If I had to make a case on behalf of the sitcom, I would offer the following defense: As formats for humor go, the sitcom is the format that makes itself most at home in the situation where the comedy occurs.
One reason I put it this way is obviously because the name itself gives me the material for analysis: spliced into the name sitcom (which the OED tells me is a neologism produced in America in the 1960s) are the two operative words situation and comedy (which the OED tells me was already a phrase current in criticism of books and theatre by the 1890s). But the words are not the foundation of what I want to say about the sitcom; they are just a useful reminder because they happen to name the thing aptly. What I really have in mind is a formal analysis of the sitcom. As a genre, a sitcom is usually a TV series in thirty-minute episodes with an ensemble cast of characters in an easily recognizable setting: a restaurant, a bar, a garage, an office, a neighborhood, a home, etc. The big idea is a simple one: the set of wacky characters will play to type in episode after episode, ringing the changes on whatever conventional setting they occupy.
The basic formula and its conventions came into being alongside the technology of television. The idea of a set scene for characters to interact in was inherited from stage drama, but the requirements of television dictated some interesting mutations: short scenes of definite length in filmable situations that would resume every week, on appointment. Historically, sitcom producers slid almost lazily into these conventions, not pushing restlessly against the limitations of the new medium, but occupying every bit of the new space just as it became available. When better lighting and multiple cameras became available and affordable, the sitcom expanded to take advantage of them. And so, by technological evolution, a genre came into being almost by accident. It was not driven by high theory or by the deep yearning of artists for self-expression and formal experimentation. It just kind of happened. There are several disadvantages that attend its accidental emergence: the whole genre has a marked tendency toward lazy tropes and half-hearted clichés. But there are also advantages. What has congealed as the sitcom is something that gives contemporary expression to what humor has apparently always wanted to express: the givenness of human situations as the place where humor happens.
Think for a minute about the classic story-joke format. I mean the kind that are currently out of fashion, but that simply dominated previous generations. They involve a very brief narrative setup like “a guy walks into a bar” or “there was a little boy who found a frog in the woods.” These are hardly bearable to modern sensibilities for some reason. The sheer artificiality of conjuring a whole situation with a few opening words just seems intrusive to us now. As a professor who teaches undergrads, I know they’ll indulge me in many kinds of humor, extending even to puns. But I cannot imagine how a class would respond if I began regaling them with jokes in this form: “It seems a certain salesman had too many red shoes in stock, and came up with a clever idea for how to sell them.” I would stare into the intergenerational abyss only to find it ignoring me back. And yet these portable story-jokes are exactly the kind of thing my father and I used to exchange via phone every few weeks, just yesterday (that is, a quarter of a century ago).
Does anything reveal the distinctive character of a culture or an era more clearly than the forms in which it expresses its sense of humor? And does anything mark a cultural shift more definitely than the passing away of a standard for of humor? I have a Dover reprint of a 1739 book called Joe Miller’s Jests, or the Wits Vade-Mecum, which the cover, not very credibly, claims is “the most popular humor book of all time.” Its original subtitle promises that it is “a collection of the most brilliant jests; the politest repartees; the most elegant bons mots, and most pleasant short stories in the English language.” I have studied all 247 numbered jokes assiduously for some time, and I cannot find anywhere among them anything straightforwardly funny. The closest is perhaps joke number 119:
A Gentlewoman growing big with Child, who had two Gallants, one of them with a wooden Leg, the Question was put, which of the two should father the Child. He who had the wooden Leg offer’d to decide it thus. “If the Child,” said he, “comes into the World with a wooden Leg, I will father it, if not, it must be yours.”
In one sense, I definitely get the joke: prosthetic limbs not being heritable traits, the Gallant’s proposal is a nimble way of sidestepping paternity. Ah, drollery; most amusing indeed. But no. Something in the set-up is all wrong for modern audiences. What strikes us odd is the whole idea of crafting a little story (“see, there was a lady with two lovers, and get this, one of them had a wooden leg, okay?”) just so we can repeat the “elegant bon mot” delivered by one character in precisely this situation. Why would anybody do that? And who could possibly do it 247 times in a row, dead-lifting a new situation into existence for every single joke, then tossing it aside and moving on to the next one. Joe Miller joke number 120, in case you’re curious, concerns “a Gentleman who had been out a shooting” birds with his Irish servant. Hilarity ensues, kind of. And by joke 121, a cook in a tavern is frying some fish. And so on and on.
