KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (25)

By: Erin M. Routson
June 23, 2022

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite TV shows of the Seventies (1974–1983).

HAPPY DAYS | 1974–1984

I’m sure there’s extensive research somewhere about when the end of American monoculture begins — the long tail curling up to a monster of fractured social media bubbles that we now inhabit. Anecdotally, my end begins with the Weezer video for “Buddy Holly” being pre-loaded on Windows 95 — something that seemed so bizarre, but considering the fact that a U2 album I never intended to listen to arrived on my last iPhone, isn’t so much. What made the video stand out amongst its peers was its merge with a pop culture behemoth: a clean as a whistle version of Weezer playing on a makeshift stage at Arnold’s, the diner central to the universe of Happy Days and its cast.

There’s something that I can’t shake about the potency of nostalgia within close proximity that compounds the video. Happy Days, a show made mostly in the 1970s about an idyllic version of the 1950s, lovingly recreated in all of its studio-audience glory in a music video from the 1990s. It’s four decades compressed to pay homage to the virtue of a time before Vietnam, before climate change, before Reaganomics, before AIDS. That nostalgic pursuit allows us to tap into innocence divorced from history. It freezes time so we can stay young, cool, and carefree — forever.

While Happy Days initially centered itself around the all-American Richie Cunningham, the showrunners realized after two seasons that the beating heart of the show was Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli. His character was elevated, leading to Ron Howard as Richie sharing top billing with Henry Winkler as Fonzie. The two characters seem to embody the American ego and id, working in concert to blur the lines between who those actors were outside of Arnold’s with who they were in their actual lives — Richie becomes a screenwriter, Fonzie becomes (among other things) an advocate for equal opportunities.

The Fonz’s (and truly, Winkler’s) ability to epitomize cool through a catchphrase and a leather jacket is distinctly American, and his iconography has a longer half-life than anything else from the show. There would be no Uncle Jesse from Full House, no Joey from Blossom, no white cool guys of a certain type without their paterfamilias Fonzie. What sets him apart is his arc — the antithesis of the antihero that emerged at the end of the ’90s. He started off as a tough guy, a dropout, but through the course of eleven seasons grew into an activist, a businessman, a pillar of the community – and Happy Days was a comedy!

That Fonzie could jump the shark and still keep going for an additional six seasons, outlast the rest of the cast as the most viable character with broad appeal — spawning toys, books, a bronze statue in his honor in Milwaukee — is testament to the unimpeachable power of cool. And the gift to this world that is Henry Winkler.

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MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (25)

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