Kotter’s remedial class of Sweathogs is an interesting one, full of wiseguys. The four main guys are ethnically different and have different personalities. The fact that the Sweathogs take pride in Epstein’s favorite subject, assault and being voted as ‘most likely to take a life’ reveals that he is the tough guy. Barbarino takes pride in being the best ranker in all of Brooklyn. Freddy Washington is the athletic one who plays basketball and believes he will become an NBA player. Horshack is the innocent, odd one and my favorite. According to Kotter, these four aren’t students but rather “hit-men in waiting.”

The urban space Kotter occupies throughout Welcome Back, Kotter is one that is dangerous, ghetto yet diverse. It’s a neighborhood that Kotter doesn’t want to go back to because he had it rough in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. He remembers that the gangs don’t use guns because they insert the bullets manually. The neighborhood of Bensonhurst is a part of Kotter because he grew up in it and though he refuses to accept it, it’s made him who he is today. The urban space he resides in is one that either forces people to accept their status or challenge it. Kotter chooses the latter as he used to be a Sweathog but made it out of Buchanan without handcuffs.

In the beginning, the class ignores Kotter and doesn’t want to have anything to do with him. However, once they find out that he used to be a Sweathog himself, they come to his apartment because he had some sort of an effect of them. They have some sort of respect for their teacher and can relate to him somewhat. Kotter used to be in their position and knows what it’s like to have people think you’re good for nothing. The Sweathogs look up to Kotter and are somewhat inspired by him. He made a difference in his life and became a teacher even though he was a founding member of the Sweathogs and grew up in the same neighborhood as Barbarino, Epstein, Washington and Horshack. Each of them want to make a difference in their life despite the negative connotations associated with growing up in Bensonhurst. Similar to Kotter, they want to become something more than a Sweathog.

Even though the setting is Bensonhurst, a dangerous neighborhood in Brooklyn, the characters make it an inviting space. The students and Kotter share a relationship that people would want to be a part of. There’s a sense of the students having each other’s backs and supporting one another. For example, Barbarino is willing to bribe Kotter to get him to pass Freddy so he can stay on the basketball team. The relationship they share is a genuine one as they truly care about each other.

Welcome, my fellow peers! I can say without hesitation that the show Welcome Back, Kotter (1975-1979) was entertaining. With all the witty comebacks and amusing characters, such as Arnold Horshack (Ron Palillo), I definitely had a good laugh. I felt that comedy played a crucial role in this show because it enabled controversial topics, such as racism, to be portrayed with levity. For instance, Freddie Washington (Lawrence Hilton- Jacobs) was the typical “African-American” basketball player who disrupted the classroom environment with his “boom-boom” jokes. Furthermore, Vinnie Barbarino (John Travolta) had dominance over Arnold Horshack and told him when he should speak (this reminded me of the Italian-mafia in Goodfellas and how they exerted control over other individuals). Even though Gabriel Kotter (Gabe Kaplan) was lampooned by his own students, he did not become livid but insulted them back in a similar, jocular manner. Essentially, the comedy in the show allowed serious insults to be taken lightly. For example, when Gabe Kotter asks his Hispanic-American student Juan Epstein (Robert Hegyes), “What’s his favorite subject?” he replies, “Assault.” The humor displayed here shows that Juan is basically insulting himself because it relates to the Hispanic-Americans stereotype of how Hispanics were part of gangs and committed many crimes and acts of violence. Rather than this matter being taken solemnly, the entire class just laughs along with Juan.

