Married with Children

 I notice a lot of people on YouTube reacting to the "Al Bundy's Best Insults" compilation video, and I feel the need to point out that these sorts of compilation videos fail to represent the true spirit of the character and "Married with Children" overall.

Al Bundy is a loser (that's the whole joke that the show is based around). His "best insults" are just his impotent rage (both figuratively and literally), because his lives in a world where he knows that he's the one ultimately getting screwed. By taking his insults out of context, it frames Al as the one standing firm against a world gone mad.

The original premise behind "Married with Children" was a mockery of modern (at the time) television, which many people saw as too sanitized, too politically correct, too artificially wholesome, and just plain too nice and clean. In fact, the originally pitched title for the shows was "Not the Cosbys." Ed O'Neil (who played Al) said in an interview that he based his performance on an uncle of his who went through life with a constant self-defeating attitude. Basically, the whole joke of the show was "let's do a sit-com where everyone acts like the OPPOSITE of every other sit-com." The mother is the opposite of the perfect homemaker. The kids are the opposite of well-adjusted youngsters who learn valuable life lessons. The father is the opposite of the head of the household who knows best. The show became popular because of how different it was from every other show at the time.

This is the point that seems to be lost on modern audiences, who have been presented with a narrative that television used to be a lot LESS politically correct, and that MwC was "typical" of shows at the time when you could "get away with a lot more," when in fact, the opposite is true. MwC was mocking the political correctness of the time. Al Bundy was not a "typical" character who was above the situation, but an atypical character who was crushed by it.

Strangely, if Al Bundy were a real person, he would fit in quite well today with the social media "alpha male" crowd, the weak loser beta male trying so hard to make himself look like a tough guy online, presenting himself as a brave resistor of the radical feminist oppression of masculinity, while everyone else just sees him as a joke, rolls their eyes, and ignores him. "No Ma'am" has gone from a joke on television to a joke in real life. Doesn't anyone else get that?