the cameo role without pay. The film’s credits listed him as “Walter Matuschanskayasky,” which he claimed was his real name. True, he was the son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Russia, but his real name was, in fact, Matthow.

“The Bob Newhart Show,” according to Todd VanDerWerff, a TV editor for the A.V. Club, “is something of a forgotten, great comedy of its era” in the 1970s, “easily overshadowed by the more ‘important’ comedies of the time,” namely the groundbreaking sitcoms “All in the Family,” “M*A*S*H” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Hands down, the best remembered and most fondly recalled episode among the six seasons of “The Bob Newhart Show” was the 1975 fourth season booze-soaked Thanksgiving saga titled “Over the River and Through the Woods.”

When Bob’s wife, Emily (Suzanne Pleshette), leaves town to spend the holiday with her parents, psychologist Dr. Hartley (Newhart) invites his pal Jerry, the orthodontist (Peter Bonerz), neighbor Howard (Bill Daily), and patient Eliot Carlin (Jack Riley) to his Chicago apartment to watch a college football game. The foursome ends up becoming hopelessly, sloppily, laugh-out-loud drunk.

Bob: "I love coffee." Peter :"I love tea." Jack: "I love  the java jive and it loves me."
Jack Riley, Bill Daily, Bob Newhart, Peter Bonerz in "The Bob Newhart Show"

For the better part of the series, Newhart maintained a button-down presence, a deadpan observer bemused by the odd, sometimes surreal circumstances surrounding him, so a major source of the hilarity in this episode is watching him, in the words of the aforementioned VanDerWerff, “let out the inner lunatic,” whether he’s slamming a little frozen turkey on the kitchen counter or slurring his words as he attempts to phone in an order for Chinese takeout: “More moo-goo-goo-goo!”

In a 1993 episode of the animated television series “The Simpsons,” Homer chuckles to himself as he peruses the comic strips, “Oh, Andy Capp, you wife-beating drunk. Heh-heh-heh!” – signaling, more or less, that a MADD backlash was well underway, personified on the show by Homer Simpson’s best friend, Barney Gumble, Springfield’s town drunk, who first appeared on the series premiere in 1989. According to one episode, Barney was once a serious student with a promising future at Harvard University until Homer introduced him to his first beer the day before his SATs.

"Beer: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems." - Homer Simpson;
(above) Homer and Barney learn that all Duff Beer varieties are the same beer

Homer himself is, obviously, no stranger to drinking himself, and Duff Beer is his brew of choice – the cheap (and fictional) beer served at Homer and Barney’s favorite bar, Moe’s Tavern. In one episode, after Homer asks Moe for his “best beer,” the latter serves Duff Adequate. Duff Beer has since been used as the actual brand name for a number of beers in numerous countries, without permission or consent from the show and resulting in legal actions.

Moe gives Barney the heave-ho on a typical episode of "The Simpsons."

Voiced by Dan Castellaneta (who also performs the voice of Homer, among many others), Barney, according to the show’s writers, was based in part on Frank Fontaine’s Crazy Guggenheim, as well as Norm (George Wendt) from “Cheers.” Initially inspired by Barney Rubble, Fred’s best friend and neighbor on “ The Flintstones,” Barney Gumble was intended by the writers to be Homer’s next-door neighbor and sidekick, but instead, while still depicting him as a friend, the writers made him an alcoholic. At the time, according to “The Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, there was “a sort of unspoken rule about not having drinking on television as a source of comedy. So, of course, we went right for it.”

Bartender: "Can I draw you a beer, Norm?"
Norm: "No I know what they look like, just pour me one."

Premiering a mere two years after the formation of MADD, “Cheers” was something of an anomaly: a situation comedy based in a fictitious bar in Boston with a cast of characters who regularly frequented the pub. Yes, it was made clear that bartender Sam Malone (Ted Danson), a former major league relief pitcher, was a recovering alcoholic, but the barflies certainly enjoyed their libations, none more so than the abovementioned Norm (George Wendt), whose ongoing tab through the 11 seasons of the series filled volumes of binders. "I never met a beer I didn't like," Norm would say. In a 2008 online competition in GQ magazine, “Cheers” was voted the best TV comedy.

"Pretty women make us buy beer and ugly women make us drink beer." - Al Bundy

Another major thorn in the side for MADD had to be the wildly popular Fox sitcom “Married…with Children” (1987-1997), featuring a hopelessly dysfunctional family headed by the incurably sarcastic Al Bundy (played to the hilt by deadpan Ed O’Neill, currently portraying the family patriarch on ABC’s “Modern Family”), a faded high school football hero whose promising sports scholarship went up in smoke after he got his girlfriend pregnant and he broke his leg, ending up as a beleaguered shoe salesman. Al’s fondness for beer (especially free beer) was a recurring element throughout the show’s eleven seasons. “The best beer is the one that helps you forget about your wife,” Al once said, “and is usually served in a nudie bar – what a coincidence.”