The classic story-joke, I think, is the format that makes itself least at home in the situation where the comedy occurs. The situation itself is obviously disposably utilitarian, doing nothing but setting up the punchline. From one joke to another, the speaker can introduce anybody, the situation can be anything, the humor can come from anywhere. There’s a kind of radical freedom in the interval between any two jokes. Many stand-up comedians exploit this freedom, sticking to one premise as long as it pays off before switching suddenly to another.
For slightly more involvement in the situation, we might look to something like skit comedy, where actors establish characters whose presence endures for several minutes, and punch lines are (ideally) scattered evenly throughout the skit. For even more involvement, we could turn to a comedy of manners, whether in a form designed to be read (a comic novel; perhaps Wodehouse fits here) or staged (a stage comedy). In each case, we have a comedy format that makes progressively more of the comic situation. Beyond a certain point of sophistication, though, we reach a level of art in which humor is only one of the elements at play. Jane Austen certainly makes much of the situations and manners of her characters, and is certainly funny; but to take her measure as an author we would have to consider numerous other virtues. If we restrict ourselves to things that are only trying to be funny, the popular format that makes the deepest commitment to the stability of a narrative setting is the sitcom.
In the light of this increasing thickness given over to the situation in which the joke occurs, it’s tempting to declare sitcoms a kind of apex art form. But we should be careful about making any grandiose claims for sitcoms, which work best when we don’t expect too much of them. Praising them too highly would expose their limitations too harshly. If an especially good sitcom achieves perfection, it is the perfection of light entertainment.
And it probably is. A good sitcom can be a nearly frictionless delivery mechanism for humor. It has to start by sacrificing the radical freedom of the story-joke. In a story-joke, a man may walk into a bar and then next a woman might confront her two gallants, but in a sitcom, Norm walks into Cheers week after week. If a woman is going to confront her gallants, it’s going to happen in that same bar, with the same extended cast of characters. The comedy is ideally going to emerge from the assigned situation, or at least be forced into its strictures somewhere. In this way, all the humor is brought down to earth, down from the stratosphere of the anything-can-happen story-joke. Contemporary audiences, broadly speaking, tend to prefer their humor in this form, as the kind of thing that is funny for the people involved at the time. Outsiders and latecomers are told, “you had to be there” to get the joke. The sitcom is designed so that the viewer was always there when the incidental funny things happened. Everybody’s in on the incidental jokes already, without needing to be briefed right on the spot about what the setup was.
It’s all extremely artificial and staged, but to modern preferences it feels less artificial than the story-joke. It is hard to think of anything easier to do than watching a sitcom. It imposes almost no cognitive load; it meshes perfectly with the audience’s genre expectations. The sitcom is the comfort food of humor.
Of course there’s nothing absolutely unique about finding comedy in situations. Quite the opposite; nearly all comedy is some kind of situation comedy. My point is just that the sitcom, true to its name, is a form that maximizes the situation-to-comedy ratio in a way that is custom-fitted to current tastes.
Flannery O’Connor, who proudly identified herself as a regional writer and gave great attention to observation of her local, southern idiom, said that fiction required two qualities: “One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners.” By “manners,” she meant “the texture of existence that surrounds you” as a writer. By “mystery,” she meant, ultimately, the presence of God, or “the operations of grace in territory largely held by the devil.” The sitcom is obviously committed to manners, or at least to the comedy of manners. The manners in question are sometimes strongly regional in flavor, from Mayberry to Manhattan. But as the child of the broadcast era and mass markets, sitcoms are also tugged toward the least common denominator. They can seem to take place anywhere and nowhere, quintessentially in the unlocatable Springfield of the Simpsons. In these cases, the manners being observed are a kind of meta-manners, Everymanners. As a result, the situation of sitcoms may start with some particular hooks or premises, but they tend strongly toward abstraction into meta-situation, situatedness, Situation Itself.