Also, in Bahktin, Polyphony, and Ethnic/Racial Representation, Robert Stam asserts “ethnicity is relational, an inscription of communicative processes within history, between subjects existing in relations of power.” I feel that in this quote Stam attempts to say that people of different ethnic backgrounds are connected to one another in some way and that events that have occurred in the past (such as apartheid, white supremacism) led to marginalization of different ethnic groups (Hispanics, Africans, etc). This notion can be applied to Welcome Back, Kotter because Gabe tries to establish a connection with the apparently diverse ethnic groups in his classroom, but this also becomes difficult due to the barrier created by the racist remarks between student and teacher. An example to illustrate this idea is when Freddie thinks that he can “pass” school as long as he’s on the basketball team. Gabe explains to Freddie the importance of education over athletics and how being on the basketball team does not guarantee success in the future. Eventually, Gabe reluctantly agrees to pass Freddie if he beats him at basketball. Here we see that Gabe wants to build a connection with the students and does not want to be a target of their jokes. Later on in the episode we witness Freddie’s newfound respect for Gabe and Freddie even agrees to take a make-up exam. Gabe has now formed some kind of bond with Freddie and both Gabe and Freddie take each other’s jokes with lightheartedness.

We also observe the relationship between humor and ethnicity when Gabe pokes fun at Joe Franklin and how he was similar to Freddie because he wanted the easy way out. Gabe jokingly says, “Franklin took simple classes, such as Hair Combing 101 and Advanced Toenail Clipping,” to point out that Freddie lacks the ability to do work. Even when Freddie says, “Can I pretend to write the paper?” shows that he does not take Gabe’s comments seriously. Vinnie, who is the group leader also formulates insults via rhyming and is unwilling to cooperate with the teacher. In the show, everyone makes disparaging remarks about one another, some with racial connotations. Each and every ethnic group in the classroom makes a fool out of themselves. In other words, the show satirizes the students of different ethnic groups through the actions they perform. For example, Vinnie writing the test answers on his hands and legs, Arnold listening to the commands of Vinnie, and Freddie thinking basketball is the only thing that will bring him fame reveal the unsophisticated ways of these ‘minorities’. None of these remedial students are willing to make the effort to improve their success in school. Rather, they squander away time until the bell rings. With the ineptness of the principal and the disorganized environment these students are in, success is limited.

Overall, through the various jokes made by the students and teacher himself we see the negative stereotypes of each ethnicity (African-American, Hispanic, Italian, Whites, etc). In my opinion, I feel that the actions of the characters in this show embody the stereotypes that were developed about them and their ethnic backgrounds. When Gabe attempts to make a joke about Vinnie’s mother, Vinnie says, “Don’t you dare say anything about my mother.” The jokes between the students and teacher have become direct verbal attacks, as we can see. Even though the jokes are being taken lightly, these jokes undermine the ethnicity of each group. Finally, I just felt that Welcome Back, Kotter utilized comedy to indirectly tell us the various racial stereotypes that exist amongst different ethnic groups.

This week’s viewing, the 1970’s sitcom Welcome Back Kotter (1975-1979), featured several different ethnicities cooperating and interacting in a Brooklyn High School. Gabe Kaplan was featured as the main character, Kotter, a high school teacher. His students consisted of a mixed bag of races, from an Italian-American, to African-American, to a Puerto Rican-Jew. The tough neighborhood and reputation of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn contrasts with the idealized, practically problem free high school classroom. The urban space occupied by Kotter definitely seems inviting, not posing as a danger.

The urban space in the sitcom is ideal, a place where different races came together and coexisted. While the characters in the film are introduced in a very stereotypical manner, the actual interaction was not racially hostile or discriminatory. For example, in “Basket Case,” the same grade and sports situation could have applied to any of the other characters just as easily. The stereotypes that were introduced in the first episode seemed like they were brought on by the characters themselves, not by others. I feel that in a nonideal urban space, there definitely would be racial conflict and hostility.

The Bensonhurst neighborhood itself helps add to the feeling of an idealized urban space. The title sequence shows the New York City neighborhood, looking unideal (especially the graffiti-tagged subway line.) However, the classroom and Kotter’s apartment are not busy or squalid. Money or struggle was barely mentioned in both episodes, showing that the characters did not have any extracurricular worries. The characters themselves come from a bad environment, talking about the danger of Bensonhurst in the pilot episode. But these dangers did not exist in the urban space portrayed in the show. For example, Epstein and Vinnie come off as tough guys in the beginning, but they both work with Kotter and the rest of the class. Situations that would definitely lead to an ugly situation in real life were more comedic than angry.

