Born in the USA: a story of money and angels

Abstract

I teach at a university. I bring up a child on my own. The builders have made a mess of my kitchen. Last week the freezer spontaneously defrosted. One of my best friends is pregnant. None of this is of any interest to the reader. It is, however, the stuff of which situation comedy is made. Sitcom, like its cousin soap opera, is a uniquely televisual form with a uniquely televisual role. While other programmes seek to provide a (not always transparent) window on the public world which we view from our domestic space, sitcom brings the private space into the private space. Sitcom is about people like us: personal mistakes and problems overcome in our everyday interaction with others. If it portrays people different from us — with, say, jobs in public life, or from the past — the point will still be to elicit the laughter of recognition: we understand the feelings of the MP who panics because she is late for a debate, the cringing courtier who gets the wrong gift for Elizabeth I. Sitcom is a leveller: everyone’s laughably human, when you get to know them. And you will get to know them; a successful sitcom will run for years, and subsequently reappear with the status of a ‘comedy classic’ on both TV and video. It may well attract better viewing figures this time around; familiarity is part of its attraction. A well-loved sitcom slips into our lives as so many of its protagonists did in the nineteen fifties, crying, ‘Honey, I’m home!’