The possibility of a theological reading of the sitcom lies somewhere in that stretch between particular situations and the very notion of situatedness. Here is a rule: Any sitcom that runs for more than a single season will exhaust its initial interest in its particular situation and increasingly become about the interactions of the characters in a way that could be located anywhere. Sitcoms start out being about their premise (a bar, a police precinct, an office, a shared apartment, a radio show, etc.) and morph into plot-driven character arcs. Some fare better than others, because some characters prove worth following while others turn out to be boors. But most sitcoms seem to thrive in the eternal recurrence of a static situation. They tend to deal poorly with change: it is rarely a good thing when a romantic tension is resolved or when a child actor ages. Well written shows can weather a move (I Love Lucy), a marriage (The Office), or childbirth (Mad About You). But the sitcom itself seems to yearn for the stability of constantly tuning back in to the same setup over and over.
If mystery, in O’Connor’s sense, can make itself known through the manners of the sitcom, it is likely to be a rather generalized and abstracted kind of mystery. I think it is probably best recognized as an off-camera, noumenal presence looming at the back of every sitcom as such, or rather at the back of Situation Itself. Why are things as they are? Why is this setup given to us as it is? Individual writers and auteurs can of course invest theological meaning into particular sitcoms. But the format itself, the sitcom as such, carries in its own form and phenomenology a sense that life is funny, and that the situation rightly contains the comedy. The story crammed inside the story-joke setup always yearned to stretch its wings, to prove that it was inherently capacious enough to be the place where multiple jokes could congregate. In due course it did so, and the sitcom became a preferred form for humor. Let there be light entertainment.
Fred Sanders is a systematic theologian who teaches in the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, as well as in the M.A. Classical Theology at Talbot School of Theology, and the Los Angeles Bible Training School. In addition to being the author and artist of a series of long out-of-print comic books about Christian theology, he is author of The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything (Crossway) and The Triune God (Zondervan Academic). He and his wife are members of Grace Evangelical Free Church in La Mirada, CA.
If I had to make a case on behalf of the sitcom, I would offer the following defense: As formats for humor go, the sitcom is the format that makes itself most at home in the situation where the comedy occurs.
One reason I put it this way is obviously because the name itself gives me the material for analysis: spliced into the name sitcom (which the OED tells me is a neologism produced in America in the 1960s) are the two operative words situation and comedy (which the OED tells me was already a phrase current in criticism of books and theatre by the 1890s). But the words are not the foundation of what I want to say about the sitcom; they are just a useful reminder because they happen to name the thing aptly. What I really have in mind is a formal analysis of the sitcom. As a genre, a sitcom is usually a TV series in thirty-minute episodes with an ensemble cast of characters in an easily recognizable setting: a restaurant, a bar, a garage, an office, a neighborhood, a home, etc. The big idea is a simple one: the set of wacky characters will play to type in episode after episode, ringing the changes on whatever conventional setting they occupy.
The basic formula and its conventions came into being alongside the technology of television. The idea of a set scene for characters to interact in was inherited from stage drama, but the requirements of television dictated some interesting mutations: short scenes of definite length in filmable situations that would resume every week, on appointment. Historically, sitcom producers slid almost lazily into these conventions, not pushing restlessly against the limitations of the new medium, but occupying every bit of the new space just as it became available. When better lighting and multiple cameras became available and affordable, the sitcom expanded to take advantage of them. And so, by technological evolution, a genre came into being almost by accident. It was not driven by high theory or by the deep yearning of artists for self-expression and formal experimentation. It just kind of happened. There are several disadvantages that attend its accidental emergence: the whole genre has a marked tendency toward lazy tropes and half-hearted clichés. But there are also advantages. What has congealed as the sitcom is something that gives contemporary expression to what humor has apparently always wanted to express: the givenness of human situations as the place where humor happens.
