Hello, I'm Mr Ed!

“A horse is a horse, of course of course, and no-one can talk to a horse of course, that is, of course, unless the horse in the famous Mr Ed”

Mr Ed was a talking horse in the American TV show Mr Ed from the early 1960s. It was on the TV a lot when I was a child. For some reason, a black and white TV show about a talking horse was a big hit in Ireland in the early 1980s.

Anthropomorphism....

All art is metaphorical. Indeed most of it is anthropomorphic. Anthropomorphism is the metaphorical equivalent of taming a wild animal. Anthropomorphism is what I was at with my 2 year old nephew  today; as far as this child was concerned my dog is his cousin. The highlight of my day was when I ventriloquized a conversation between them. They had a whale of a time.

Anthropomorphism is not always so explicit. It is nonetheless, taming. An act of making what is not, or, is not quite, human, human. A way of making the strange familiar, a way of forgetting that everything may actually be just as meaningless and empty as it surely would be if by some catastrophe there were no longer any anthropoi to morph everything else in their own image.

Mr Ed is patently anthropomorphic but why did he emerge when he did? What was being tamed, who was taming it and who was it being tamed for?

My first answer is sociologically functional. In 1960 there were still people alive who could remember when horses were the main form of transport. But Mr Ed was a kids’ programme. Kids in 1960 did not live in such a world so Mr Ed was a way of narrating the past, negotiating between generations, clearing the (horse – free) road for the future. Preserving and animating the past.

My second answer is about the symbolism of the horse its historical and social contexts. Mr Ed is a cunning, genius horse. He speaks. He makes some really sophisticated jokes. He is far smarter than the humans in his life and he has a killer sense of humour. For all that he has been tamed and domesticated; hidden from view. 

The horse is an obvious symbol for a world that had (in rapidly vanishing living memory) disappeared. He was a symbol of the wild west – a metonymy from the past that declared the hegemony of the state. It is no accident that this symbol of freedom, this memory of a time of lawlessness, was being domesticated week, in, week, out on American TV at the very time that that society itself was undergoing social disruption that called into question the legitimacy of its political and economic status quo. 

The hegemony of the American ruling classes had been won but was now under threat through internal and external tensions – the social upheavals around the issue of race and the international misadventures in South East Asia – Mr Ed was a feelgood reminder of all that had been won and all that had to be conserved. 

Mr Ed was a success story. Mr Ed was every untameable figure from the American past suddenly domesticated and turned into an comedian. Mr Ed is 'what we’re fighting for'.

And since Mr Ed was what could, without proper care, become destructive, he was also a threat.

But why did Ireland  ‘import’ Mr Ed? Why was this put in the nosebag for me every week in the 1980s?

Is there anything symbolic about Mr Ed’s ‘taming’  for the Ireland of the 1980s? This was, after all, the  heyday of the culture of political corruption perfected by Charles Haughey and his love of the finer things of life, including horses.

Remember, Brendan Behan defined a member of the Anglo Irish aristocracy as a ‘Protestant with a horse’. Maybe the domestication of the horse dramatized in Mr Ed answered a need to represent and observe the transfer of power from the Anglo-Irish to the Catholic Bourgeois ruling classes?

So Mr Ed was really the Anglo-Irish horse domesticated and tamed. If this is so he stages a lie as disgusting as the one he was used to pass off in America 20 years previously.

Mr Ed is a trophy but he is atrophy, too.

The trophies were the reins of power, landed wealth, privileged access to business/professional/political power relations.

Mr Ed is atrophy because he is so funny. He is a joke at the expense of the vast majority of the population of the country I grew up in. He is a reminder of what people could not have, of the victory that they couldn’t share in. 

The point is Mr Ed was fantasy - a fiction. When all is said holding the reins of power is not a TV show. A small few - the church, the Catholic professional classes, farmers, civil servants and publicans - could ride the horse. Everyone else had to settle for the illusion. 

But Mr Ed had a big mouth. He was clever. He was more than a stultifying atrophic sop for the masses.

I loved Mr Ed  because in every episode he is cheeky, defiant, hilarious. He is a surplus energy that remains untamed after he has been tamed. 

Even though most people were being ridden into the ground or forced to emigrate Mr Ed reminds me that a horse is a powerful animal, he reminds me that, really, change was just a kick away!

Je suis Mr Ed.