How the West Was Fun

Abstract

Abstract In the mid-1960s, F Troop utilized self-conscious humor, along with the physical comedy of vaudeville, to spin a comic tale of life in a frontier cavalry fort. The series’ cast of misfits and shady characters poked fun at canonical US history, authority, social class, racial and ethnic stereotypes, and normative gender roles, all pivoting around issues of masculinity and patriarchy. This chapter situates the series in the sociopolitical context of the 1960s and examines the ways in which F Troop and its characters both mirrored and grappled with the era’s shifts in American idealized masculinity, from rugged archetypes to “softer” models that privilege intellect. This chapter also illustrates how, as part of this shifting constellation of ideologies, the series engaged with long-held notions about the gendering of the wilderness and Anglo–Indigenous relationships and, in so doing, both mocked and reinforced notions of Manifest Destiny and the Myth of the Frontier.