When dads became bumbling idiots

Today smacking: the Bumbling Idiot Dad archetype

At risk of turning into the old lady sitting in the rocking chair on the front porch, polishing her shotgun and whistling through the gap where that front tooth should be, muttering, “Back in my day, we used to walk to school uphill both ways, even with a broken leg and tuberculosis, and we were grateful for it!” I must express that I feel there’s a gaping hole where our fathers used to be.

I blame this stupid archetype that came along around fifteen years ago: the Bumbling Idiot Dad. This archetype has single-handedly managed to reduce a generation of fathers to the status of the gum stuck to the bottom of the world’s shoe, and it’s so wrong and destructive that it makes me want to scoop out my eyes with a rusty teaspoon for sheer despair.

It began with Homer Simpson, the lovable but unfathomably stupid foil to the upright responsibility of beleaguered wife Marge. Now, since I grew up on a diet of The Simpsons I can hardly bash it with a clear conscience – and besides, that chip the Fox Network put in my brain will shock my neurones into a catatonic stupor, and I hardly want to be more mind-numbingly boring than I already am. But my horror remains that the character of Homer Simpson inspired a league of Bumbling Idiot Dad characters in our comedy sphere, and it’s ruining our appreciation of the actual father role.

You know the type of character the Bumbling Idiot Dad (BID) is. His head is almost permanently in the clouds, and he often conjures inspired but ultimately stupid schemes in order to achieve his ends, which are always selfish and childish. His wife is tempered and patient and supports him no end, though clearly he doesn’t deserve it since he is partially retarded and frequently on the brink of destroying everything the family holds dear. He gives ill-conceived advice to his 2.3 children, sending them on exploits derived of bad decisions. And all the while we laugh, and we laugh, and we laugh – until we choke on our Doritos and realise our arses are plastered to the couch for the rest of eternity.

The shame is that Homer Simpson was pure comedic perfection, but lesser producers, scriptwriters and networks evidently saw the cash cow that The Simpsons quickly became, and since then we’ve been battered from all sides by an army of poorly-rendered, frustratingly stupid characters all trying to imitate the classic BID. But they completely fail to be even remotely funny or clever. (I’m looking at you, Family Guy: you and your shameless Homer and Marge Simpson rip-off characters. And I’m looking at you, Everybody Loves Raymond: you and your complete mockery of the family unit, and your devaluation of really serious relationship issues, you utter waste of space and air time.)

We are turning fatherhood into a running joke.

I feel sorry for dads in all this, because the BID archetype is just small part of a larger deterioration in our culture of the value of the father role. Fathers these days are too often immediately second-class to mothers just by virtue of their being male. Mothers are given custody of their children often quite unquestioningly in custody disputes. Women are taking the final say in reproduction and how and when the family will expand or not. Don’t misread me: it is essential that women take over the microphone when it comes to what they do with their own bodies. But I cannot see how it is fair that, once there are children in the picture, a supposedly equal parenting relationship will intrinsically give the father’s opinions less voice than the mother’s.
(There’s an expansion of this idea over at Violent Acres, if you’re interested.)

I have raved on about how important I think good parenting is. It’s also important to value what both parents essentially are within the family unit, which is, in a nutshell, really crucial and valuable. It’s destructive and foolish to perpetuate a stereotype that so greatly devalues everything that a father is, can be, and should be. Can you imagine if there was an emerging stereotype in our media of the Bumbling Idiot Mother? Oh, how the feminists would crow!

Speaking of which; there are some who will say it is the rise of feminism which has in large part helped to push this deadbeat dad character in to our entertainment in an effort to Put Down the Man, or whatever it is people seem to think Those Feminists are doing these days. But since true feminism is about equality across genders, and not pushing one gender down for the purpose of advancing the other(s), we can’t say it’s all the feminists’ faults. Sorry, angry mob, you’ll have to douse those torches and put down the pitchforks for now.

I’m blaming, in half part, the laziness of our entertainment vehicles for this. How hard is it to come up with a new and interesting set of characters for a new programme, instead of re-hashing the same old stupid stereotypes time after time? It’s not that hard at all, but the thing is, the TV networks don’t have to. It is we who so gleefully lap up this ridiculous premise that it’s funny to laugh at incompetent parenting. This is where I place the rest of the blame. It’s our stupid faults for tuning in to see how Ray Barone will stick his foot in his mouth this week, thereby turning wife Debra into a screeching harridan, or how Peter Griffin’s latest hair-brained scheme will put his family’s life and income in danger while Lois Griffin sits patiently by.

I really wish we wouldn’t watch this crap when there are so many better-sketched characters out there; characters which are grounded in originality and don’t reek of influences much better than themselves. By supporting and believing this crap, we’re helping to destroy everything that a father should aspire to and be proud to be, and we should be really worried.