Happy Days: Fonzie’s Funeral

Ask people for a list of their favorite sit-coms of all time and you’re likely to get responses like Seinfeld, The Andy Griffith Show, Cheers or the Mary Tyler Moore Show.  Rarely in that list will you get the response Happy Days, which was a huge hit for a long period of time in the late 70s and early 80s.

Of course, it’s easy to understand why people can look down their nose at Happy Days.  It is the show, after all, that gave us the phrase “jump the shark” referring to that exact moment in a TV show’s history when the slow, inevitable decline began.   I think adding that phrase to the pop culture vocabulary has worked against the show and the general public’s memories of it over the years.

A recent article in the Onion A.V. Club that asserts that Happy Days sold its soul to be a hit didn’t exactly help either.

And while the article has some interesting points about how Happy Days evolved from a single camera series to a multi-camera formula driven situation comedy, I feel that I should come out and make the radical statement that while I like the first two season of Happy Days, most of the time when I stumble across the show in syndicated repeats, I feel like these are the two seasons I have to plow through in order to get to “the good stuff.”

And by “the good stuff,” I mean the third and fourth seasons when the show’s emphasis moved away from a nostalgic piece of Americana to putting one Arthur “The Fonz” Fonzereilli front and center of  the show.   These are the only two season of the show I own on DVD and it’s likely those will be the only two I will ever own though that’s less about my opinion on later seasons’ quality and more based on the belief that future seasons won’t see the light of day on DVD due to the musical rights.

It’s because of this that when the Hallmark Channel began running the entire series through in large blocks, I sought out and recorded selected episodes not included in the two seasons I have on DVD.

Among those was the seventh season installment, “Fonzie’s Funeral” which I don’t think anyone would call a great episode of the series.   By the time we’ve reached “Fonzie’s Funeral,” Fonzie become the human equivalent of what the sonic screwdriver was on Doctor Who in the late 70s—a way out of virtually any corner the writers painted themselves into.   By the time we’d reached seventh season, Fonzie had jumped the shark, tangled with Mork from Ork and could literally snap his fingers out of virtually any predicament.

The show hadn’t always been this way and while some would argue that it was the shark jump that really ramped up this excess, the seeds had been sewn in season four in the “They Shoot Fonzies Don’t They?”   That’s the one where an exhausted Fonzie is Joanie’s partner in a dance contest and overcomes extreme odds (and the threat of a crew-cut) to help Joanie win. Unfortunately, there isn’t a clip that I can embed here, so you’ll have to surf over to YouTube to see it: http://youtu.be/3gvusTsmW9A

And so it is by the time we roll into “Fonzie’s Funeral” that the mantra, “Fonzie will fix it,” pretty much rules the show.   In this episode, Fonzie is not only able to control Arnold’s jukebox via the telephone, but he’s able to survive a near-death experience of his garage blowing up.

The plot of the episode revolves around a gang of counterfeiters and the Happy Days gang’s attempt to stomp them.   A couple of things made the episode stand out in my memory – the main villain is called the Candyman, it’s got an early appearance by Night Court alum Richard Moll and Fonzie dresses up in drag to attend his own funeral.    It seems the department of the treasury is looking for evidence to prove the Candyman and his gang are behind the counterfeiting work going on in and around Milwaukee, but they can’t find the smoking gun to do it.  The smoking gun, in this case, being the printed press used to print the fake bills.  The Candyman is using a funeral home as his legitimate front (he ships the counterfeit bills around the country in hearses) and Fonzie decides faking his own death will distract the Candyman long enough to give the G-men a chance to look around and find the evidence they need to bring the trio of nefarious no-gooders to justice.

The explanation of how Fonzie survives being inside the garage when its blown up is no more or less absurd than the jump the shark moment a few seasons before.  But the phrase “surviving the garage blowing up” isn’t nearly as catchy nor do I think it would have inspired a pop-culture web site and catch phrase.  The garage blowing and the trio of goons assuming the Fonz is dead is merely a catalyst to get from point A (we can’t find the printing press used to make the counterfeit bills) to point B (we’ve got to get inside the funeral parlor serving as a front for the Candyman and his henchmen and find said henchmen).

And, of course, the funeral serves as an excuse to trot out several familiar faces from the show’s run as well as the entire cast of LaVergne and Shirley for a cross-over stunt.

All of this is a far cry from seasons three and four.  Back then, while Fonzie had a certain aura of cool to him, his presence also leant a bit of tension, especially when it came to his relationship with Howard Cunningham.  In the early days, Mr. C was wary of having Fonzie live above the garage and the two often came into conflict over the best solution to a problem.  In one episode, Marion is sneaking around with the Fonz to practice for a ballroom dancing competition, leading Howard to jump to the wrong conclusion when he puts together pieces of circumstantial evidence.  This being Happy Days, the audience is well aware that Fonzie and Marion aren’t having an affair, but there is still enough suspicion on Howard’s part to sell his paranoia.   Also in that run, Howard and the Fonz clash on whether the truth should be told to a girl that has had her honor besmirched by Potsie, pretending to be Richie.  Howard says the truth must be told, Fonzie argues that the lie should be gone along with and that telling the actual whole truth will lead to far more serious consequences.  (The scene leads off a series of clips of the Fonz in the video below)

And while it’s not a deep idelogocial clash, at least there is some tension between the two characters and its played out for laughs.  In the end, the Fonz is right (and ironically, he can say the word “wrong” in the apology episode without stuttering, but that’s another story) but at least there is something more to it.  By this point, everyone is pretty chummy and gets along fairly well, to the point that much of this early dramatic and comedic tension is gone.  Or it has to be manufactured.

This isn’t to say there aren’t still a few gems in the later seasons (before Richie leaves, that is) to make it worth your while.  The episode in which Fonzie is allergic to girls is worth viewing, if only to see the long, slow build to the punchline pay-off, “Oh, that’s just number 39.”  And the episode where Richie and Fonzie find out that Joanie has her first car date and try to warn her of the dangers of boys and the tricks they’ll pull to try and kiss her is also a lot of fun.  (Well, at least the scene between Henry Winker and Ron Howard is…the rest is largely forgettable).

Some shows can sustain a level of greatness over the course of their run and some burn out quickly.   And while Happy Days might not be called great by many, I think it was a show that worked best when it was figuring out its formula.   But it’s once the show got stuck in that formula that things took a leap over a shark…and the rest is, as they say, history.