How Sweet It Is, Again

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They looked a little older and were perhaps not quite so bouncy: 30 years is a long time by any measurement. But his voice still sounded like an overloaded station wagon lumbering up a gravel road, her wisecracks could still break open a Brink's vault, and they projected the same vitality they did when they were feuding, fussing and making up on Chauncey Street in Brooklyn. Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows, otherwise known as Ralph and Alice Kramden, the Honeymooners, were back together in Miami last week, taping an NBC special to be aired next Monday. As Gleason used to say, "How sweet it is!"

For the millions who are addicted to The Honeymooners shows, the special will * in fact be special. Until now, they have been able to see only 39 episodes from the 1955-56 season, which are constantly being rerun throughout the country. On the NBC show, Gleason and Meadows will introduce clips from many of the 80 or so other episodes The Great One dug out of storage this past winter. "I think this is the right time," he said, when he revealed their existence. "I'm sick of watching those other ones." True devotees greeted the news of the cache as if it were the discovery of a tenth symphony by Beethoven. In September, Showtime, the pay-cable channel, will begin running weekly collections of the newly released sketches, which vary in length from seven to 45 minutes; a year or so after that, Viacom will put them into regular syndication.

Most of the shows from the vault actually predate those now being seen; they were originally aired between 1952 and 1957, when The Honeymooners was a continuing segment on Gleason's one-hour variety show for CBS. Ralph and Alice lived in that dingy two-room apartment on Chauncey Street even then, and their best friends were already their upstairs neighbors, Ed and Trixie Norton (Art Carney and Joyce Randolph). Unlike most other sitcom couples of the '50s, the Honeymooners were not middle class, but the working poor. Ralph earned $62 a week driving a bus; Norton worked, as he liked to say, as an engineer of subterranean sanitation--in the sewer system. Though Alice's quick mind would have enabled her to run Ralph's bus line, or NBC for that matter, she was a housewife: in those prefeminist days, Ralph did not want his wife to take a job.

In the earlier segments, however, the characterizations were simpler. Ralph was even louder, brasher and more abrasive than in the shows now being seen, according to Peter Crescenti, co-founder of R.A.L.P.H. (Royal Association for the Longevity and Preservation of the Honeymooners), an organization of friendly fanatics formed in 1983. Alice was also louder and more argumentative, and Norton was dopier, unlikely as that may sound.

Why does The Honeymooners remain so appealing? "I have two answers, and they're very simple," says Gleason, now 69. "First, they're funny. And second, the audience likes the people in The Honeymooners. Once you get an audience to like you, you're home." Ralph is a loser with hopes of being a winner--someone, in other words, everybody can identify with. Before each episode ends, his bubble always bursts. "It's the story of my life," he says in a rare moment of self-awareness. "I could always make a great start, but I never finished. I never stuck at anything, never hit the high note."

Alice is a full-time scrapper, never at a loss, even when she stands silently glaring at Ralph after he has done something typically dumb or outrageous. Many of her comebacks refer to his weight. Early on, Gleason discovered one of the first truths of comedy: a fat man is almost always funnier than a thin one. "This is probably the biggest thing I ever got into," says Ralph of one of his moneymaking schemes. "The biggest thing you ever got into," responds Alice, "was your pants." Afraid that she will skimp on dinner to save money, he says, "Then you know what I'll look like?" She replies, "Yeah. A human being." To which Ralph usually responds with the familiar "One of these days, Alice! Pow! Right in the kisser!" Despite her jabs, Alice is Ralph's greatest supporter, and with all his threats, he is crazy about her. "You know something?" he says. "I did hit that high note once--the day I married you."

Another reason for The Honeymooners' attraction is that, for the most part, it was shot live, and it has a gritty spontaneity that would probably send most of today's TV directors into years of deep analysis. Gleason hated rehearsals, and often the lines were improvised. When he could not remember what he was supposed to say, he would pat his stomach, which was his way of signaling the other actors to say something--anything. Once he even forgot he was supposed to be onstage, leaving Carney all by himself for something like three minutes. Carney went to the icebox--it was an icebox, not a refrigerator --and, with ruffles and flourishes, pulled out an orange and peeled it. The audience roared.

A new generation of viewers may be just as delighted with the shows Gleason has pulled out of his Ali Baba's cave in Florida. One of Ralph's more tender lines to Alice could be applied to each of the four star players: "Baby, you're the greatest."