Think for a minute about the classic story-joke format. I mean the kind that are currently out of fashion, but that simply dominated previous generations. They involve a very brief narrative setup like “a guy walks into a bar” or “there was a little boy who found a frog in the woods.” These are hardly bearable to modern sensibilities for some reason. The sheer artificiality of conjuring a whole situation with a few opening words just seems intrusive to us now. As a professor who teaches undergrads, I know they’ll indulge me in many kinds of humor, extending even to puns. But I cannot imagine how a class would respond if I began regaling them with jokes in this form: “It seems a certain salesman had too many red shoes in stock, and came up with a clever idea for how to sell them.” I would stare into the intergenerational abyss only to find it ignoring me back. And yet these portable story-jokes are exactly the kind of thing my father and I used to exchange via phone every few weeks, just yesterday (that is, a quarter of a century ago).
Does anything reveal the distinctive character of a culture or an era more clearly than the forms in which it expresses its sense of humor? And does anything mark a cultural shift more definitely than the passing away of a standard for of humor? I have a Dover reprint of a 1739 book called Joe Miller’s Jests, or the Wits Vade-Mecum, which the cover, not very credibly, claims is “the most popular humor book of all time.” Its original subtitle promises that it is “a collection of the most brilliant jests; the politest repartees; the most elegant bons mots, and most pleasant short stories in the English language.” I have studied all 247 numbered jokes assiduously for some time, and I cannot find anywhere among them anything straightforwardly funny. The closest is perhaps joke number 119:
A Gentlewoman growing big with Child, who had two Gallants, one of them with a wooden Leg, the Question was put, which of the two should father the Child. He who had the wooden Leg offer’d to decide it thus. “If the Child,” said he, “comes into the World with a wooden Leg, I will father it, if not, it must be yours.”
In one sense, I definitely get the joke: prosthetic limbs not being heritable traits, the Gallant’s proposal is a nimble way of sidestepping paternity. Ah, drollery; most amusing indeed. But no. Something in the set-up is all wrong for modern audiences. What strikes us odd is the whole idea of crafting a little story (“see, there was a lady with two lovers, and get this, one of them had a wooden leg, okay?”) just so we can repeat the “elegant bon mot” delivered by one character in precisely this situation. Why would anybody do that? And who could possibly do it 247 times in a row, dead-lifting a new situation into existence for every single joke, then tossing it aside and moving on to the next one. Joe Miller joke number 120, in case you’re curious, concerns “a Gentleman who had been out a shooting” birds with his Irish servant. Hilarity ensues, kind of. And by joke 121, a cook in a tavern is frying some fish. And so on and on.
The classic story-joke, I think, is the format that makes itself least at home in the situation where the comedy occurs. The situation itself is obviously disposably utilitarian, doing nothing but setting up the punchline. From one joke to another, the speaker can introduce anybody, the situation can be anything, the humor can come from anywhere. There’s a kind of radical freedom in the interval between any two jokes. Many stand-up comedians exploit this freedom, sticking to one premise as long as it pays off before switching suddenly to another.
For slightly more involvement in the situation, we might look to something like skit comedy, where actors establish characters whose presence endures for several minutes, and punch lines are (ideally) scattered evenly throughout the skit. For even more involvement, we could turn to a comedy of manners, whether in a form designed to be read (a comic novel; perhaps Wodehouse fits here) or staged (a stage comedy). In each case, we have a comedy format that makes progressively more of the comic situation. Beyond a certain point of sophistication, though, we reach a level of art in which humor is only one of the elements at play. Jane Austen certainly makes much of the situations and manners of her characters, and is certainly funny; but to take her measure as an author we would have to consider numerous other virtues. If we restrict ourselves to things that are only trying to be funny, the popular format that makes the deepest commitment to the stability of a narrative setting is the sitcom.
In the light of this increasing thickness given over to the situation in which the joke occurs, it’s tempting to declare sitcoms a kind of apex art form. But we should be careful about making any grandiose claims for sitcoms, which work best when we don’t expect too much of them. Praising them too highly would expose their limitations too harshly. If an especially good sitcom achieves perfection, it is the perfection of light entertainment.
