5 - Audiences

Summary

Here's the big difficulty with television comedy; it's the only bit of television that tells the audience what they'll feel before it starts.

(Jon Plowman 2005)

The notion that sitcom's aim is to make people laugh seems so obvious as to not warrant evidence or investigation. Television comedy is repeatedly judged on its funniness, and this is an approach adopted by audiences, critics and the creative industries. The aim here is not to suggest otherwise; while academic approaches to sitcom are many and employ a range of methods with various aims, the genre is defined by its ‘comic impetus’, which has a clear relationship to audience responses to it. What shall be examined here is the effect such a generic characteristic has. While all media texts have some kind of aim, and somehow take into account the audience for whom they are made, this has a particular inflection for the sitcom because of the ‘form of pragmatism’ (Curtis 1982: 4) which defines its success. This not only affects industrial decisions and textual practices, it also, significantly, cues audiences into a particular kind of response, with viewers criticising programmes that fail to deliver. As Plowman notes above, the expectations audiences bring to sitcom are clear and defined, and these require a response which is as much emotional as it is anything else.