During the 11^th season of “The Simpsons” in 2000, in an episode titled “Days of Wine and D’oh’ses,” Barney gave up drinking, which didn’t sit well with Homer. The episode was written by Dan Castellaneta and his wife, Deb Lacusta. Several staff members weren’t comfortable with the notion of a sober Barney because they didn’t think a sober Barney would be funny, although Castellaneta maintained, “He’s still a goofy man-child…he’s still got fifteen years of booze left in his veins.” The episode was commended by PRISM Awards, which honors the entertainment media for accurate portrayals of substance abuse, addiction, and mental health.

The perfect fast-food value-added toy for a child: a pocket-size barfly

Barney, who had developed a new addiction to coffee, ultimately relapsed in the 14^th season. The website Filmcritic.com ranked Barney 18^th on their 2008 list of “The 21 Best Movie Alcoholics of All Time.”

Another Matt Groening creation, “Futurama” (which premiered in 1999), introduced Bender (above), a cigar-smoking, beer-guzzling, wisecracking, sometimes felonious robot. Voiced by John DiMaggio and described by the show’s Leela (Katey Sagal) as “an alcoholic, whore-mongering, chain-smoking gambler,” Bender typically displays dishonest, egotistic, greedy, ignorant, lazy, unethical if not criminal behavior, and is reliably hilarious.

Stewie Griffin and teddy bear Rupert welcome home the family patriarch.

The year 1999 also saw the debut of the Fox animated series “Family Guy” (above), a frequently inspired and very funny skewing of family sitcoms centering on Peter Griffin (voiced by the program’s creator, Seth McFarlane), an overweight, reprehensibly irresponsible blue-collar worker whose favorite hangout is a bar called The Drunken Clam. Although Peter is presented as a moderate drinker, a number of episodes have revolved around his excessive behavior induced by extreme intoxication.

The cast of "It's Always Sunny in Philaphelphia": Rob McElhenney,
Caitlin Olson, Danny DeVito, Charlie Day, Glenn Howerton

When it comes to excessive behavior, one has to look no further than the depraved “Gang” on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” – five amoral slackers who operate the rundown Paddy’s Pub in South Philadelphia. The series, which debuted in 2005 on FX and is rated TV-MA for explicit language, explicit sexual content, crude humor, depictions of drug and alcohol abuse, and some bloody comedic violence, has been compared to “Seinfeld,” mainly because of the self-centered nature of the characters. The Philadelphia Inquirer reviewer Jonathan Storm wrote, “It’s like ‘Seinfeld’ on crack.” Danny DeVito steals the show as family patriarch Frank Reynolds, a paranoid, possibly psychotic compulsive gambler who shamelessly ingests large quantities of drugs and beer.

"It's the kind of scotch that people drink that are going to die penniless." - Ron White

Ron White, who toured with Blue Collar Comedy regulars Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall, and Larry the Cable Guy, from 2000 into 2003, is known for performing his standup material with a glass of scotch in hand, while Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) proudly proclaimed his fondness for the potable in 2004’s “Anchorman”: “I love scotch. Scotchy scotch, scotch. Here it goes down, down into my belly…”

Bobby Moynihan (right) as "Drunk Uncle" on "Saturday Night Live" with
"Game of Thrones" costar Peter Dinklage as brother-in-law "Peter Drunklage"

Comedian Bobby Moynihan regularly appears on “Saturday Night Live’s” Weekend Update segments as “Drunk Uncle,” a stereotypical blue-collar worker who attempts to deliver rambling monologues, not dissimilar to Colin Quinn’s St. Patrick’s Day appearances as a tipsy commentator on Weekend Update when Norm McDonald was the “SNL” news anchor in the mid-1990s..

The Huffington Post remarked that Moynihan “covers every aspect of your typical drunk uncle, including ‘back in my day’ folksy-isms, a luddite cynicism of all modern technology and quaint anti-immigration rants, all of which inevitably give way to mournful laments on his own failures in life." In 2012, Moynihan told Newsday that Drunk Uncle “is probably the funnest (character) to do…by far, just because the process of writing it is the funnest part in the whole world.”

Mike Rowe (above), best known as the wisecracking host of the Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs,” hosted the miniseries, “How Booze Built America,” a lighthearted historical documentary-docudrama that aired on the Discovery Channel in 2012.

Bob Odenkirk as President Richard Nixon, Jack Black as Elvis Presley
on Comedy Central's "Drunk History"

Comedy Central recently renewed the series “Drunk History” for a second season. Executive-produced by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay (who wrote the screenplays for “Anchorman” and “Anchorman 2”), the twisted, irreverent perspective on American history consists of episodes in which an intoxicated guest narrator struggles to recount a historical event. Featured “re-enactors” have included Jack Black, Lisa Bonet, Will Forte, David Grohl, Bill Hader, Kevin Nealon, Bob Odenkirk, Winona Ryder, Kristen Wiig, Fred Willard, Luke Wilson, and Owen Wilson.

Satyrs, Falstaff, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, the Warner Bros. stork, Andy Capp, Red Skelton, Frank Fontaine, Foster Brooks, Rowan and Martin, and Walter Matuschanskayasky would all appreciate the fact that...

the funny drunks are here to stay...