Sitcoms

Defining Sitcoms

The most fruitful way to think of sitcoms is as a television and radio genre. Genres are forms of culture that have characteristics in common but can never be concretely defined to the point that what belongs in such a category is beyond discussion; therefore, deciding what is and is not a sitcom is always up for debate. That said, there are characteristics that can be seen to recur often across the genre and that are commonly understood to be indicative of sitcoms.

Sitcoms are a serial form of television and radio, made up of many episodes (sometimes into the hundreds) often across many years. This serial format is common in broadcasting, where the regular nature of the schedule encourages program making that is episodic. This distinguishes sitcoms from comedy in other media because, unlike the theater, film, or the novel, sitcoms are not predicated on getting to the end of the narrative. While individual episodes may have self-contained stories, the ongoing, episodic nature of sitcoms means that the overall ending is repeatedly delayed, and, therefore, only the middle portion of the story is presented to the audience. This fact has caused many problems for the use of traditional comedy analysis when one studies sitcoms because most of those frameworks argue that comedy can be defined by its happy ending. Analysis of sitcoms has, therefore, had to develop new models that acknowledge the genre’s episodic structure.

This episodic structure accounts for the kinds of settings that recur in sitcoms, as a program needs to have a setup that can facilitate multiple characters and many episodes. Many sitcoms are set in the home, where the main characters are a family and the comedy centers on familial relationships and misunderstandings. Similarly, sitcoms are often set in workplaces, where multiple characters repeatedly interact in a restricted setting. The idea of place is key to sitcoms, and it is common for them to have very few sets. Location shooting has traditionally been rare in sitcoms; sitcoms are usually considered a studio-bound genre.

Most sitcoms are 30 minutes long in broadcast time and, in commercial broadcasting systems, must include narrative breaks in order to accommodate advertising. For many decades, the dominant way in which sitcoms were filmed was in front of a live studio audience, whose laughter was recorded and broadcast [Page 696]alongside the program. This laugh track remains one of the most obvious defining characteristics of the genre, even though there have been programs that have not used it. Although the lack of a laugh track has become more prevalent in recent years, the laugh track remains an interesting characteristic of the genre: It means that sitcoms are a form of culture that acknowledges the audience it is performed for and invites audiences at home to align themselves with those who were at the recording, which can be seen as being indicative of comedy’s communal nature and the social aspects of humor and laughter.

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