The primary scope of this dissertation is to identify some of the pragmatic mechanisms that underlie the formation and perception of humour in situation comedies and try to apply them to a corpus formed by communicative exchanges between Sheldon, one of the main characters of the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory, and his friends and colleagues in order to understand what kind of humour arises and for what reasons the audience interpret certain instances as humorous.
Chapter One revolves around the description of the main features that characterize sitcom. In particular, attention is given to the description of the audience’s participation framework, in order to understand how the audience approaches the vision of the sitcom.
Furthermore, part of the chapter is devoted to the description of Sheldon Cooper, who is the very focus of the dissertation.
Chapter Two contains the description of Raskin’s “Semantic Script Theory of Humour”
(SSTH), which claims that jokes are formed by two overlapping and opposing scripts, whose codification should determine the correct interpretation of the joke. SSTH will then be supplemented by Alan Partington’s concept of “mental model” and his three mechanisms for the resolution of incongruities generated by humorous texts. Furthermore, an array of stylistic figures commonly used in comic discourse are taken into consideration and explained. In light of this, and in order to understand why Sheldon’s utterances provoke laughter and how they are interpreted by the participants, fourteen excerpts of communication between Sheldon and the other characters will be selected and analysed according to Partington’s revision of the SSTH and considering the stylistic figures explained.
In Chapter Three the phenomenon of “impoliteness” is explored in depth, for it is considered one of the most effective devices for the creation of humour in the sitcom in object. The contribution to the impoliteness framework that is majorly taken into consideration is Culpeper’s “Impoliteness Theory”, by means of which he has tried to explain the use of impoliteness in human communication. Culpeper’s theory will be integrated by Brown and Levinson’s concepts of “positive face” and “negative face”, and by the definitions of “relational work”, “experiential norms” and “social norms”,
“rudeness” and “power”, that have been introduced by Culpeper himself. The theory will
L’obiettivo primario della ricerca è quello di definire alcuni dei meccanismi che stanno alla base della formazione dell’umorismo che permea interamente il genere televisivo della situation comedy e di studiarne le modalità di percezione da parte dello spettatore.
Il primo capitolo è incentrato sulla descrizione delle caratteristiche che maggiormente definiscono il genere della situation comedy, con particolare attenzione rivolta alla descrizione del modello partecipativo che sottostà alla relazione che lo spettatore intesse con la struttura della sitcom e i suoi protagonisti. Inoltre, parte del capitolo è destinata alla descrizione del personaggio di Sheldon Cooper, uno dei protagonisti della sitcom statunitense The Big Bang Theory, che costituisce il fulcro dell’analisi svolta nei capitoli successivi.
Il secondo capitolo contiene la descrizione della “Semantic Script Theory of Humour”
(SSTH) di Victor Raskin, la quale è basata sulla codifica di scripts opposti che, il famoso linguista sostiene, una volta identificati determinano la buona riuscita e corretta interpretazione di una battuta umoristica. Tale teoria è poi rivisitata alla luce della sua interpretazione da parte dello studioso Alan Partington e in vista dell’aggiunta, da parte di quest’ultimo, della nozione di “mental model” e di tre fondamentali meccanismi per la risoluzione delle incongruenze generate dalla percezione di diversi scripts (o mental models) all’interno del testo umoristico. Inoltre, alcune figure stilistiche rintracciabili nei testi di natura comica saranno prese in considerazione e inserite nell’analisi. Alla luce di ciò, quattordici stralci di conversazione tra Sheldon e gli altri protagonisti di The Big Bang Theory saranno selezionati dalla terza stagione della sitcom e analizzati applicando l’interpretazione della SSTH fornita da Partington e tenendo in considerazione le figure stilistiche presentate, cercando in questo modo di comprendere perché esattamente gli enunciati prodotti da Sheldon provocano il riso e in che modo sono interpretati dagli spettatori.
Il terzo capitolo è invece dedicato all’esplorazione del fenomeno linguistico della
“impoliteness” poiché ritenuto uno dei dispositivi più efficaci per la produzione dell’umorismo nella situation comedy in oggetto. Maggiormente utilizzata per l’analisi, è la “Theory of Impoliteness” di Jonathan Culpeper, attraverso la quale lo studioso ha cercato di spiegare il ruolo svolto dalla scortesia all’interno della comunicazione umana.
