The 1970s brought a change to the face of the television sitcom, particularly with the works of Norman Lear, as comedy began to shift its focus away from portrayals of the ideal nuclear family to more complicated interactions with the outside world. This thesis focuses on All in the Family and the various ways that the series broke ground in its methods of social discourse. The series’ unique representation of working-class domestic life and its various distancing techniques provided a new challenge for sitcom audiences. With other Lear series and the likes of M*A*S*H and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the 1970s television comedy landscape provided platform for socially conscious discourse. However, this period of progressive entertainment declined toward the end of the decade, as series like Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley sought to look backward rather than forward. From the 1980s to the 2000s, with a few exceptions, the focus of the sitcom reverted back to the preservation of idealized domestic and workplace families with the likes of Family Ties and Friends. However, the 2010s bring the promise of new social relevancy in television with series like Black-ish, which negotiate 1970s relevancy with 2010 narrative and aesthetic style, and streaming, non-network programs like Orange is the New Black and Transparent that experiment with genre in new ways.

An oral history of television comedy from the early 1950s through the mid 1970s as told by the writers Sydney Zelinka, Larry Rhine, Milt Josefsberg, and the team of Seaman Jacobs and Fred S. Fox. The shows they wrote for included "The Honeymooners," "The Phil Silvers Show," "The Red Skelton Hour," Bob Hope specials, "Here's Lucy," "All in the Family," and "Maude." These five writers were working in the earliest days of the medium and spent years writing for the personalities--from performers to producers--who pioneered and defined it. Most of them also wrote scripts during one of broadcast television's greatest periods of transformation, when comedy took a decidedly topical turn that continued to have a significant impact on television comedy in the decades that followed. / text

The purpose of this study was to test the applicability of the theories of selective perception and selective exposure among ethnic minority viewers of the satirical, ethnic humor of the television program, "All in the Family." This study statistically related the Dogmatism Scale responses to selected program opinions among Jewish and non-Jewish high school students. The results of this survey were inconclusive. None of the hypotheses presented were supported by the evidence of the study; however, unexpected data were found that suggests previously unexplored interpretations of the program.