British TV Comedies

Cultural Concepts, Contexts and Controversies

Juergen Kamm, Birgit Neumann, Juergen Kamm, Birgit Neumann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137552952
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection offers an overview of British TV comedies, ranging from the beginnings of sitcoms in the 1950s to the current boom of 'Britcoms'. It provides in-depth analyses of major comedies, systematically addressing their generic properties, filmic history, humour politics and cultural impact.

1
Introduction: The Aesthetics and Politics of British TV Comedy

Jürgen Kamm and Birgit Neumann

1 Comedy matters

TV comedies make up some of the most watched, most profitable and most controversial productions on British screens. Not least due to the role of public broadcasting, TV comedy in the UK enjoys a tradition and success probably unrivalled anywhere. Firmly embedded in the British media culture and shaped by the specific dynamics of the British television industry, British TV comedies are immensely powerful cultural media, which have developed distinctive filmic formats and nationally inflected narrative traditions (Dannenberg 169). The great popularity of the British TV comedy has certainly much to do with its formal and cultural flexibility. Even if its primary aim is to be funny and to entertain, comedy typically touches upon a whole range of cultural topics and explores a variety of ideological conflicts (Feuer 69). Typically oscillating between appreciation and denigration, affirmation and subversion, British TV comedy plays a significant role in the formation, dissemination and reflection of cultural values, structures of identification and notions of difference: concepts of class, gender, ethnicity, disability, sex, family, work and domesticity find a most intriguing and provocative expression in TV comedies. Consider, for instance, Men Behaving Badly (ITV/BBC1 1992–1999), probably the signature sitcom of the 1990s, whose depiction of the ‘new lad’ propelled debates about new concepts of masculinity and the historical dynamics of gender relations. Since British TV comedies, with very few exceptions, pick out central themes that concern British society in general or particular social groups at the time of production, they offer a rich source for gauging the intersections of British (popular) culture, history and media.

It is surprising that relatively little academic work has as yet been done on a genre that is as popular and entertaining as it is intellectually challenging. Up to now, British TV comedies, including their generic variety, filmic history, humour politics and cultural impact, have rarely been studied in a comprehensive and systematic manner. Of course, the present volume cannot fill this lacuna; however, it can provide an overview of some milestones in this history of British TV comedy in an exemplary manner. We start from the assumption that TV comedy needs to be taken seriously (Palmer). There is no longer any need to defend the status of comedy against the charge of cultural triviality and aesthetic insignificance. Instead, we propose to examine particular features and functions of British TV comedy over time. The aim of this volume is to offer concise interpretations of major British comedies, ranging from the beginnings of the sitcom in the 1950s to the current boom of ‘Britcoms’, as well as to explore their cultural concerns, generic tendencies and historical developments. Some of the key questions to be addressed in the contributions include: which cultural concepts and topics are negotiated in TV comedies? How does comedy use symbolic codes and aesthetically condensed images to negotiate cultural issues? How and to what end is humour used? Who are the spectators and who are the objects of the comic spectacle? How are genre conventions and filmic formats taken up and further developed? How does (popular) seriality work and how do the dynamics of seriality connect to popular aesthetics? How does seriality bear on the negotiation of ideological conflicts? And what role is played by the British television industry, marketing strategies and the audience? By examining these and other questions, this volume wants to present the multifaceted generic variety and humour politics of British TV comedy, stimulating a debate about its cultural impact as a mode of public address.

2 Comedy and transgression

Being closely intertwined with cultural and social configurations, there is hardly any topic and social arena of British culture that is not playfully negotiated by TV comedy, and yet TV comedies never operate in a purely mimetic manner. Rather, they use the imaginative and aesthetically condensed space of fiction to exceed the status quo of established concepts, to creatively subvert established norms and to humorously probe new forms of identification (Chambers; Emig, ‘The Family’ 151–152). Following the conventions of comedy, the playful discussion of cultural topics is not an end in itself, but aims at entertaining audiences and creating laughter among them. Whatever topic is taken up in TV comedy will therefore inevitably be depicted in a comically exaggerated or satirically distorted manner (Jacobson 1–38; Emig, ‘Taking Comedy Seriously’ 20). Comedy and the comic, however, are notoriously difficult concepts to define and no single definition exists to date. Generically, comedy relies on transgression, cultural deviation and, sometimes, deformity and monstrosity. ‘All instances of the comic, of that which is specifically designed to be funny’, Neale and Krutnik rightly point out, ‘are founded on the transgression of decorum … on deviation from any social or aesthetic rule, norm, model, convention or law. Such deviations are the basis of comic surprise’ (Neale and Krutnik 86). Deviation entails a break with established norms and standards of decorum, and frequently involves a relocation of specific forms of behaviour to a ‘teasingly inappropriate framing’ (Weitz 93), thus producing humorous incongruities and anarchic disorder. The range of possible deviations is vast and complex, including deviations on the level of generic conventions, language, social behaviour, physical appearance and performance. Deviations from established generic forms, generic mixing and hybridisation are essential to TV comedy and might well be considered central to its historical development and constant innovation (Nelson). Just think, for instance, of The Office (BBC2/BBC1 2001–2003), which radically breaks with established representational forms of the sitcom and playfully exploits the aesthetics of another television mode, namely the documentary, to engage with contemporary, post-industrial aspects of the workplace and to curtail the openly flaunted artificiality that was the hallmark of TV comedies for decades (Mills, ‘Comedy Verite’ 67).¹