La teoria di Culpeper sarà poi integrata con i concetti di “positive face” e “negative face”
altri protagonisti di The Big Bang Theory e si cercherà di comprendere il ruolo giocato dalla scortesia nella formazione dell’umorismo nella sitcom in oggetto.
INTRODUCTION 1
1. CHAPTER ONE: THE STIRRING WORLD OF SITUATION COMEDIES 3
Initial remarks 3 1.1 Defining sitcom’s main features 3
1.1.2 Viewers’ participation framework in sitcoms 10
1.2 The Big Bang Theory (2007-) 13 1.3 Sheldon Lee Cooper: a portrayal 16
Final remarks 26
2. CHAPTER TWO: ACHIEVING HUMOUR IN SITUATION COMEDIES 28
Initial remarks 28
2.1 Victor Raskin’s Semantic Script Theory of Humour (SSTH) 28 2.1.1 The incongruous component of jokes 34 2.1.2 Alan Partington’s logical mechanisms of verbal humour 35
2.2 Other features of comic discourse 41
2.2.1 Stylistic figures 41
2.3 Analysis 43
Final remarks 59
3. CHAPTER THREE: WHEN POLITENESS FAILS: AN ANALYSIS OF HUMOUR BASED ON THE USE OF IMPOLITENESS STRATEGIES 61
Initial remarks 61
3.1 Politeness and Impoliteness: a theoretical account 61 3.1.1 Geoffrey Leech’s Principle of Politeness 61 3.1.2 Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson’s Theory of Politeness 64 3.1.3 Jonathan Culpeper’s Theory of Impoliteness 69 3.1.3.1 The notion of relational work as applied to experiential norms and social norms 73 3.1.3.2 Difference between impoliteness and rudeness 74
3.1.3.3 The notion of power 75
CONCLUSION 96
BIBLIOGRAPHY 103
INTRODUCTION
Humour is one of the most pleasurable and intriguing experiences in human life. It brings joy, it relieves the heart, it is the sparkle that enlightens our daily routine and makes us feel happy. During the day we are used to experience laughter with our friends, colleagues and family, people with whom we share our life and meet on a daily basis, but we can also experience laughter watching the television, in particular programs that are explicitly and specifically devised to entertain the public and give it its fair share of amusement, such as situation comedies, that will be the main focus of this dissertation.
This work will investigate the phenomenon of humour as devised in one of the current American situation comedies, The Big Bang Theory, which, during the eight years of its production has garnered huge success and its viewers have grown to be fondly in love with its uncanny characters. In particular, the third season will be taken into consideration as, when the season premiered in 2009, it ranked as CBS’s highest-rated show with 12.8 million viewers. Furthermore, in Season 3 characters’ mutual relationships and characteristics have already established and no particularly relevant character is newly introduced1.
Using an approach based on cognitive pragmatics, I will try to explain how the spectator approaches the vision of the sitcom and why characters’ utterances are perceived as amusing and funny. In order to do so, in Chapter One a general overview of the main characteristics of sitcoms will be made, with particular attention given to the viewers’
participation framework, since it is of paramount importance in understanding how the viewer interacts with the characters and the structure of the sitcom. Moreover, a portrayal of the character of Sheldon Cooper will be proposed, as the analysis will concentrate in particular on his communicative exchanges with the other characters of the sitcom. The choice has fallen on this specific character because the sitcom largely revolves around him;
due of his uncanny personality Sheldon constitutes the most particularized character in terms of his behavioural characteristics and provides the sitcom with a special touch of folly that renders its vision palatable and amusing.
1 In Season 3, Bernadette (Howard’s wife-to-be) and Amy (Sheldon’s girlfriend) will be introduced, but their appearances will be salutary and, until Season 4, they will not become important characters.
Chapter Two is instead divided into two main parts. The first part provides the theoretical framework for the analysis. In particular, Raskin’s “Semantic Script Theory of Humour” will be described in depth and supplemented with Partington’s notion of “mental model”, which contributes to the widening of Raskin’s theory and its adaptation to texts other than jokes. Moreover, it will be argued that the scripts’ overlap and opposition in jokes claimed by Raskin generates an incongruity that, once resolved, can engender humour. In this regard, Partington’s mechanisms for the resolution of incongruities will be introduced and explored in depth. Furthermore, an array of stylistic figures commonly used in comic discourse will be presented, for from their use possibly humorous incongruities can arise. The second part is, instead, devoted to the analysis. Dialogues occurring between Sheldon and his friends will be selected from the third season of The Big Bang Theory and analysed applying Partington’s revision of Raskin’s theory and detecting major stylistic figures in order to determine the incongruities that can arise and how and why they are interpreted as humorous by the audience.
