M*A*S*H turns 30: the TV series' dark comedy was a paean to the ludicrousness of war.

• Author: Gehring, Wes
• Position: Entertainment

MEDIA HISTORIAN Rick Mitz credits "M*A*S*H" (1972-83) with being television's first dark comedy. As he noted in The Great TV Sitcom Book, "This was a comedy that showed war. Not like a John Wayne epic, but one of small-scale, more human dimensions." Yet, one should hasten to add, it was a very funny show, too.

At its most fundamental, dark comedy (or black humor) is a genre of comic irreverence that attacks what are normally society's most sacredly serious subjects--especially death. This is precisely what "M*A*S*H" did week after week as it chronicled the life and times of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, stationed close to the front during the Korean War.

Besides attacking the military establishment and the war itself, "M*A*S*H" showcased another pivotal dark comedy component--the inherent absurdity of life. The original producer and founding father of the series, Gene Reynolds, probably stated this position best in David S. Reiss' 1980 booklength study, M*A*S*H. Likening the program's inherent absurdity to a existential mindset, he observed: "They're in the middle of a war where everything is designed to ... kill. [But] they're in the business of putting these bodies back together again, only to have them sent back ... which becomes like shoving a rock up a hill only to have it roll down again ...."

Confronting this apparent futility, "M*A*S*H" (and black humor in general) is about coping through comedy. Richard Hornberger, the author of the original 1968 novel (written under the name Richard Hooker), said as much in his foreword to the book: "The various stresses [of war] ... produced behavior ... inconsistent with their civilian behavior patterns. A few flipped their lids but most of them just raised [dark comedy] hell...."

While "M*A*S*H" the novel became a late 1960s bestseller, it was maverick director Robert Altman's groundbreaking 1970 film adaptation that took a liberal antiwar America by storm. Though set during the Korean War, it was consciously made as a dark comedy statement about the U.S.'s involvement in Vietnam. Indeed, many young fans of the film were all but oblivious to the Korean connection, because the picture so totally seemed to speak to them on the ludicrousness that was Vietnam. As a period footnote to this phenomenon, by someone who saw the film numerous times upon its initial release, the biggest laugh was consistently generated by a line which was very timely to a 1960s draft-age audience. Hot Lips (Sally Kellerman) asks how anyone like Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) could have reached such a position of responsibility in the Army Medical Corps. "He was drafted" was Father Mulcahy's crowd-pleasing reply.

After "Airport" "M*A*S*H" was the top-grossing film of 1970. Not surprisingly, the movie's parent studio (Twentieth Century-Fox) decided to cash in on its biggest commercial success in years by adapting the property to television. The studio entrusted the making of a "M*A*S*H" pilot and subsequent series to Reynolds, whose greatest gift to the show arguably was convincing talented comedy writer Larry Gelbart to script both the pilot and the lion's share of the series' stories during the first four seasons. All those wonderful wisecracks so synonymous with Alan Alda's television Hawkeye Pierce came from Gelbart, who initially had honed his comedy skills writing for such celebrated funnymen as Bob Hope and Sid Caesar during television's early years. Gelbart followed this up with additional successes for the stage and screen. His most memorable credit pre-"M*A*S*H" was...