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Popular Culture Review
paraphernalia decorated the bar and Red Sox players made cameos on the show.
All of these Red Sox players were, not surprisingly, white. As with the busing
crisis, these racial tensions were ignored as well.
It is obvious that Cheers was not comfortable dealing with race. Its citation
of Othello is especially interesting, then, because it came at a time when many
Shakespeareans were just as uncomfortable dealing with the racial implications
of the play. “Homicidal Ham” occurred at a critical moment in the performance
history of the role, as the idea that Othello should only be played by a black
actor had gained currency and also engendered a backlash. “Homicidal Ham”
aired in 1983, four years after the RSC declared it would no longer produce the
play with a white actor in the role. It also comes two years after Jonathan
Miller’s BBC version with Anthony Hopkins in the title role, in which Miller’s
stated aim was to make the play not about race. Miller chose not cast a black
actor because “casting a black actor would encourage audiences to ‘equate the
supposed simplicity of the black with the exorbitant jealousy of the
character.’”12 However, despite this stated antiracist claim, the film drew
criticism. As Lois Potter points out, “what the director’s critics objected to was
not his ideology but its practical result: a white actor was to play the most
famous black character in drama, in a televised version likely to become the
standard image of the play for a whole generation of school and university
students.”13 Miller’s BBC Othello, despite its antiracist protestations, entrenched
the idea of a white Othello and gave institutional support to the interpretation
that the play is about jealousy, not race.
Given this climate, both in sitcoms and Othello's performance history, it is
not surprising that Cheers, like Miller’s version, attempts to submerge the
uncomfortable racial elements in Othello and universalize the play as a story of
jealousy. Lacking Miller’s Shakespearean credentials to fully form a theoretical
argument that the play is about jealousy, not race, the creators of Cheers try to
enforce a colorblind version of the play on its audience through a case of what
could be called hopeful forgetting.
The episode inscribes the idea that the average viewer is supposed to
recognize the names Shakespeare and Othello, but have only a fragmentary
memory of them. Before performing the scene, Diane gives a brief plot
summary in a condescending, school-marmish tone to the blue collar denizens of
the bar, obviously assuming that they are unfamiliar with the play. Later, the
scene’s big punchline—Coach’s “That’s the only line of Shakespeare I ever
understood”—is built on the onscreen audience’s ignorance of the play.
This interplay of recognition and ignorance in the on-screen audience
creates a situation in which the real audience watching the show is given license
to forget Othello’s race. The viewers of the episode, like the on-screen audience,
are supposed to know vaguely that Othello is a play by Shakespeare but not
remember specifics. With Othello’s race erased from the collective memory of
the mass audience, the play can then be universalized as, simply, a play “about a
man driven mad with jealousy,” as Diane calls it right before the performance.