Comedy temporarily suspends the rigid regimes of normality with performances, behaviour patterns, practices, dialogues and images of surreal absurdity, grotesque exaggeration and drastic vehemence, inviting viewers to interrogate the moral ground of cherished norms and established values. Typically, British TV comedies feature highly eccentric, overblown characters who struggle to move beyond the conventions of their specific class, gender, ethnicity or occupation (Dannenberg 172) and who incessantly and sometimes stubbornly transgress social norms. Through the dynamics of this character constellation, TV comedy typically ridicules hegemonic norms and counteracts the construction of singular and authoritative orthodoxies. In Fawlty Towers (BBC2 1975–1979), Basil Fawlty, a snobbish hotel owner, delights in insulting his guests rather than serving and supporting them.² The Royle Family (BBC2/BBC1 1998–2000, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2012) makes much of ‘the “not-quiteness” of family life’ (Hartley 79), depicting the family as an accumulation of various dysfunctions and a site of constant conflict and ‘dismal non-communication’ (Dannenberg 176).³ And in Absolutely Fabulous (BBC1 1992–1996, 2001–2004, 2011–2012), Edina’s egocentricity, her absolute failure at domestic tasks, her drug abuse and her ostentatious lack of interest in her daughter Saffron violate the generation contract and ‘propose a blazing critique of conventional representations of motherhood and family life by ridiculing the maternal instinct and notions of women’s liberation’ (Chambers 169).⁴ Such playful transgression, however, ‘is not an abhorration nor a luxury, it is rather a dynamic force in cultural reproduction – it prevents stagnation by breaking the rule and it ensures stability by reaffirming the rule’ (Jencks 7). In this sense, many TV British comedies are indeed ‘worldly’ (Said 4). By portraying alternative, marginal and eccentric patterns of behaviour, they offer new, unprecedented ways of depicting and experiencing the world.

Resonating with the tradition of theatrical comedy, TV comedy abounds with puns, repetitions, interruptions, digressions, illogicality, double entendres and misunderstandings. Conversations and sentences are interrupted, left incomplete or finished in an unconventional, nonsensical or ungrammatical manner. Comprehension and ‘ordered turn-taking in conversation’ (Emig, ‘Taking Comedy Seriously’ 19) are consciously thwarted by interfering background noises, music or individual speech habits such as the use of slang or dialect. Foregrounding the breakdown of communication and crisis in understanding comedy lays bare the many pitfalls and challenges inherent in seemingly ordinary, logical and economically structured conversation. But communicative failure, nonsense and misunderstanding also have a pleasurable and creatively liberating potential for they temporarily release viewers from the self-imposed obligation of communicating effectively and grant the (childish) pleasure of suspending everyday rules.

