What's Happening! attempted to be a topical, social-issue sitcom in the vein of the Norman Lear shows, but I felt it came across as in-authentic (if that's a word) because they relied too heavily on 'stock characters' and predictable behaviors/reactions. This was the tail-end of a period when jokes about black stereotypes, fat shaming, and homosexuality were predictable (if cheap) sources of humor. I saw this show in reruns in the mid-1980s and didn't really get into it, though I watched it enough to know who was who and
what was happening. It felt so staged--the actors all 'reciting' their lines to one another (waiting for the laughs) rather than acting out the situations and reacting to the scene partner in a natural way. But many 70s sitcoms are guilty of this, of course. The "touchy topics" felt sort of shoe-horned into the episodes in that "very-special-episode" way. As a kid growing up in rural Georgia I didn't really know what life was like in inner-city Los Angeles, but many of the issues were universal.
As for the issue of whether it is racist or not, I don't think it's productive to even go down that path. I'm sure they didn't intend for it to be anything other than funny and/or topical when they produced it. It was made in a time when the networks were embracing African-American representation on sitcoms; sometimes they did a good job, and sometimes it came across as kind of lame (pandering). The show could be a source of 2020 discomfort, for sure, since they went for the low-hanging fruit type jokes that we would not try today. What they found funny in that period might not be funny today, or at least it gets laughs for a different reason. But they did not know then how attitudes would evolve over the succeeding decades. WE don't know what will be considered offensive or anachronistic in thirty years' time. They were trying to examine issues with laughter on a cheaply-produced sitcom--which is sometimes the best way to get people to talk.
If you allow others to dictate what you enjoy, you won't be enjoying much of anything. As you noted earlier,
The way things are today, probably every show out there would be deemed "offensive" by somebody.
….and there's really no rule-book on why you find something funny or not. I think the world will realize someday that 'cancel culture' is hurting more than helping. Rather than helping us get over the problems of the past, they're removing opportunities to discuss the issues and come to better understanding. Removing representations of how we used to behave also removes opportunities to face our past. It creates a fake world where we can pretend those events did not happen. And if people start believing certain unpleasant things didn't happen, then we will end up re-engaging in the same behaviors.
If we never see Dee insulting Rerun over his weight, we don't experience that inner uneasiness that we feel when we see someone being picked on over something they can't control. How will we know that is unacceptable behavior in real life if we never see how it hurts "fake" people? If they keep us from seeing Raj and Dee's mother working menial, domestic jobs because they don't want us to see a black woman stereotypically cast as "the maid," then we don't get to see her portrayal of a struggling, loving mother doing whatever she has to do to keep her children fed, clothed, and out of trouble despite so many things stacked against her.
What someone does for a living is not
who they are as a person, and seeing that represented in fictional works can only help the rest of the world understand that.
