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A Comparative Analysis of the Reception of Domestic and US Fiction 79

interpretation of the diegetical world, as depicted by both sitcoms. Interpretation
is defined here as the inferential comprehension of both programmes – or the
consideration of how the different elements are meaningfully related to each
other. Here the same questionnaire booklet (scaling phase) can be used, providing
important data on differences of interpretation.

General Specialization

The first finding of note in this part of the study is that the recipients attributed
systematically higher scores to the characters in the American series (see Table 6.1,
where the average mean scores for the twenty-one characteristics are reported).
This was the case for most characteristics (sixteen of the twenty-one). So, the char-
acters in the American fiction programme were considered to be a lot warmer in
their social and moral relations, more modern looking, active, rational, sexy,
intelligent and rough, but also harder and more dominant. One major exception,
however, is that the highest scores for the characteristics within the ‘comic
dimension’ (characteristics 1, 8 and 20) were systematically reserved for characters
in the domestic sitcom.
This central finding of the generally higher values for the US fiction programme
versus the higher estimation of the comic functioning of the domestic sitcom suggests
that, for the recipient, commercial American television drama exploits better and
deeper a broader set of properties (codes) within social, cultural and moral
dimensions. Compared to this general achievement of the American drama, the
domestic programme seems (for the recipients) to have concentrated on the
dominant dimension in sitcoms, the comic one.

Complex Comic Effect

Still, it is not advisable to wrench different dimensions from each other; situation
comedies do not function in just the comic dimension. Sitcoms, and the charac-
ters in them, function in very specific social, moral and cultural contexts (Eaton,
1978). The comic effects of some characters are strongly generated by specific
interrelations between codes and dimensions. The most comic character in the
domestic drama (the character with the highest scores for the comic characteris-
tics) also scored extremely high on other characteristics (like ‘rough’, etc.). In this
sense any analysis of the functioning of specific characters has to be closely
connected to the recipients’ reconstruction of the interplay of several dimensions
on moral, cultural, social, comic and other levels.
Analysing the data in this way (see Biltereyst, 1991) indicates clearly that
the viewers have been decoding the domestic programme on more complex,
extreme levels, using several dimensions. To give just one example, it was clear
that the recipients made a quite logical connection between the intellectual
status of a character and its comic effect in the domestic drama: people with
extreme low or high scores for the characteristic of ‘intelligence’ (characteristic 19)