TV Quote of the Day (‘M*A*S*H,’ As Potter and Radar Consider Cigars)

Col. Sherman Potter [played by Harry Morgan]: “Cigar?” 

Cpl. Walter “Radar” O'Reilly [played by Gary Burghoff]: “Will it stunt my growth?”

Col. Potter [eyeing the short Radar]: “What do you got to lose?”

Radar: “Is it habit forming?”

Col. Potter: “Nah. I've been smoking five cigars a day for 45 years. Never got the habit.”— M*A*S*H, Season 6, Episode 1, “Fade Out, Fade In,” original air date Sept. 20, 1977, teleplay by James Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum, directed by Hy Averback

Talking about tongues planted firmly in cheek! Just as M*A*S*H used the distant mirror of the Korean conflict to comment on the Vietnam War, its writers realized that their audience would know that, 13 years before, the Surgeon General’s report had warned that smoking causes lung cancer and probably heart disease.

TV Quote of the Day (‘M*A*S*H,’ With the Epitome of Bureaucracy)

Col. Henry Blake [played by McLean Stevenson] [yawning and bored]: “What are these forms for?"

Cpl. Walter “Radar” O'Reilly [played by Gary Burghoff]: "These are forms to get the forms that enable us to order more forms, sir."— M*A*S*H, Season 1, Episode 23, “Ceasefire,” original air date Mar 18, 1973, teleplay by Laurence Marks and Larry Gelbart, directed by Earl Bellamy

TV Quote of the Day (‘M*A*S*H,’ As Margaret Utters a Sweet Endearment to Frank)

Maj. Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan [played by Loretta Swit]: “Frank?”

Maj. Frank Marion “Ferret Face” Burns: “Yes, dear?”

Margaret: “For a moment there, you looked like you had a chin.” —M*A*S*H, Season 4, Episode 1, “Welcome to Korea,” original air date Sept. 12, 1975, teleplay by Everett Greenbaum, Jim Fritzell, and Larry Gelbart, directed by Gene Reynolds

TV Quote of the Day (‘M*A*S*H,’ on a General Going Out in a Different Kind of Glory)

[General Robert Kelly—a.k.a. “Iron Guts”—has died after a nocturnal visit to the tent of head nurse Margaret Houlihan. Once the body is discovered, a coverup begins.]

Colonel Wortman [played by Keene Curtis]: “Get me Kimpo Air Base. I want a squadron of jets. And get me the Navy for some offshore bombardment. Major General Robert ‘Iron Guts’ Kelly is gonna perish in a full-scale, blazing, all-out glorious, star-spangled bannered death.”

Lt. Col. Henry Blake [played by McLean Stevenson] [walks over to talk to Hawkeye and Trapper]: “Hey, guys.”

Army Capt. "Trapper John" McIntyre [played by Wayne Rogers]: “Yes, Henry.”

Henry: “Is he talking about killing a General who's already dead?”

Trapper John: “That's right, Henry.”

Henry: “Well, uh, isn't that sort of crazy?”

Wortman [on phone]: “And rockets! I want plenty of rockets!”

Capt. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce [played by Alan Alda]: “That's for the red glare.”—M*A*S*H, Season 3, Episode 4, “Iron Guts Kelly,” original air date Oct. 1, 1974, teleplay by Sid Dorfman, directed by Don Weis

[The image accompanying this post shows McLean Stevenson and Wayne Rogers as Henry and Trapper.]

TV Quote of the Day (‘M*A-S-H,' on Marriage and Divorce)

Major Franklin Marion Burns [played by Larry Linville] [to Margaret Houlihan]: “Marriage is the chief cause of divorce.” —M*A*S*H, Season 3, Episode 16, “Bulletin Board,” original air date Jan. 14, 1975, teleplay by Larry Gelbart and Simon Muntner, directed by Alan Alda

TV Quote of the Day (‘M*A*S*H,’ With Radar Finding It Tough to Get to the Point)

Radar O’Reilly (played by Gary Burghoff): “Sir, I have something to report that I wish I could do almost anything else instead of, but which I guess I got no choice.”

Hawkeye Pierce (played by Alan Alda): “Radar, if you bring that sentence in for a fitting I can have it shortened by Wednesday.”—M*A*S*H, Season 4, Episode 14, “The Gun,” original air date Dec. 2, 1975, teleplay by Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds, directed by Burt Metcalfe

TV Quote of the Day (‘M*A*S*H,’ In Which Klinger Tells Hawkeye and B.J. Who’s Funnier in the 4077th)

Corporal Maxwell Q. Klinger [played by Jamie Farr] [responding to a question from Hawkeye Pierce and B.J. Hunnicutt about which of the two is funnier]: “I'm writing my Uncle Abdul about what it's like over here—doctors, nurses, saving lives. Well, I got a commanding officer who dresses me up in his clothes and sits me on a horse named Sophie so he can paint his own picture. There's a priest writing war ditties. And a snooty major who pays me twenty bucks to go out into the woods with him and watch him blow up a pigeon with a land mine. And if that doesn't beat all, I got a head nurse who shoots unarmed luggage. All you guys do is tell jokes. What the hell's so funny about that?”— M*A*S*H, Season 8, Episode 12, “Dear Uncle Abdul,” original air date Dec. 3, 1979, teleplay by John Rappaport and Jim Mulligan, directed by William Jurgensen

TV Quote of the Day (TV Writer Glen Mazzara, on “Nash Bridges” vs. “M*A*S*H”)

“On Nash Bridges, the cop is always driving a big yellow cop car and always finds a parking space right outside of the place he wants to go. That doesn’t feel real. Whereas on a show like M*A*S*H the characters always had to duck down before they entered a tent. That feels real.”—Glen Mazzara, scriptwriter for The Shield, describing the difference between his first series, Nash Bridges, and the TV classic M*A*S*H, quoted in Nick Edwards, “Drama Behind the Drama,” Financial Times, August 28, 2010

This Day in Television History ('MASH' Bows Out With Record Audience)

February 28, 1983 – After 251 episodes and 11 seasons – three times the length of the conflict it depicted—the CBS comedy about the Korean War, M*A*S*H, came to a triumphant end, with a record 125 million viewers watching what became of Dr. Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce and the rest of the 4077th unit.

