YMMV / The Honeymooners

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • If you take away the laugh track, Ralph's total and complete lack of trust in Alice after 15 years of marriage is pretty disturbing and sad.
  • Another interpretation is that Ralph has some very deep-seated self-esteem issues, perhaps brought on by his low income and a sense of not being "good enough" for Alice. He tries to hide it by being overly bombastic, but is constantly afraid that Alice will leave him for someone more "appropriate" for her.
• Award Snub: Jackie Gleason never getting an Emmy throughout his legendary TV career is one of the biggest black marks in the award's history.
• Fair for Its Day: The threats of domestic violence are pretty horrifying and sexist to modern audiences, but the way the show handled it was pretty empowering to women for the time. The threat was completely empty, Alice knew it was, and always treated it with boredom. The fact that Ralph always made the threat in response to her snarky comments showed that this relationship was not quite one-sided as it would otherwise imply. The TV biopic Gleason took time to make this clear, as during their first rehearsal together Audrey Meadows acts afraid of Ralph, and Gleason tells her she has to show she isn't for the joke to work. Considering this was The '50s, the very fact that Alice consistently put Ralph in his place to the point where empty threats were the only response he was capable of was far more than fair. Today, it'd have viewers begging for Ralph to be given more comeuppance than just being told off by his poor, beleaguered wife.^note  The King of Queens was pretty much a Homage show in The '90s. Doug and Carrie Heffernan are Ralph and Alice updated to a more modern age; delivery driver Doug might get angry but would not dream of physical violence against Carrie. Meanwhile, the viewer suspects that the domestic violence and spouse-beating is more likely to come from the hard-bitten Carrie - against Doug.
• Genre Turning Point: Considering that it was one of the earliest television series at all, let alone a popular and successful one, it paved the way for nearly every Dom Com that would run with everything that made the show unique, from the leads being a bumbling husband and snarky wife, to the wacky neighbor to a perfectly-timed misunderstanding which would lead to 30 minutes of hijinks, et al, to the point that it's almost impossible for newcomers to find anything fresh about them. The worst offender was easily The Flintstones, literally just an all-caveman remake which is still more popular today than this show.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In the episode "TV or Not TV", Alice questions why Ralph won't buy a TV set. Ralph replies he's waiting for 3D television. Some stations have broadcast 3D movies during the 1980s, and 3D sets came to the market in the early 2010s — and flopped badly.
  • Ralph's failed get-rich-quick schemes included selling low-cal pizza and glow-in-the-dark wallpaper. Low-cal pizza can now be found in any supermarket, while a few companies did come out with glowing/blacklight wallpaper in the 1960's.
  • The entire fact that a major character is named Ed Norton.
• Hollywood Homely: Gleason wanted a plain-looking woman and initially rejected Audrey Meadows as "too pretty." She went home, put on old clothes and messed up her hair and make-up and returned to the studio. Gleason hired her on the spot. In the actual show she was always fresh-from-the-stylist perfect, though.
• Humor Dissonance: "Six Months to Live" certainly has a touch of this. While we are supposed to find uproarious humor in Ralph believing he is dying, the letter he reads could easily double as a Tear Jerker for any dog owner.
• Informed Wrongness: Alice’s mother can be rude, insulting, and downright nasty to Ralph even in his own home, but any disagreement between the two will always be 100% Ralph’s fault in Alice’s eyes.
• Narm: Occurs in-universe when Ralph gets a role in a commercial for Choosy Chews candy bars and tries to emphasize his delight with the candy by saying "Yummy yum yum", which to everyone beside him sounds either silly or plain ridiculous.
• Once Original, Now Common: The show is considered groundbreaking for being one of the first instances of film or television to portray marriage in a negative way (The Hays Code strictly forbid it at the time). Nowadays, it's hard to imagine any sitcom where the married leads aren't in a love/hate relationship.
• Technology Marches On: Inevitably with the show set in The '50s, but one of the major Running Gags is that the Kramdens still don't own a refrigerator, and have to settle for an icebox.
• Values Dissonance: "To the moon, Alice!" was never meant seriously, but there is no way a modern Sitcom husband could get away with even an empty threat of domestic violence.
• Values Resonance: While domestic quarreling and threats of violence aren't considered nearly as funny as they were in the mid-1950s, the show's depiction of a service worker and his wife struggling to live paycheck-to-paycheck feels a lot closer to post-Great Recession America than the Informed Poverty or even luxurious suburban living situations (or, even still, luxury claiming to be poverty) depicted in most modern sitcoms.
• Vindicated by Reruns: The standalone 1955-56 series was often soundly beaten in the ratings by The Perry Como Show and received mixed reception from the critics, with some thinking it was "labored" and lacked spontaneity compared to the earlier live sketches. Once it entered syndication in 1957, it began to be seen as one of the classic sitcoms of TV history. The 39 episodes of this series are now commonly known as the "Classic 39".

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