Humour in TV Comedy

2.6 Humour in TV Comedy

TV comedy is increasingly popular, thus becoming extremely influential because it reaches, in some cases, millions of viewers (Ross 1998: 91-92). In describing sitcoms, Palmer (1994: 142) suggests that they “depend upon a fit between narrative flow and joke theme, despite their overwhelming emphasis upon the flow of gags”. Sitcoms seem indeed structured according to recurrent patterns, which enhance their main themes and attempt to ensure the audience’s appreciation and consequently the prog rammes’ good viewing rates.

Tagliamonte and Roberts (2005) claim that data taken from TV comedy can be a surrogate to “real-world” because TV comedy attempts to replicate everyday language. However, Walte (2007: 5) points out that “television does not reflect real interaction; rather it tries to recreate an idealized little community”. Regarding humour, it could be suggested that, like real conversations, TV comedy contains conversational and potentially funny wordplay and jokes. These can be used to convey challenging, offending as well as harmless humour. Moreover, they can also foster characters ’ friendly or antagonizing relationships with one another. Finally, characters may tell personal anecdotes with humorous potential, which also contribute to their positive

perception by other characters. However, real and TV comedy conversation differ in many ways that I do not have the space to review here. What is more important to point out is that conversational exchanges among the characters in comedy are often exaggerated for humorous purposes. This is possible because TV comedy involves a character-character level of communication and an author-(scriptwriters)-audience perception by other characters. However, real and TV comedy conversation differ in many ways that I do not have the space to review here. What is more important to point out is that conversational exchanges among the characters in comedy are often exaggerated for humorous purposes. This is possible because TV comedy involves a character-character level of communication and an author-(scriptwriters)-audience

For the purpose of this thesis, it is therefore important to understand how humour is conveyed at both levels. Drawing on Clark and Schaefer (1992: 260) and Goffman (1976, 1979), Bubel and Spitz (2006: 72) propose a model for the analysis of the perception of humour in TV comedy that takes into account these two levels. This model is based on the idea that TV spectators are ‘overhearers’. To describe this concept, Bubel and Spitz give the example of a person on a bus who unintentionally hears other people’s conversation(s). Spectators, like overhearers, do not fully share the same knowledge as the participants of the conversation. Therefore, they cannot directly negotiate meaning but they have to infer and make ‘conjectures’ on the basis of what the participants say.

For Bubel and Spitz, the producers, scriptwriters, directors, camera staff and cutters in the editing team of a TV programme are all involved in the construction of meaning with a specific audience in mind. They produce a script on the basis of communication processes that lead the audience to create a desired meaning. By referring to Clark (1996) and Short (1981), Bubel and Spitz suggest a model that comprises a top level created corresponding to the character-character interaction and an underlying level in which the whole film production crew, the actors and the audience pretend that the interaction at the top level (the fictional word and its dialogues) is real (ibid.73).

Not surprisingly, Bubel and Spitz argue that a spectator, like an overhearer in a real situation, is likely to draw inferences regarding a character on the basis of what s/he utters. These inf erences depend on and are integrated by the audience’s “prior knowledge of personalities – real-life or fictional – who display such features” (ibid.74). More precisely, they claim that:

[C]haracterization means that in the course of a TV drama, while we are making sense of the dialogue with the help of our world knowledge, we also gain an impression of the characters uttering the dialogue. At the same time, each bit of dialogue and the information about the characters it carries also adds to this world knowledge (ibid.75).

With these premises in mind, Bubel and Spitz analyse two jokes performed by two main characters, Renée and Ally, in one episode of the TV comedy programme Ally McBeal (1997-2002, David E. Kelley) by means of the GTVH metric. Their inv estigation demonstrates that Ally’s joke is potentially more humorous that Renée’s. They carried out an informant-based study that further confirmed this. However, their analysis of the context within which the jokes are told shows that viewers perceive jokes as less humorous when they do not fit their view of the character who utters them. Since the joke Ally tells does not fit her character, her joke is perceived as less humorous than Renee’s and vice versa (ibid.92- 98).

Snell ’s (2006) study further confirms the relevance of prior world knowledge in the construction and understanding of humour in TV comedy. She combines the GTVH metric and schema theory in the investigation of the potential humour of the TV comedy series Little Britain (2003- , David Williams, Matt Lucas). She shows that the humour in this series can be explained in terms of an incongruity between the schemata /scripts in the audience’s mind about a given persona (e.g. VICTORIAN LADY and its related social schema) and what they are presented as on the screen (Emily, a transvestite who fails to appear as a Victorian lady) (ibid.61).

As can be seen, the studies reported above corroborate the idea that elements such as conversational interaction and characterisation are highly relevant for the construction of potential humour in TV comedy. In particular, the way characters are constructed and perceived is pivotal to the enhancement of humour. As Culpeper

(2001) explains, fictional characters are perceived, at least in part, in terms of readers ’/viewers’ knowledge and expectations about different social categories. However, in comedy, particular characteristics may be taken to extremes, resulting in ‘prototypical distortions’, so that characters can be described as ‘exaggerated prototypes’:

They [exaggerated prototypes] fail to exhibit contextually sensitive behaviour. (...) Such prototypical distortions are, of course, more typical of fictional worlds than the real world (...) [They] can become established as fictional stock figures in their own right (88-89).

All the six main characters in Friends seem to fit Culpeper’s definition, at least to some extent, as I will show during my data analysis in Chapters 5, 6 and 7.