SITUATION COMEDY

SITUATION COMEDY

This week we move to a a genre which has become as popular and prevalent as 'Soap Opera', Situation Comedy. "Sitcoms" are now established as part of the staple diet of mainstream television entertainment throughout the world. To give an indication of this try to list below 25 examples of the form (and this should present few challenges!)

As a form, it has been suggested, "Sitcoms" are popular precisely because of their reliance on certain key conventions and ingredients. They are, the argument continues, generally conservative and safe, endless rehearsals of a common formula. We will return to this issue of conservatism later on but, for the moment, what do many of the examples you have listed above have in common? Do they follow a common formula? Can they be regarded as formula entertainment?

Comedy:	Before proceeding to look at the Sitcom in detail I would like us to consider some general points about Comedy in general. Firstly, it's useful to note the variety of different comic forms: satire, black comedy, puns, gags, jokes, comedy of the absurd, sketches, slapstick, parody and farce. Individual situation comedies may incorporate a number of these elements. It's also useful to note that "Comedy" does not mean the same as "comic". Laughter (which is the distinguishing feature of 'The Comic') is a significant element of many comedies, but just as important is the way in which comedies are defined as opposite to Tragedy. In Comedy generally (and this applies as much to As You Like it and the novels of Jane Austen as to Dad's Army) the distinguishing feature of Comedy lies in the happy ending. It's also worth noting that Comedy, from Plautus and Terence to the Likely Lads, has traditionally been a vehicle for representing the lives of the middle and lower classes: where the upper classes are dealt with it is in terms of their 'private' or trivial lives. In the reliance on the convention of the happy ending Comedy retains kinship with related genres such as Melodrama and Romance, all of which may involve a happy ending and an aim of encouraging the audience's empathy with the protagonists.
Comedy and Narrative:	The importance of the happy ending implies an underlying sense of narrative form and order in the Comedy. Here we might apply Evanthius' fourth century BC formulation of "comic form", including Exposition, leading to Complication, (and then additional Complication), followed by Resolution. these are bound together through rigorous causal motivation, and possibly also the introduction or operation of coincidence, luck, fortune, or even the supernatural. In some forms of Comedy there is a reliance on illogical, impossible or absurd forms of motivation. This, you will recall, takes us back to the work on 'Narrative' which we looked at in Week 2
Enigma and comic suspense:	Enigma, comic surprise and suspense, involving the giving or withholding of information, in terms of characters' knowledge or self-knowledge, these are all vital ingredients in the form of Comedy in general. Many comic narratives involve suspense in these terms, a plan or scheme that involves duping others, or pretence and disguise. Another type of suspense plot involves misunderstanding or ignorance as a consequence of the disposition of events, of which only the spectator is fully aware (comic irony). A final type of comic surprise involves both audience and characters in shared ignorance.
Functions and Pleasures:	It goes without saying that the main function and pleasure of Comedy in general is to make us laugh, but this begs wider questions about what we are laughing at, and why we are laughing. Are we "laughing at" or "laughing with", when watching and sharing the fortunes and misfortunes of others? Is our laughter deriving from our experience of disruptive surprise and its resolution? Is our laughter allowing us to sublimate or rehearse underlying or unconscious fears, anxieties or desires? Finally, it has been suggested that Comedy (and laughter in general) is all about a vicarious experience of loss of ego control and its restoration: Comedy, and laughter, allows us to stand outside our own 'ego' and be taken over by events or circumstances outside of our control. One example of this might be to consider how "painful" it can sometimes be to watch John Cleese in Fawlty Towers, endlessly thwarted in his neurotic attempts to control, stay organised and organise others - in laughing at him are we not also laughing, in some way, at aspects of ourselves?

Broadcast Comedy and Situation Comedy

Situation Comedy grew out of Variety Entertainment, but format derived also from the domestic sketch format that appeared in American mass-circulation newspapers in the 1870s: influence of Vaudeville and Music Hall sketches this century has also been an importance influence. In part the general movement of TV Sit. Com. was from Radio to TV, such as Dad's Army and Steptoe.

Situation comedy narratives generally centre on the middle class home (Terry and June, 2.4 Children), and characterised also by episodic structure from week to week. In the Sit Com there is an emphasis on repetition and forestalling of closure in terms of the series as a whole. Characters do not learn or develop across episodes. Situation comedies also tend to be set in clearly defined settings, with a limited range of characters, and a fair degree of emphasis on characters-as-stereotypes: this places the Situation comedy close to the Soap Opera, (especially if there is further emphasis on emotional interrelationship). Do these points concur with your view of Situation Comedy, and the examples you listed at the beginning?

In terms of the formulaic element of Sitcoms it has been suggested that sitcoms share a common ingredient, the "comic trap", as Barry Took remarks:

"all successful comedies have some trap in which people must exist - like marriage" [and the perfect situation for a situation comedy] "is a little self enclosed world where you have to live by the rules".

These rules may be those of the mini-community, of one's own characters and its limitations. Circumstances and limitations may be social (learning to live within one's class - Hyacinth Bucket - or learning to acknowledge that you have to live within the limits of your own body and age (think of characters in Dad's Army). Hancock rests on a similar pivot: his sense of superiority and wish to escape from himself and his surroundings is always thwarted, his old self renormalised, and his situation also. In Steptoe the threat to order is often expressed as a threat from women, who threaten the precarious but enduring bond between father and son.

This element of learning to live with frustrated expectations and desires, has been described as follows:

"The abiding rule... is that a character must not face the world alone; she or he must experience the joys and tribulations of life as part of some larger social unit".

In the Situation Comedy characters transgress against, and then learn the value of, closely-bound ties, of the family or the social group - restoration of the family, or what may be called "communalization,. reaffirming the stability and importance of the group. Many of the plots of Steptoe and Son, for example, involve Harold seeking to escape from his frustrating circumstances, either directly or through self-betterment, but he cannot. Certain critics have suggested that this underlying thematic concern makes the form particularly suitable for the 'home-based" television audience', going on to suggest that Sitcom, as a form, tends towards the reassertion of conservative values of the home and family (in terms of both setting and theme), and the stereotyping of racial, class, sexual and regional differences. Emphasis also on the 'inside' (of the home or social unit) against which the 'others' are judged, rejected or simply viewed (neighbours, or outsiders of whatever kind). In the case of a programme such as Dad's Army the question of who is the "insider" and who the "outside" can be seen to have all sorts of implications for wider questions of national identity and national self-identification.

It is worth noting, however, that we can't always assert that sitcom is an essentially "conservative" genre, teaching people to live within their limits and limitations. In recent years it has been significant that there has emerged a tendency towards parody or anti-Sit. Com. forms, Cheers, The Young Ones, The New Statesman, all playing with the themes and norms of the traditional Sit. Com form, or Blackadder which burlesques them, (and popular misunderstanding of English history). Situation Comedies like Steptoe; were, to some extent, already doing this, presenting the stable abnormal situation of Steptoe's yard against familiar bourgeois life ("a spectacle of inverted bourgeois decorum"). In these, as in all sitcoms, the key question is what we are laughing at and what we are laughing with.

For wider reading on the Sitcom look at Steven Neale and Frank Krutnik's book, Popular Film and Television Comedy, stored on Reserve in the LRIT.

Return to Course Outline and Schedule