Jackie Gleason & Two Kinds of Anger

The Anger of Art and of the Ego

In his lecture "Poetry and Anger," Eli Siegel made this surprising and important statement:

All art, in a sense, is anger, because you are taking a situation which doesn't have form, and you are changing it, that is, destroying the formlessness of it, to make form.

I believe this is what Jackie Gleason unknowingly tried to do as a comedian and actor: give form to what could seem sprawling and formless, to find structure in a world that had seemed ill-made.

In 1950, at age 34, he emceed a show called Cavalcade of Stars on that new thing, the television. With his vibrant personality and his big, graceful body which, when he's dancing, is like what Eli Siegel once described in an Aesthetic Realism lesson—"To have a mountain skip would be...delightful"; and with his keen instinct for what would honestly entertain, such as the 16 June Taylor dancers, Jackie Gleason filled that small screen.

Gleason did come to a form, a composition new to television: a mingling of reccurring sketches and music, of "pathos and...the broadest baggy pants comedy" as one critic put it. He brought this new form into people's living rooms, and became an overnight success, soon known as Mr. Saturday Night.

But with all his success Jackie Gleason was troubled and angry. His first marriage was, at this very time, failing. He worried constantly about ratings and could not sleep. He overate, then checked into a hospital to lose weight. And Gleason's carousing became legendary, as did his excessive drinking. Jackie Gleason did not know his deepest purpose in life was to like the world—that, as Eli Siegel writes in his essay "Alcoholism; Or, You Got To Find the World Interesting," he needed to see "in the ordinary universe a zip, a tingle, a blandishment." Instead, Gleason wanted to beat out the world through being a tough show business success. He was competitive and very often mean.

This is vivid in the contemptuous way he treated his writers. His biographer describes how Gleason seemed to get a thrill humiliating them, making them grovel as he passed judgement on their work. He short-changed them on money, and most reprehensible of all, he refused to give them credit for creating the characters that made him famous for decades. All the characters Jackie Gleason played, except for Ralph Kramden, were created in the first shows by his writers—but Gleason insisted he created them himself.

Leonard Stern summed up what most of Jackie Gleason's writers felt when he said:

I think he resented us because we did something he knew he needed and couldn't do for himself.

That is a tremendously important statement. Jackie Gleason preferred to be resentful and angry rather than grateful for where the world had been of use to him. The desire to be ungrateful makes us mean and miserable and only Aesthetic Realism explains why. Men learn about this in consultations, to the everlasting benefit of their lives, through hearing questions such as: Would you rather be pleased by the world or resentful of it? When do you feel stronger—when you're grateful or when you're angry? If the world did come through for you, are you sure you would only like it?

Jackie Gleason suffered greatly because he did not hear questions like these. I believe unknowingly he didn't like it that the world had been good to him in such a big way, enabled him to have success in his career—it blew his case that the world was a place that hurt him. What Eli Siegel says in his lecture "Aesthetic Realism Looks at Things: Discomfort" describes Jackie Gleason—that a "problem...drinker" is one who "maintains his anger."

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