Sitcoms and Absurdism

by Andrew Hirschhorn

What follows is not a grand, unifying theory that will unlock the mysteries of sitcoms, but a syntagm of contingent observations that may be developed into something more coherent some day – any one is welcome to make what they can of this. I hope that some of you may find some of it useful.

The traditional sitcom is a single-set closed narrative about a small group of people, without any narrative development (let alone resolution); at the end of the episode our characters are back at exactly the same point from which they departed some twenty-seven minutes previously. A circular narrative does not follow any of the precepts of Aristotle’s Poetics, upon which most film writing is based, as the characters have nowhere to go either literally or metaphorically, and there is no obvious antagonist, protagonist, no struggle, little drama and no stakes, goals or choices (well, there are, but as a sitcom wouldn’t work if the characters chose to make a life changing decision, the choices are actually pretty meaningless), which also means that sitcoms are quite difficult for students to analyse, because it is not immediately clear exactly what sitcoms are actually about.

But, as so often with issues of story telling, Aristotle does provide a clue. In The Poetics he writes of comedy that:

. . . [it] is a mimesis of men who are inferior [to the subjects of tragedy or epic], but not in a way which involves complete evil: the comic is one species of the shameful. For the comic is constituted by a fault and a mark of shame, but lacking in pain or destruction. (tr Halliwell 1998)

Heroes (protagonists) are, as we know, people who achieve some goal by overcoming obstacles and end their journey stronger, wiser, and with greater self knowledge than at the beginning. Tragic heroes end up dead (or outcast), but the audience should gain wisdom as a result of the protagonist’s doomed journey. The sitcom character, because he (and the gender is significant as we shall see) cannot learn from his experiences -- or if he can learn, cannot put his lesson into practice and lacks the will to escape or improve, is therefore shamed, and unmanly, and in Sartre’s term, lives ‘in bad faith’ (the opposite of the existential hero). He lives a life, as Thoreau puts it, ‘of quiet desperation’.

The audience’s laughter is that of catharsis – what we recognise in the sitcom is the human condition:

“Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.” (Eugene Ionescu on Kafka, quoted Esslin 2001).

The sitcom’s character (one can hardly refer to him as either hero or protagonist) cannot be destroyed because he will not confront his own weaknesses, and although we can feel pain on his behalf, cannot himself suffer (at least not for very long), but would rather go down the pub. Gary and Tony, Basil, Rodney and Del Boy, David Brent, Father Ted, Harold Steptoe, Rigsby, Jonny & Gaz -- where reality does not have to be faced, which is just as well, as (to switch to a Freudian discourse) none of these characters have developed a super-ego because there are no father figures in sitcoms and therefore no fear of castration. They are still adolescent boys in men’s trousers, with all that implies including a typically British obsession with bums, boobs and poo, and of course, class.

Almost the only ‘serious’ sitcom that does not fit this generic mould, and treats its characters with unfailing courtesy, is Dad’s Army -- a sitcom in which the writers clearly love and admire their creations. It is perhaps worth noting that Dad’s Army is also the most popular of all sitcoms -- but that’s another story.

So where did this quintessentially modern anti-hero, teetering on the edge of despair, come from? One obvious influence is ‘classical’ Absurdism -- Pinter, Beckett, and Ionescu -- and if you see (or read the script of) the original Comedy Playhouse ‘pilot’ of Steptoe, the influences of Godot on Galton and Simpson are very clear.

Another influence is, via the radio (ITMA, Round The Horne, and The Goons), and the theatre with such writers as Shakespeare, Wilde, Chekhov, Shaw and N. F. Simpson and early Stoppard, the very ancient English linguistic tradition of puns and bizarre wordplay that dates back to Anglo Saxon times and can be seen in At Last The 1948 Show, Monty Python and Father Ted. As befits a nation whose cultural hero is a writer, English surrealism is almost solely literary, whereas the Belgians have Magritte (and Herge, ‘Mr Storyboard’) as their dominant cultural forces.

There are other clear influences -- Sterne, Dickens (whose novels are full of failures, incurable optimists, monomaniacs and obsessives), the Jacobean tragi-comedies, Restoration Comedy.

Of course there is another way of looking at this issue, a perception I owe to Nick Lacey -- perhaps the slackers and emotional retards of the British sitcom are not alienated and angst ridden losers, but men-boys, Peter Pans in fact, who are confronting the neuroses of bourgeois life by opting out of it completely. This is certainly a strand in Coupling and Two Pints of Lager.

The various theories of binary opposites (day/night, tall/short etc.), of which Lévi-Strauss is perhaps the best known of students, date back to Pythagoras and his ten oppositions (as Aristotle reports in his Metaphysics). These oppositions include male/female, right/left, light/ darkness, straight/curved. Obviously Pythagoras was reflecting contemporary and patriarchal social attitudes in his choices, but the use of opposites to express values is in itself ideology free, and could be applied to sitcom characters – get your students to list all the things sitcom men are: feckless, lazy, self centred, irresponsible, obsessive, egocentric, childish, noisy, untidy, cowardly. These are just a few that come immediately to mind. Then list the opposite of each value. I am not saying that these attributes are exclusively male, (Kathy Burke in Gimme Gimme Gimme and Gina Bellman in Coupling, seem to fit the bill well) but . . .

And would any woman put up with the chaos (physical and emotional) that sitcom men inhabit? As the men can never grow up they are doomed to spend eternity, (or as many episodes as the writers can manage), in limbo, neither man nor child, always yearning for what they can never have -- a regular bourgeois life. Of course, some do manage that -- but who wants to study Terry and June, or Butterflies?

References

Martin Esslin (2001) The Theatre of the Absurd, Methuen

Stephen Halliwell (1998) Aristotle’s Poetics, Bristol Classical Press

This is one of three short pieces on 'Representations of Gender in TV Sitcoms' published in itp 46. Order a back copy for only £1.50

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