The Doofus Dad

By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: June 18, 2005

One evening, after watching Homer Simpson wreck the family car at a
monster-truck rally and plunge on a skateboard into Springfield Gorge, my 6-
year-old son asked me, "Why are dads on TV so dumb?"

Having grown up with the omniscient fathers on "Leave It to Beaver" and "My Three Sons," I
wanted to give a bemused yet authoritative answer, chuckling wisely as I explained the ways of the
world. But this question left me feeling more like Homer Simpson.

Where did we fathers go wrong? We spend twice as much time with our kids as we did two
decades ago, but on television we're oblivious ("Jimmy Neutron"), troubled ("The Sopranos"),
deranged ("Malcolm in the Middle") and generally incompetent ("Everybody Loves Raymond").
Even if Dad has a good job, like the star of "Home Improvement," at home he's forever making
messes that must be straightened out by Mom.

There have always been some bumbling fathers like Dagwood Bumstead and Fred Flintstone, but
now they're the norm. A study by the National Fatherhood Initiative found that fathers are eight
times more likely than mothers to be portrayed negatively on network television.

Ward Cleaver has been replaced by a stock character known in the trade as Doofus Dad.
Explaining this change isn't easy, but if Ward were still around, he could puff his pipe and offer
several theories.

The most obvious is that the television audience has splintered along gender lines, and sitcoms are
now a female domain. Four out of five viewers of network sitcoms are women, and they
apparently like to see Mom smarter than Dad.

Another explanation is the rising number of mothers with paying jobs. Now that they have their
own paychecks, the old bread-earning patriarch is less essential and therefore more mockable. And
TV writers no longer have an easy stereotype of Mom to work with. Jokes about daffy middle-
class housewives like Lucy Ricardo and Edith Bunker seem dated now that so many women work
outside the home.

Fathers are still the same old targets, and they're even more tempting now that they've gotten a new
image as shirkers thanks to widely reported findings about who does what at home. Even though
more mothers have outside jobs, women still do about four more hours of child care and four more
hours of housework per week, according to studies by the social scientists John Robinson and
Geoffrey Godbey.
But it's not as if these women's husbands are out every night drinking at Moe's. The same studies
show that men have increased their share of the child care and housework while still working 14
hours longer outside the home than mothers do each week. Overall, the men still have a little more
free time - about a half-hour per day - but that gap has been shrinking, not growing, in recent
decades.

Still, no matter how much Dad does in real life, I think he'll remain a doofus on television, and not
just because he's a safe target and makes the female sitcom audience laugh. He makes men laugh,
too - the men who watch him and the ones who create him. Three-quarters of sitcom scripts are
written by men, and nine out of every 10 scripts submitted to "The Simpsons" are from men.

Homer has become the longest-running doofus on television by appealing to guys, who have made
"The Simpsons" one of the few sitcoms with a predominantly male audience. I asked Al Jean, the
show's head writer, why they keep watching.

"Homer is the father that no one will admit to being that many fathers are," Mr. Jean said. "He
loves his kids, but there are a lot of times when he'd rather just go out for a beer."

Homer embodies a famous distinction made by Margaret Mead: motherhood comes naturally, but
fatherhood must be learned. It's an awkward process. Before I became one, dads my own age often
did look like doofuses as they struggled with drooling babies and their new domesticity - no more
free time or disposable income, lots of chores to do and orders to take from wives ruling the home.

At the time, I saw Homer as the father's inner slob yearning to break free, but on this Father's Day
I mainly see something else. Yes, he may want to duck out for a beer sometimes, but when he sits
on that couch with his family he does not look like a man longing to escape. He is at peace.
Fatherhood has created one more happy doofus.