Page 102 - The Language of Humour

SPOKEN HUMOUR- TELEVISION AND RADIO 89
produce significant amounts of scripted humour. Radio 4 unfortunately
has such a limited audience—appealing mainly to middle-aged,
middleclass listeners—that much new comedy is not heard by a wider
audience until it breaks into television—and the best does so! (Alan
Partridge, Brass Eye, This is the Day, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
etc). Although the quality is innovative, so that it should appeal to a
wider and younger audience, examples will not be included here,
because of lack of space.

Television

The examples in the activities have been drawn from television. There
is a great variety of comedy on TV and it reaches a large audience, so it
is potentially very influential. Television has a range of types of scripted
humour, which can be summarised briefly to provide a guide for
classifying and selecting examples for your own analysis.

SITUATION COMEDIES

Sitcoms have a series of weekly shows based around an initial idea of a
situation and characters with potential for humour. These characters
remain essentially the same, rather than developing as they would in
comedy drama; (such examples would need to be examined within the
context of other dramatic techniques). The humour in a sitcom comes
from playing around with the comic possibilities of those particular
character types interacting with each other in that situation, and may not
involve lines or gags which are funny in isolation.
Analysis of the humour requires comment on the humorous potential
of the situation itself, as well as examining individual occurrences of
humour. (The entire transcript of an episode would provide too much data
for close analysis.) For example, Steptoe and Son featured father and
son rag and bone merchants; The Good Life followed neighbouring
couples with different lifestyles. The type of situation perceived as
funny will ref lect preoccupations of that culture; perhaps the previous
examples no longer have dramtic or humorous impact. Although British
comedy has a high reputation and used to claim a higher degree of
subtlety and irony, some of the most popular recent sitcoms are from the
USA: Roseanne and Friends. It is interesting to note the type of
situation which is perceived as having humorous potential for the
society of the time. Roseanne, for example, was one of many American
sitcoms featuring strong women as the central character; Friends