And it probably is. A good sitcom can be a nearly frictionless delivery mechanism for humor. It has to start by sacrificing the radical freedom of the story-joke. In a story-joke, a man may walk into a bar and then next a woman might confront her two gallants, but in a sitcom, Norm walks into Cheers week after week. If a woman is going to confront her gallants, it’s going to happen in that same bar, with the same extended cast of characters. The comedy is ideally going to emerge from the assigned situation, or at least be forced into its strictures somewhere. In this way, all the humor is brought down to earth, down from the stratosphere of the anything-can-happen story-joke. Contemporary audiences, broadly speaking, tend to prefer their humor in this form, as the kind of thing that is funny for the people involved at the time. Outsiders and latecomers are told, “you had to be there” to get the joke. The sitcom is designed so that the viewer was always there when the incidental funny things happened. Everybody’s in on the incidental jokes already, without needing to be briefed right on the spot about what the setup was.
It's all extremely artificial and staged, but to modern preferences it feels less artificial than the story-joke. It is hard to think of anything easier to do than watching a sitcom. It imposes almost no cognitive load; it meshes perfectly with the audience’s genre expectations. The sitcom is the comfort food of humor.
Of course there’s nothing absolutely unique about finding comedy in situations. Quite the opposite; nearly all comedy is some kind of situation comedy. My point is just that the sitcom, true to its name, is a form that maximizes the situation-to-comedy ratio in a way that is custom-fitted to current tastes.
Flannery O’Connor, who proudly identified herself as a regional writer and gave great attention to observation of her local, southern idiom, said that fiction required two qualities: “One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners.” By “manners,” she meant “the texture of existence that surrounds you” as a writer. By “mystery,” she meant, ultimately, the presence of God, or “the operations of grace in territory largely held by the devil.” The sitcom is obviously committed to manners, or at least to the comedy of manners. The manners in question are sometimes strongly regional in flavor, from Mayberry to Manhattan. But as the child of the broadcast era and mass markets, sitcoms are also tugged toward the least common denominator. They can seem to take place anywhere and nowhere, quintessentially in the unlocatable Springfield of the Simpsons. In these cases, the manners being observed are a kind of meta-manners, Everymanners. As a result, the situation of sitcoms may start with some particular hooks or premises, but they tend strongly toward abstraction into meta-situation, situatedness, Situation Itself.
The possibility of a theological reading of the sitcom lies somewhere in that stretch between particular situations and the very notion of situatedness. Here is a rule: Any sitcom that runs for more than a single season will exhaust its initial interest in its particular situation and increasingly become about the interactions of the characters in a way that could be located anywhere. Sitcoms start out being about their premise (a bar, a police precinct, an office, a shared apartment, a radio show, etc.) and morph into plot-driven character arcs. Some fare better than others, because some characters prove worth following while others turn out to be boors. But most sitcoms seem to thrive in the eternal recurrence of a static situation. They tend to deal poorly with change: it is rarely a good thing when a romantic tension is resolved or when a child actor ages. Well written shows can weather a move (I Love Lucy), a marriage (The Office), or childbirth (Mad About You). But the sitcom itself seems to yearn for the stability of constantly tuning back in to the same setup over and over.
If mystery, in O’Connor’s sense, can make itself known through the manners of the sitcom, it is likely to be a rather generalized and abstracted kind of mystery. I think it is probably best recognized as an off-camera, noumenal presence looming at the back of every sitcom as such, or rather at the back of Situation Itself. Why are things as they are? Why is this setup given to us as it is? Individual writers and auteurs can of course invest theological meaning into particular sitcoms. But the format itself, the sitcom as such, carries in its own form and phenomenology a sense that life is funny, and that the situation rightly contains the comedy. The story crammed inside the story-joke setup always yearned to stretch its wings, to prove that it was inherently capacious enough to be the place where multiple jokes could congregate. In due course it did so, and the sitcom became a preferred form for humor. Let there be light entertainment.
Fred Sanders is a systematic theologian who teaches in the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, as well as in the M.A. Classical Theology at Talbot School of Theology, and the Los Angeles Bible Training School. In addition to being the author and artist of a series of long out-of-print comic books about Christian theology, he is author of The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything (Crossway) and The Triune God (Zondervan Academic). He and his wife are members of Grace Evangelical Free Church in La Mirada, CA.
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