The character of Kotter himself further emphasized the positive, idealized urban space in Welcome Back. He was portrayed as an ideal. He sat “in the same seats” as the other characters. He was successful, and wanted to help people that were in the position he once was. The student-teacher relationship was one of respect. The students worked with the teacher to become “better.” This was definitely seen in the “Basket Case” episode.

The urban space imagined in Welcome Back, Kotter is one that I feel many would enjoy. An urban space with no financial problems and only matters of school and age is extremely inviting. A teacher helping his struggling, slacker students improve themselves is what many teachers idealize. A seemingly struggling Brooklyn neighborhood, where races can coexist seems too out of the ordinary. The urban space portrayed in this snapshot of life is what we all want, right? It’s like Macaulay, right? (insert sarcastic smiley here.) No struggle, awesome teachers, no money, race, or hostility to worry about. Imagine.

John Travolta’s flow was ridiculous.

The classroom consists of three prominent ethnic groups: Puerto Rican, African American, and Italian American. The fact that the forgotten, remedial, underachieving students consist of these races may be seen as racist or stereotypical. But in Bakhtin, Polyphony, and Ethnic/Racial Representation, Robert Stam says, “spectators themselves come equipped with a ‘sense of the real’ rooted in their own social experience, on the basis of which they can accept, question, or even subvert a film’s representations.” The placing of these particular figures in the remedial classroom was a conscious choice, and I believe it was an attempt to show “realism” in this show. The humor based on someone else’s ethnicity is shown many times in Welcome Back, Kotter. For example, Epstein, the Puerto Rican Jew, is known as the “toughest kid in school.” The school had voted him “most likely to take a life,” which the class seemed to think was humorous. There is also Arnold Horshack, who doesn’t speak unless allowed to by Vinny. He makes other people laugh by putting himself down, and takes orders from Vinny to do tricks. The fact that the only white guy in the class is the sweathog leader and seemingly a “master” over Horshack might be a bit unsettling but the class seems not to have a big problem with it. Again, as Stam says, spectators can judge for themselves if the film is being racist or not, and “the cultural preparation of a particular audience (…) can generate counterpressure to a racist or prejudicial discourse,” perhaps allowing them to enjoy the film nevertheless.

Humor has the capability of taking many forms and accomplishing many different goals. Depending on the type of humor, various messages can be presented. In the case of Welcome Back Kotter, we find many different uses for humor, primarily to represent different ethnic stereotypes. We see stereotypical statements being made not only about different ethnic groups but also about a few typical job positions. The students and the school staff shown in the series serve as the butt of the joke. However, Kotter isn’t the only one that plays on the stereotypes. The students are more than happy to show their ethnic pride.

We begin with Barbarino, since he clearly dominates the classroom, or so he says. Barbarino is portrayed as the typical Italian pretty boy with a pinch of criminal mixed in. He’s the head of the classroom. He is the first one to talk, speaks for others, and tells others when they’re allowed to talk. He is the Brooklyn champion of insults, or should we say he WAS until he was schooled by the teacher(Kotter). Barbarino is full of schemes and words. He tries to cheat on his test, he attempts to bribe the teacher so that Washington could pass the exam and remain on the basketball team, and he distracts Kotter and his wife while the rest of the class takes their television. Clearly the director used distinct jokes and somewhat exaggerated personalities to represent the stereotype of the Italian ethnic group.

Italians are not the only group that is made fun of. We have stereotypes of African Americans, Foreigners, and Hispanics demonstrated by Freddy Washington, Horseshack, and Epstein respectively. Washington is the typical Black basketball player that is highly conceited and loves to mess with the teacher. He allows his conceitedness to assure his position as a future college basketball player, although this position is not guaranteed at all, as we are shown during the course of the episode. With Washington the stereotypes become even more clear, especially when Kotter speaks to him about Joe Franklin. Kotter makes fun of Franklin by saying that he wanted easy classes like Hair Combing 101 and Advanced Toenail Clipping. In the second episode Washington makes an ironic joke by telling Kotter that he should lock his windows because there’s a lot of “ghetto trash” out there now a days, after he himself just climbed through the window.