Chapter Three is devoted to the exploration of the phenomenon of impoliteness, for it is considered as one of the major devices used to create the humorous effect that characterizes Sheldon’s utterances. A general overview about the politeness/impoliteness framework. composed by Leech’s “Principle of Politeness” and Brown and Levinson’s
“Theory of Politeness”, will introduce the theory that will be mainly used in the analysis:
Culpeper’s “Theory of Impoliteness”, by means of which the scholar aimed at explaining how and for what purposes impoliteness is used in human communication. Culpeper’s theory will also be supplemented with the notions of “negative face” and “positive face”, borrowed from Brown and Levinson’s Theory of Politeness, and with the concepts of
“relational work”, “experiential norms” and “social norms”, “rudeness” and “power”
introduced by Culpeper himself. The analytical part will, instead, consist of excerpts of communication between Sheldon and his friends chosen from the third season and analysed according to the theory explained and also considering the reactions (both attested and potential) of the characters to Sheldon’s impolite utterances and the viewer’s participation framework. In this way, an attempt at explaining why Sheldon’s use of impoliteness contributes to the hilariousness of the sitcom and why the audience finds it humorous will be made.
CHAPTER ONE
THE STIRRING WORLD OF SITUATION COMEDIES Initial remarks
In this chapter I shall proceed by (i) attempting a definition of the main features that characterize situation comedies, (ii) describe the characteristics of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory and (iii) describe the character of Sheldon, who is the very focus of this dissertation.
1.1 Defining sitcom’s main features
Jane Feuer, in 1992, writes that
We are all capable of identifying its (situation comedy) salient features: the half-hour format, the basis in humour, the “problem of the week” that causes the hilarious situation and that will be resolved so that a new episode may take its place the next week. (Feuer 1992: 146)
Some other features, however, are not so easy to spot nor are they so straightforward to understand, in that they have either faced change over time or are not always identifiable in every situation comedy.
Feuer (1986) argues that a good starting point for the analysis of sitcoms would be the different ways in which sitcom producers deal with “the family”, which is for sure “the linchpin of situation comedy” (Auter 2004: 1275). From the very beginning, characters have always clustered around families but, over the last seventy years of sitcom production, the concept of family has mutated radically. When situation comedies arrived on television for the first time in the forties (Auter 2004), families were represented as stereotypically composed by stay-at-home mothers, bread-winner fathers and children, a tradition that was held during the fifties and the sixties. Richard Butsch, in his 2008 essay, describes the portrayal of the American family as follows:
The American family was portrayed as a vital institution in which love, trust and self-confidence were best developed. […] the networks preferred blandness in
sitcoms. […] No threatening world impinged on these early TV families, not the bomb or the cold war; not 1960s Vietnam, riots, protests; not sex and drugs. These families seldom struggled. All problems were simple and internal to the family. Almost everyone was content about their place in the family and in the world. (Butsch 2008:
115)
In early middle-class situation comedies such as The Andy Griffith Show (1960-1968) and Father Knows Best (1954-1960) the comic situation often revolved around the children or the wife, who were represented as buffoons or troublemakers. The father was instead successful, mature and sensible and the one who always had a solution for every problem;
his authority in every familial matter was undisputed, he was infallible and in control, he was the one who truly knew best (Reimers 2003).
The unity of this idyllic family is somewhat disrupted during the seventies, when super- fathers came to be replaced by less wise and perfect ones such as Archie Bunker of All in the Family (1971-1979) and George of The Jeffersons (1975-1986). The reason why this change happened is explained by Valerie Reimers:
The shift from a world constituted of fathers who spoke standard English and held white collar jobs takes place during the maturation of a first generation of television watchers who watched a world which appeared, for some, to be apart from their reality. (Reimers 2003: 115)
Said otherwise, real families were not as perfect as those appearing on television in the fifties and sixties and people preferred watching something that was more akin to their life, so sitcoms producers had to introduce more actual characters, who were for sure less ideal but slightly more fallible and closer to reality.
