Americans have become so accustomed to hearing politicians and television commentators end statements with the phrase “God bless America” that we tend to forget that its use in popular discourse is a fairly recent development. Ronald Reagan was the first to utter it in a presidential nomination speech and, in 1984, he became the first president to close a State of the Union address with these words. Democrats adopted the phrase in 1992, when nominee Bill Clinton used it in his address before the Democratic Convention, and thereafter, for most of his State of the Union addresses (Scher 2015). Thus in the eighties, the political rhetoric of this country sounded a new note of calculated piety that is still with us. The religious right helped to elect Reagan, who won by carrying 44 states with 489 electoral votes, and who went on to ally himself with religious fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell throughout his presidency. It was Falwell who, some years later, launched the humorless attack on Teletubbies, the popular TV show aimed at preschool children, on the grounds that the purple character Tinky Winky was intended as a gay role model.

Schlesinger's raucous farce, Honky Tonk Freeway, released seven months after President Reagan took office in January of 1981, was inimical to the spirit of these times. When the final print of the film was screened for executives at Universal Studios, the film's editor Jim Clark describes a scene in which the executives watched in stony silence, then stood up and “ ‘began screaming at [Schlesinger]. […] saying things like ‘This is anti-American, anti-religious. How could you have made such a thing?” (Mann 2005, 479). The film went on to garner indignant reviews like that of Janet Maslin, who, despite the fact that the film had amused her, announced in the New York Times that “John Schlesinger […] thinks America is a crass, foolish, disagreeable place” (Maslin 1981). It's true that the America of Honky Tonk Freeway is, among other things, crass, foolish and disagreeable but no more so than the America featured in other comedies of the period, like Animal House (1978), Airplane! (1980), Caddyshack (1980) and Porky's (1981), all of which received more favorable reviews, and none of which offer the arch critique of America of Honky Tonk Freeway.