Good Scout

Television series, particularly situation comedies, are not intended for casual viewers. They require fidelity. If you're an absentee, you lose out.

Consider a casual viewer tuning in The Dick Van Dyke Show. He has heard that it's pretty funny. After all, it has just won three Emmy awards as the funniest, best-written and best-directed humor show on television. He knows from just general absorption that Van Dyke plays a gag writer married to a delicious-looking girl played by Mary Tyler Moore. Van Dyke and Moore are arriving at a literary cocktail party. "Do you want to duck out right now," says he to her, "and take in a movie?" The laughter that follows this line is deafening.

When they leave, Van Dyke says: "The next time we're invited to a liter ary dinner party, will you say to me, 'Let's stay home and can some plums'?" Wow. That line gets such a laugh that even the set falls on the floor. Van Dyke does it every time. Like the night he said, "Without my thumbs I couldn't type." Or that other time, when he told his wife: "If you keep looking that good in the morning, I may have to switch to an afternoon newspaper."

Jumping Juror. The laughter, since it comes mainly out of the can, may be irritating, but the characters are not-and therein hides the secret of a successful TV series. The regulars tune in not for the latest witticisms of Gag Writer Rob Petrie, but to watch Dick Van Dyke, a clean-cut fellow with a frog in his throat. He looks believable. He isn't aggressively glamorous or excessively cute. He is a pretty bright guy whose brain is sometimes a ball of thumbs, and he is married to an American icon: the steady, dependable, reliable, beautiful, clean-limbed little mother who has the sort of dewy wholesomeness that every twelve-year-old boy looks forward to in a wife.

The show has had its good moments. Van Dyke is a fine mimic and an even finer slapsticker. He is 37, but "I was born 30 years too late," he saysand indeed he does at times recall the Harold Lloyds and Stan Laurels that he much admires. Playing a jury foreman, he jumped out of the jury box to pick up the voluptuous defendant's handkerchief, reeled around awkwardly before the court and fell back into the jury box. It was one moment that a casual viewer could appreciate. Last week came another one, as he told his little boy in flashbacks the story of the hours before the child's birth. Semper paratus, he slept in his clothes, dashed around like a nut, and smashed up his car in the driveway. A laundry truck had to drive his wife to the hospital.

First After Lemmon. But the mass viewers care less for what he does than for the fact that he is doing it. Viewers like his apple-pie accent. They read TV Guide and the Sunday supplements, and they know he's an eagle scout. He has been married to his high school sweetheart for 15 years; they have four children and live quietly near Hollywood; they don't see much of show people. He teaches Sunday school at the Brentwood Presbyterian Church. He is loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. He is a friend to animals. He will not kill or hurt any living creature needlessly. He smiles whenever he can. He never shirks or grumbles at hardships. He stands for clean speech, clean sport, clean habits, and travels with a clean crowd. As Carl Reiner, the show's writer, puts it: "Dick is a very civilized neurotic. He's like me. We make very few waves."

Born in Missouri and raised in Illinois, Dick Van Dyke started out as half of a pantomime act. He worked around in TV and radio until he reached Broad way, most notably as the talent agent in Bye Bye Birdie. He did the film version of Birdie, and is now making Mary Poppins with Julie Andrews. For light movie comedy, he has become the man everyone wants when Jack Lemmon is unavailable. "I don't mind," he says cheerfully.

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