Moreover, new and more controversial themes were introduced in sitcoms. As Richard Butsch (2008) points out, Norman Lear, the producer of All in the Family, abandoned the representation of idyllic lives and created more shaped and less one-dimensional characters that dealt with real problems such as racism, abortion and poverty.
During the seventies not only did the figure of the father changed, but the composition of the family was remodelled as well. An alternative family paradigm was developed during those years when sitcoms began to revolve around groups of co-workers and friends, “the nuclear family was no longer the dominant form” (Feuer 1986: 615). This variation also gave rise to alterations in settings: if early sitcoms mostly took place in the
households, now characters are placed in more social environments such as bars or workplaces:
The term family2 is used broadly when describing the sitcom cast of characters. It identifies traditional family members but also friends and co-workers. Any group of people that the main character spends significant amounts of time with and cares a great deal for make up his or her sitcom family. Because of this liberal definition of family3, the situation comedy might be primarily centred on the home but might just as often gravitate to a social gathering place (such as a bar) or a work environment.
(Auter 2004: 1276)
Examples of these reconfigured family groups include The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977), where threats to the family unit come for example from co-workers who want to leave their job but, in the end, change their minds for the sake of the “family”
(Feuer 1986: 615). A peculiar case is instead showed by the Cunningham family of Happy Days (1974-1984). The classic family unit of the fifties is here re-established, with mom and dad helping their children growing up and finding the right path in life, but for one aspect: a new family member, Fonzie, is introduced (Marc 1997). Despite his biker look and his being a womanizer, Fonzie turns out to be a kind of surrogate father who gives the kids precious advices and reinforces their father’s authority and credibility.
Though sporting biker clothes and possessed of legendary sexual charisma (a point that the viewer is often reminded of despite a lack of graphic evidence), the Fonz emerges as a bizarre […] moralist, offering Richie and the audience advice on everything from the importance of staying in school to the evils of racial prejudice.
(Marc 1997: 178)
The nineties and two-thousands brought with them an array of dysfunctional families.
According to Butsch “sitcoms shifted away from the morality tales typical since radios to programs about flawed families” (2008: 125). Fathers were no more irreprehensible breadwinners and good advisors to their children and problems did not only concern kids’
mischievous behaviour or wives’ silliness, but more serious issues became everyday matters, as Richard Butsch explains when writing:
2 In italics in the original text.
3 In italics in the original text.
Many 1990s shows featured dysfunctional families, but the more serious dysfunctions existed in blue-collar families. Alcoholism, spousal abuse, child abandonment, and children being put up for adoption appeared in working-class shows […]. Divorce and quirky personalities were more typical of middle-class shows. (Butsch 2008: 128)
In these situation comedies, a shift regarding the person who holds the dominant role is also to be perceived. If, in earlier sitcoms, husbands were the ultimate authority in the house, now they are loud-mouthed, childlike and ineffective when trying to discipline the kids, while wives are the more dominant parental figures, the ones who keep the household together, dispense advices and reprimands (also to their husbands) when needed (Reimers 2003); so, more and more often, the task of readdressing issues falls back on the wife/mother as in The Simpsons (1989-), According to Jim (2001-2009) and Malcolm in the Middle (2000-2006).
Another aspect of situation comedy that has faced change over time is its narrative style. Akass and McCabe, in their 2007 essay, make reference to the concept of “flexi- narrative” developed by Robin Nelson in 1997, which he defines as:
A hybrid mix of serial and series forms derived from a prose fiction, distinctive to the majority of TV output today. Flexi-narratives are mixtures of the series and the serial form, involving the closure of one story arc within an episode (like a series) but with other, on-going story arcs involving the regular characters (like a serial). (Nelson in Akass and McCabe 2007: 289)
Following Feuer (1986), Akass and McCabe (2007) remark that claiming for generic purity with reference to television would be preposterous because genres often intermingle and are used to create hybridized shows, as happens for sitcoms whose narrative forms, in Feuer’s terms, are getting closer to those of serials (Feuer 1986).
Television sitcoms are often characterized as “built around a humorous situation in which tension develops and resolves during the half-hour” (Butsch 2008: 111). On this matter, Jane Feuer (1992) explains Horace Newcomb’s model based on episodic series as follows:
The situation is “the funny thing that will happen this week”. Next week there will be a new situation that will be entirely independent of what happened this week. The situation develops through complication and confusion usually involving human error.
