Page 105 - The Language of Humour

92 SPOKEN HUMOUR—TELEVISION AND RADIO
share in the humour, as there’s no intention to make the talk
inclusive for a wider group.
2. Yet this is a fictional and scripted scenario, so there is a need for an
audience to share the humour. The most obvious target audience
are those that can identify with the group of young, attractive,
single New Yorkers, either because they share, or aspire to, those
characteristics. The audience figures probably bear this out. There
is vicarious pleasure in their successful life-style, marred only by
minor setbacks. This description, however, suggests little more than
the bland world of soap-powder adverts. The six protagonists are
not simply glamorous, but have distinct character quirks.
3. Here are a range of comments made by students about each of the
characters: Rachel: sexy, funky, dotty. Monica: obsessive,
competitive, obsessive about weight. Phoebe: weird, new-agey, on
another planet, unpredictable. Chandler: witty, cynical, insecure.
Joey: over-confident, a lad, dopey. Ross: sensitive, odd, geeky,
introspective. The sitcom thus features a range of personality types
that occur in friendship groupings; they are good company, but can
be infuriating.
4. The situation from week to week explores all sorts of combinations
of characters and the comic potential of the clashes: Joey and
Chandler as flat-mates and rivals: Rachel and Ross with their on-
off love affair; Ross and Monica with brother/sister tensions;
Phoebe out on a limb.
5. It would be interesting to test out written versions of the comic
dialogue, without the speakers’ names, to see how easily utterances
could be matched up to the characters. Where the interchange leads
up to a punchline, the ‘feeder’ lines could, perhaps, be spoken by
any character, but the part which gains a laugh is often associated
with a particular personality. Phoebe’s comic lines, for example,
could only be delivered by her. The humour is based on the
oddness of her responses. The world she inhabits is one of high-
minded aspirations, unaware of the need for a lighter, more trivial
response in that situation: when asked what she wants for her
birthday, she launches into deeply-felt wishes about her mother.
She often interprets other people’s questions and comments
literally, ignoring the conventional force of the utterance: ‘Guess
who we saw today?’ is a conversational opener that does not invite
a protracted guessing game. Ross’s observations tend to delve so
deeply into the implications of notions, for example ‘if seven dog
years equals one human year…’hat he loses the others—but not the