Eight writers were credited with the script for “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” including star-writer-director Alan Alda (who also directed this episode) and future Judging Amy executive producer, blogger and Roman Catholic convert Karen Hall.

In a way, that reflects the multiple hands that shaped material which began as a novel by Richard Hooker, was adapted by Ring Lardner Jr. into an Oscar-winning screenplay (with extensive improvisation and overlapping dialogue encouraged by director Robert Altman), then developed into a TV series in 1972. Along the way, events set in one Asian conflict served as a not-so-distant mirror of a later one: the Vietnam War.

So much about the show seems not just from another decade, but in TV terms, another lifetime ago:

* It survived first-season ratings so abysmal that nowadays, it wouldn’t have made it past the second episode. (But networks had greater patience then—witness a similar ratings trajectory for Cheers a decade later.)
* It was not just a comedy but, like another ‘70s CBS comic blockbuster, All in the Family, one that challenged censors and stretched notions of the genre (dispensing with the laugh track in operating-room scenes, freely mixing dramatic as well as comic elements, even killing off the beloved Colonel Henry Blake).
* Its massive audience at its denouement could never be repeated today, when cable TV, the Internet, and God-knows-what-other-new media compete with networks for viewers’ attention.

Faithful reader, I have a confession: I have never watched this last episode. At this juncture so many years later, my only guess as to why I missed it 25 years ago is that I was taking a continuing-ed course that night, and without a VCR at the time I couldn’t tape it. 

But somehow, I have never gotten around to seeing the 2 1/2-hour episode a quarter-century later—not even given the ubiquity of the show in video and DVD formats, not to mention in reruns on one channel or another. (TV Land? Fox? Who knows what else?)

Mea culpa, mea culpa. I’ll rectify this. Someday. Hopefully soon.

Believe it or not, I had two close encounters with two creative forces most closely associated with the show: writer/co-producer Larry Gelbart and Alda.

The first of the two I saw was Alda. Back when I was still a pup (okay, a teenager), I worked as a page (i.e., student assistant) at my local public library. One day, glancing at the circulation desk, I saw a tall, dark-haired, lean man in his late 30s standing there. I was staggered to recognize Alda, though, in truth, I shouldn’t have been—at the time, he was a resident of the New Jersey town to the immediate south of mine.

Emptying the book bin at the desk before it became too heavy, I encountered an older student assistant whom I knew from my high school. She was practically devouring the star with her eyes. “I can’t believe it!” she said. “It’s Alan Alda!”

Unfortunately for Alda, he was being served not by a star-struck teen who would have expedited his checkout time but by a short, slight, gray-haired Englishwoman with not a clue about his identity. Adjusting her glasses as she stared at the piece of white plastic he’d given her, she finally announced: “Sir, your card has expired!”

Unlike other celebrities given to throwing their weight around under and all circumstances (take a bow, Opray Winfrey, for your after-hours hissy fit at that exclusive Paris store!), Alda didn’t throw a tantrum or even look a bit irked when the English circ-desk clerk told him this…nor when she sat down at a typewriter and, in her best hunt-and-peck style, created an entirely new card for him…not even when a long line of other patrons waited behind him at the desk, winking and nudging each other about who else was there.

This incident occurred when the show was very close to its creative peak. More and more, particularly when Gelbart departed after the fourth season, Alda took up much of the writing and directing slack. It provided a perfect springboard for similar work by the actor in films, when he seemed to bid fair for a time to become another Woody Allen comic star-writer-director hyphenate with The Seduction of Joe Tynan and The Four Seasons.

But during this time, M*A*S*H became less like the ribald series I had loved in the first place—hardly a surprise, given that Alda had taken on an increasingly high profile as the prototypical late ‘70s Sensitive New Age Guy. Add to that the restlessness and constant changes in the ensemble cast over the years (blazing a trail that Law and Order would later follow) and you had a series more sanctimonious, more obvious in telegraphing its feelings. (The photo accompanying this blog entry comes, of course, from the series' early incarnation, when Wayne Rogers still played Hawkeye sidekick Trapper John.)

I met Gelbart 10 years ago, at an appearance at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, N.J., for his new memoir, Laughing Matters. A member of the audience asked Gelbart about what had troubled me about the show’s change from its hard-edge early seasons to its softer tones later.

Gelbart admitted that it was not necessarily a direction he would have taken, but by that time it had in effect become Alda’s show and it was his prerogative to do as he wished.

The writer, who time and again that night let loose one outspoken, wildly funny line after another, now seemed to speak more carefully and diplomatically. I sensed that he had major concerns about how the show had changed after his departure, but he was too respectful of Alda’s contributions—and too diplomatic—to give full vent to his opinions on this score.