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Editorial: He was a camera Allen Funt made video art out of American life Thursday, September 09, 1999
Allen Funt is dead, but his spirit - and his catch phrase: "Smile! You're on 'Candid Camera'!" - will live on in media folklore. As the original host of "Candid Camera" and its precursor "Candid Microphone," Mr. Funt made surreptitious invasions of privacy in a Cold War-obsessed America the stuff of humor.
As horrified as George Orwell would have been with the idea of a network of hidden cameras recording our confusion in the name of entertainment, most TV viewers were delighted with images of their fellow citizens having lucid conversations with mailboxes that demanded more postage for letters.
Everyone from self-important businessmen to cute kindergartners were vulnerable to Mr. Funt's cameras. There was real democracy in who was made a fool of on "Candid Camera."
When a prospective employer told eager secretarial applicants to "not move from their seats, no matter what" until he returned from an errand, some took the admonitions literally while others rushed to see what was happening when life-like mannequins started falling past 20-story windows with "screams" trailing behind them. The job candidates who didn't investigate were only too willing to "see no evil" if it meant getting the job.
Though hilarious, Mr. Funt's "Candid Camera" inadvertently uncovered disturbing truths about Americans during its original run from 1948 to 1966. Credulous thinking and a willingness to accommodate the absurd seemed to unite nearly everyone caught in the show's impish lens.
Are Americans merely stoic or is there such a profound suspicion of causality in the land that even "talking" animals encountered at a park bench don't seem that improbable?
"Candid Camera" continues to operate with Mr. Funt's son Peter at the helm. Still, it will never recover the cultural capital it held in the '50s and '60s when cameras were relatively exotic and cumbersome.
With the advent of personal cameras, absurd events like the beating of Rodney King, a big city mayor's arrest while smoking crack on camera and the sometimes mean-spirited amateur videos on "America's Funniest Home Videos" make the relatively benign pranks on "Candid Camera" seem quaint.
But Allen Funt will always be remembered for introducing "Smile, you're on 'Candid Camera' " into the lexicon. Mercifully forgotten is the unstated corollary of that statement: "And don't you feel like a fool?"
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