Remembering Norman Lear: "The soundtrack of my life has been laughter"
CBSN
Norman Lear, who died this week at the age of 101, didn't invent the situation comedy. But, more than anyone else, he made sure that it said something important. In 1999 he told "CBS This Morning," "My slide rule is, if I care, you care. If I laugh, you laugh. If I think it's serious, you'll think it's serious."
Without him it's unlikely we would have ever met Sanford and his son, Maude, the Jeffersons, the families from "Good Times" and "One Day at a Time," or that grumpy, grandstanding daddy of them all, Archie Bunker.
He told "Sunday Morning" in 2016, "When I began to cast 'All in the Family,' my first thought, the only one I had in mind, that was a name I knew and a face I knew and a personality I understood, was Mickey Rooney. And he thought it was ridiculous that I was thinking of doing a show about a bigot. 'You're going to get killed in the streets,' he told me. 'They're going to shoot you dead!'"