The humour of many of these transgressions fundamentally relies on performance and embodiment: physical appearance, voice, gestures, facial expressions, movements – all commingle to accent the physical presence of the bodies whose expressive powers reach well beyond the possibilities of verbal signification. British TV comedy has always harked back to a tradition of physical comedy to highlight ‘the physicality of comic acting’ (Mills, ‘Contemporary Comedy’ 131). Brett Mills is right to point out that: ‘Much comedy draws on the physical, whether it be a joke about sexual behaviour, the pain of slapstick or laughter at fat people, even if ‘civilised’ societies condemn such humour’ (‘Contemporary Comedy’ 133). In comedy, the body serves as a ‘complex and polyvalent instrument of expression’ (Buckley 251), which is not only linked to the dramatic action; more importantly, the body conveys emotions, impulses and affects that cannot be expressed other than through bodily enactment. Due to the frequent use of slapstick and idiosyncratic physical performance, seemingly ordinary, everyday situations may be turned into absurd or surreal moments. It is in scenes involving physical comedy, silly faces, movements and voices, and sudden changes in energy that the ‘comic excess’ (Mills, ‘Contemporary Comedy’ 137) characteristic of the situation comedy is probably most obvious. Physical comedy, such as we find it in Little Britain (BBC3/BBC1 2003–2006) or The League of Gentlemen (BBC2 1999–2002), turns the body into an eloquent body, that is, a major site of comic intervention (Mills, ‘Contemporary Comedy’ 131), which confronts viewers with a pre-semiotic realm of absurd, gross or dark physicality. Intensely affective and highly sensual, the absurd, monstrous, abject or disgusting body conveys suppressed cultural taboos and elicits strong emotions and a pleasurable uneasiness. But it is worth remembering that the grotesque, deformed, loose, abject or even monstrous body is not only funny – it frequently constitutes an ideological site through which established notions of physical appearance, beauty, perfection, cleanliness, age and normality are critically negotiated (Feuer 68).⁵ The abject and monstrous body counters the primacy of the civilised and disciplined cleanliness of the modern body. It allows for an encounter with otherness that hints at repressed realities and possibly tabooed desires. What is more, the openly showcased physicality of comic acting reveals the centrality of performativity to constructions of gendered, ethnic or class-specific identities, illustrating that these rely on acts which have been ‘rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again’ (Butler 526). TV comedy is a particularly productive space for exploring the complex interrelation of performativity and identification through exaggerated, farcical deconstructions of social norms and transgressive performances.

TV comedy and humour feed upon a disparity or incongruity between the characters’ social behaviour and physical characteristics on the one hand and established norms and expectations on the other (Critchley 2–3; Morreall 195; Weitz 93). Humour or, more specifically, the provocation of laughter arises from ‘the surprise of confounded expectations’ (Mills, The Sitcom 82), that is, an incongruity between cultural conventions and unexpected, absurd or deviant situations. Through inappropriate framings of situations, actions and experiences, comedy enacts a constant shifting game (Sommer 239) that produces humorous incongruities and ambivalences. Drawing on the incongruity theory, John Morreall maintains that the cognitive experience of incongruity, that is, the deviation from standard expectations, typically provokes some sort of cognitively troubling uneasiness – unless it is made clear that incongruity and deviance themselves follow specific rules, such as those provided by the generic conventions of (TV) comedy (Morreall 195). In this case, the incongruent situation affords pleasure and cognitive stimulation rather than eliciting negative feelings. In a situation of generically framed incongruity, the violation of standard expectations can be enjoyable precisely because it offers recipients a temporary respite from the rigid norms of everyday life, allowing them to playfully adopt alternative, distancing and critical attitudes (Mills, The Sitcom 82). In other words, the transgressive humour of comedy can provide a borderline experience, an experience of in-between-ness, created by the confrontation with unexpected and absurd situations, which attract and fascinate by generating a feeling of pleasurable uneasiness (Billig 57–85). Seen from this perspective, comic transgressions are central to what the French philosopher Jacques Rancière (13) called the ‘distribution of the sensible’, understood as ‘the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience’.

3 The politics of humour

Given comedy’s emphasis on deviation and transgression, it is perhaps not surprising that comedy and humour have often been interpreted in terms of their subversive functions, as sites for criticising social norms, unsettling hierarchies and depicting ‘the unsayable’ (Mills, ‘Comedy Verite’ 64). Within theories of humour, the understanding of humour as subversive or even radical has a long tradition and reaches back to Sigmund Freud (1905/1953), one of the earliest modern theorists of humour and jokes (Billig 139–172). Freud understands joking as the expression of something culturally tabooed and hence as a symptom of the repression of unwanted thoughts and bodily drives. Operating along the principles of displacement (or substitution) and condensation, jokes temporarily bring to the surface what remains otherwise unsayable in society. To the extent that jokes thrive on the largely anti-social id, they ‘will abound’ whenever subjects are confronted with rigid norms and social restrictions (Billig 154). Humour may therefore be a means of communicating messages which cannot be articulated seriously since they violate accepted behavioural rules (Mulkay 79–83). According to Freud’s psychoanalytical understanding, joking is closely related to ‘the re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: The Aesthetics and Politics of British TV Comedy
• Part I The 1950s and 1960s: Beginnings of the British Sitcom and the Satire Boom
• Part II The 1970s and 1980s: New Loyalties, Histories and Collective Identities – Post-familiar Paradigms
• Part III The 1990s: (Un)doing Gender and Race
• Part IV The 2000s: Britcom Boom – New Britain = ‘Cool Britannia’?
• Index