Studies on sitcoms

Previous studies on sitcoms mainly focused on the sociolinguistic aspects. Here, we will review Bubel and Spitz’s (2006) study on the characterization of women through the telling of dirty jokes in Ally Mcbeal, and Paolucci and Richardson’s (2006) study on Seinfeld’s critique of American culture

2.4.2.1 Ally Mcbeal

Bubel and Spitz’s (2006) study on the characterization of women through the telling of dirty jokes in Ally Mcbeal analyzed an episode of the US sitcom Ally Mcbeal in which two women told dirty jokes. Their study showed that although the structure of both jokes as well as their respective performance equally met the

demands of good telling of jokes, the screenplay was constructed in such a way that one of them failed to elicit laughter. This was achieved through creating expectations in the audience before the telling of the jokes, and through having the two speakers structure their jokes in different ways. In this episode, while Ally set the wrong mood before telling her joke by challenging her audience, Rene established rapport with her audience. In addition, Ally’s uptight and prudish personality and Rene’s self-assertive and provocative characteristics also contributed to the failure of Ally’s joke

performance and the success of Rene’s.

Bubel and Spitz’s study also had implications for gender research. They analyzed three levels of the relationship between gender and humor. On the individual level, their study revealed that there is a continuum of human’s gendered practices: at one end, there is the stereotypical female who is not able to present and enjoy dirty jokes, illustrated by Ally’s character; at the other end, there is the provocative, tomboyish female displaying stereotypical male behavior who knows how to tell and appreciate dirty jokes, illustrated by Rene.

On the interactional level, the bar audience’s responses to the two joke telling were apparently both rooted in pre-existing gender stereotypes. Their positive reaction to Rene’s joke performance seemed to be grounded in her representing black woman Jezebel archetype while their negative reaction to Ally’s telling could be seen as a consequence of the pervasive stereotype of the humorless woman.

On the social structural level, the mediated humor of this episode reproduced dominant views of gender. Although Rene seemed to subvert the stock image of the humorless female in successfully telling a dirty joke in public, she corroborated another hypersexual, lascivious hedonistic and immoral stereotype of a black woman.

The failure of Ally’s attempt at telling a dirty joke more obviously reproduced stereotypical gender expectations.

Bubel and Spitzs also pointed out that television discourse is built around the insight that the interaction portrayed is designed to be overheard by the audience in front of the TV. That is to say, the model of television discourse is audience centered, and the mental processes in the viewers are taken as a starting point. Since the audience, like the over-hearers, are unlikely to fully share the participants’ common ground and they can not directly negotiate meaning with the participants, dialogues of sitcoms must be designed in such a way that the participants’ common ground is available to the audience in front of the TV, i.e., the audience has access to the underlying knowledge the utterances are based on. Therefore, the present study will be conducted based on the audience-perspective, rather than on the conversation participants’, i.e. the speaker’s and the hearer’s, point of view.

2.4.2.2 Seinfeld

Paolucci and Richardson’s (2006) study on Seinfeld’s critique of American culture showed that the US sitcom Seinfeld had often been considered as being non-political in nature. However, Paolucci and Richardson revealed the sitcom’s hidden critique of the rules dominating modern American society. Based on their study, humor in sitcoms not only functions to exhibit human foibles in such a way as to connect an audience to its humanness, it also specializes in indicating the

nonsensical nature of the institutional rules in American society. Paolucci and

Richardson stated that comedians have a role as licensed spokespersons who identify and discuss contradictions in society that other people may be unaware of or reluctant to acknowledge openly. They center on everyday life, asking questions about how its rules are negotiated. Thus, Seinfeld combines two forms: humorous commentary and an examination of often undiscussed aspects of everyday life. “Through its focus on social life and their misarrangement, it is possible to reveal how its social critique

pokes through official reality’s thin sleeve” (Paolucci and Richardson, 2006: 30).

Paolucci and Richardson pointed out that commentators on comedies had

traditionally understood it as a presentation of an unexpected departure from the norm where humor disturbs our definition of reality. They used incongruity theory to

explain this phenomenon, which focuses on the divergence between an unexpected and an actual state of affairs. The audience must understand the two realities involved to perceive the incongruity and get the humor. Comic discourse often plays with familiar meanings in a way where the setting often contains some sort of incongruity between expectations and the reality. For instance, Seinfeld often forces its audience to think about incongruous attitudes towards norms in daily life by making fun of its characters’ failure to negotiate the incongruities between social change and the norms that are supposed to guide social intercourse.

According to Paolucci and Richardson, the humor in Seinfeld rests on two concerns. The first one is the examination of how failures in controlling the situation often result in incongruous events, meanings coming out quite differently than expected, and a loss of normalcy in daily situations. The second one is the focus on how characters use what is called impression management to make themselves appear to have complied with social norms, despite their real intentions. The characters often play with meanings to create humor and to change the normalcy of the situations. In order to maintain familiarity across audience, comedy can play with generalized character traits, ordinary situations such as pursuing shallow relationships for sex or changing jobs for money, and social rules as its characters embarrass themselves and misread other’s intentions through “role reversals, funny actions, double meanings, word distortion, parody, and unexpected answers” (Paolucci and Richardson, 2006:

32). These strategies reveal “incongruities, unnoticed ironies, and contradictions in social life through constructing absurd situations, unexpected events, and exaggerated

or ironic conclusions of a plot line” (Paolucci and Richardson, 2006: 32). These techniques show us rarely discussed aspects of our social relationships.

As we can see from the review, previous studies on sitcoms mainly focused on the sociolinguistic aspects such as gender issues and critique of the American society, instead of the linguistic characteristics of the funny lines in the TV show, the present study takes the linguistic perspective and aims to investigate the linguistic strategies used in the funny lines in Friends.