Then we move on to Horseshack, the foreigner in the series. He is portrayed as being very slow and the major target of jokes. When the teacher tells him to distribute the exams, he walks outside of the classroom. When the teacher tells him that he meant in the classroom, he begins to explain how he thinks of the English language as being a precise tool and that he should be more specific. He has a ridiculous laugh and smile and likes to make a fool of himself (hunchback of Notre dam). The group constantly picks on him and Barbarino tells him when he is allowed to speak. He is obviously the odd one out, but perhaps the most stereotypical example for Horseshack was when the group was at Kotter’s apartment and they confessed to Kotter that they stole Horseshack’s father’s cab and tied him up. Epstein’s case is without a doubt the most stereotypical of them all. Barbarino explains that Epstein was voted most likely to take a life and Epstein laughs and says that his favorite subject is assault.(very negative stereotype of hispanics) Kotter finishes off by jokingly saying that Epstein is a menace to society and by telling the class that they must choose something to study even if it is how to look good in a line up or how to speak clearly with a stocking over their head.

** Evidently, Kotter plays the most important role in this parody because he makes fun of each of the students, the gym teacher and principal, the ghetto, and religious conflicts. By saying things such as “Any more notes… diseases, religious conficts”, he sets up the ethnic parodies that the show revolves around. The show, although very stereotypical, was interestingly humorous and enjoyable.

The urban space – the ethnic neighborhood of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn – that Gabe Kotter (Gabe Kaplan), his wife, and his students inhabit is depicted in an interesting way in these two episodes of Welcome Back, Kotter. For all intents and purposes, it is a “dangerous” ghetto – a place where the poor and the ethnic non-whites live (and sleep on foldout couches in the middle of the living room) and interact on a day-to-day basis and where the gangs that hunt the streets at night are so dangerous, “they don’t use guns. They insert the bullets manually.” The ethnic students of this neighborhood – the “hip” African American basketball player, the Italian American who is religiously devoted to his mother, the “toughguy” Puerto Rican Jew, and the class clown with the funny last name (that is apparently a slang term for brothel?!) – are not expected to amount to anything. Instead, they are all shoved into a remedial class on the topmost floor of the local high school, where no one else has to think about them and they can soon become forgotten (after all, they will probably drop out before anything else).

This is how Gabe Kotter characterizes the neighborhood in the pilot episode – both through his conversation with his wife and through non-diegetic voiceover (and with the aid of frame setup). And yet, despite this image, the viewer cannot help thinking of the urban space as an inviting one. The students are “delinquents,” but they get along very well with each other and with their teacher, whom they seem to treat with some sort of respect (despite the attempts to outsmart him with forged doctors notes and other similar antics). The jokes that do permeate the classroom setting in the two episodes are less symbols of disrespect, and more signs of how – despite coming from unfortunate backgrounds – the students and the teacher are happy (or at least, satisfied) with their positions in society and in life. They are not troubled by poverty and racism. There is hope in the face of adversity. Mr. Kotter was a Sweathog, but he made it out of high school and became somebody. With his help, there is the chance that the new generation of Sweathogs will also do the same.

THIS image of the urban space is an unrealistic one. I can hardly imagine a group of delinquents acting with the same kind of respect for their teachers that the Sweathogs show for Mr. Kotter. It is more likely that a delinquent student dissatisfied with his grade in a class would key his teacher’s car than offer to take a makeup exam or challenge him to a basketball game. And if the neighborhood was as dangerous as Gabe made it out to be when talking to his wife, I doubt any of them would be walking around with smiles on their faces or cracking jokes. Because the show chooses to depict it in this way, the neighborhood becomes an ethnic utopia, where – though they talking about the adversity they face – the characters seem to be impervious to its effects. They are one big, happy, non-white family, and the viewer sort of wants to be part of this family too – because, let’s face it, the world we live in sucks by comparison.

In the case of Woody Allen, I believe that he ignores the idea of race. I don’t think Allen embraces or even slightly acknowledges ethnic backgrounds. Most of his characters, as in his most important ones, are white. The only way in which an ethnic person would be involved in one of Woody Allen’s films is through some sort of task. (i.e. The moving men in Manhattan, or the performer in Radio Days.)  The one that thing that shines through Allen’s work is the use of white actors. Basically, whiteness. He embodies the literal idea of whiteness by using whites as the basic “go to” race.

If one takes Allen’s jewish heritage into consideration, it can be said that Allen presents his jewish roots through humor.Now, maybe its because I’m not jewish and I don’t feel the sting of Allen’s jokes, but I don’t believe Allen uses humor in a hateful way. I actually think that Woody Allen is entirely neurotic. I think he makes these jokes because he’s just a liberal jewish man that is nervous about what people think about him. It’s just a tick that he has that spills over into his films. I truly do not believe that Woody Allen hates his jewish background. Maybe he does take some stabs at the “homeland” through the rabbi, but when I saw that scene I thought it was more geared toward comments on the leniency of child abuse laws.

In comparison, Welcome Back, Kotter deals with stereotypical “reform” students found in inner city Brooklyn. Kotter himself is very resistant to go back to his old neighborhood and teach in his high school. In the two episodes I watched, I couldn’t decipher who Kotter identified with. However, it was very clear who his students were. There was the typical black man aspiring to be the star basketball player and play in the big leagues. The italian guy who was tougher than everybody else. And last but not least, (and my personal favorite) the spanish jew who was a in simple terms, a pretty bad kid. Welcome Back, Kotter plays into the stereotypes because technically that’s what Kotter is most afraid of. He hates being back in Brooklyn and doesn’t want to be teaching there at all.

To be honest, I think that even though his (maybe sometimes snotty) humor, Woody Allen relates more so back to his ethnic backgrounds than Kotter does. I think Welcome Back, Kotter is more so about the students ethnic identities than Kotter’s himself.

The urban space depicted in Welcome Back Kotter is, in my opinion, the most positive view of New York City we have seen in any film this semester.  The Brooklyn classroom where the majority of the two episodes we watched is a place of great diversity that seems relatively representative of the diversity of New York City as a whole.  It contains many different ethnic groups and each individual seems to really embody their sense of ethnic identity.  There is the typical Italian stereotype embodied in Vinny Barbarino, the black basketball star in “boom-boom” Washington, and the Puerto Rican Jew in Epstein, among others.  Despite the differences in each character’s culture and traditions, they all seem to get along.  There is a perfect mix with little to no racial discrimination among its participants, perhaps because they identify most closely not with their ethnicity, but rather with the culture associated with being a sweathog.

The urban space itself is welcoming and inviting.  It seems kind of safe because everyone gets along and there is little conflict.  I would definitely want to be a part of this urban space.  Even the space that we are shown outside of the classroom seems inviting.  We are told that the area that Kotter is residing and teaching in is not the best of neighborhoods and is almost a “ghetto.”  Despite this, the relationship that his students have with him and each other is a good one.  There is definitely a feeling of acceptance and understanding in all parties depicted in these episodes.

As I was watching these two episodes, I could not figure out what Kotter’s ethnicity was. (I later asked my parents and they told me he was Jewish, I don’t know for sure if this is true or not, but whatever, that’s besides the point.) I wonder if it was just me, or if this was done on purpose.  Is he supposed to just embody whiteness? Or is he a mix of all the cultures that can be found in his classroom? He plays basketball like Washington, is white like Barbarino, and is Jewish like Epstein.  Is he simply the successful embodiment of a bunch of different things? Just as they can all exist in each other in Room 118, maybe they can all live inside of a single person as well.