There is no plot development and no exploration of ideas or conflicts […]. Newcomb sees the sitcom as providing a simple and reassuring problem/solution formula. As the audience we are reassured, not challenged by choice or ambiguity; nor we are forced to re-examine our values. (Feuer 1992: 148)
This means that every issue and every problem must encounter its appropriate solution in a short while, in order to give the following episode the green light for the development of other problems and other solutions and that spectators do not feel forced to line up with one character or the other or to engage in deep reasoning on social issues.
Everything is already arranged for the right solution to be reached, no doubt arises about the final outcome, no effort is needed, roles are straightforward and positions made explicit; the only thing the audience is required to do is to laugh and enjoy the show.
However, although Newcomb’s theory may be valid, it does not provide an explanation for seventy years and hundreds of sitcoms.
Feuer (1992) highlights that Newcomb was writing during the seventies when, as written above, producers had barely started to introduce new and controversial social issues, so it is of no surprise if the majority of situation comedies were still dealing with simple and familial matters that could easily be solved by the end of the episode and if characters were “oversimplified stereotypes that were rather consistent from series to series” (Butsch 2008: 115), but times have changed and sitcoms have changed as well.
Even though their comic effect is preserved, shows now debate crucial issues and characters’ contentions can go on for weeks. As Feuer puts it:
[…] the sitcom has “evolved” in its brief lifetime, in the sense that it has gone through some structural shifts and has modulated the episodic series in the direction of the continuing serial. (Feuer 1992: 151)
Accordingly, many modern sitcoms develop on a double level: on the one level a problem is presented and solved every week as in episodic series, on the other level every character has his/her own personal development in terms of relationships, working issues, familial matters etc. that spans over the weeks. In this way, as Akass and McCabe (2007) disclose, the pleasure of spectators who watch from week to week is maximized, for they
can follow the progresses made by the characters, and spectators who just happen to watch one episode are also perfectly happy with its narrative closure.
A further element that characterizes situation comedy and differentiates it from other television genres is the extensive use of pre-recorded laughs (or canned laughter) or, alternatively, the recording in front of a live studio audience, whose laughter highlights comic moments.
Brett Mills defines “laugh track” as “a record of the live responses of those who witnessed the event, recorded and transmitted to viewers at home” (Mills 2009: 14) and considers it a useful device as producers, thanks to actual reactions, can get an idea of which comic exchanges are actually funny, which is impossible for many other television programs having their audience sitting at home and incapable of offering immediate validation. Moreover, the laugh track helps domestic viewers to feel part of the experience and encourages domestic audience laughter as
through the use of canned laughter, influencing agents attempt to capitalize on the social nature of laughter to produce audience laughter. […] people laugh on response to canned laughter because of automatic, non-thinking conformity – simply hearing others laugh leads us to laugh as well. (Platow et al. 2005: 542)
Strictly connected to the recording in front of the live studio audience is the shooting style, egregiously described by Mills (2009) in his lucid essay. As the audience is in the studio during the recording, scenes are shot only from one angle and cameras have to be placed accordingly, moreover actors are forced to perform as though they were in theatre in order for the audience to catch every gesture, movement and gaze that could elicit a comic response, this means, for example, that performers cannot stand with their backs toward the audience. Furthermore, the most widely used shooting style is the multiple- camera system4, which was introduced for the first time in 1951 for the shooting of the sitcom I Love Lucy (Copeland 2007) and consisted of
[…] three cameras to capture a scene involving two characters: the first covered a wide, establishing shot while the other two were each mid-shots of each performer.
These shots allowed for fast editing between the two performers in any conversation
4 Although other types of shooting style are also employed, such as use of reaction shots or point-of-view shots, the multiple-camera system is the most used (Mills 2009).
scene, and also meant that the text offered as much weight to reaction shots5 as it did to those of speech. (Mills 2009: 39)
Through this camera arrangement, the audience is not only able to actually see the comic slapsticks of one character, but also the reaction of the other, which doubles spectators’
entertainment (Mills 2009).
Last but not least, the most evident and anticipated trait of situation comedy is its comic nature that “places sitcom as different to other forms of broadcasting” (Mills 2009: 7).
Situation comedy’s main goal is, indeed, to entertain the public, to make people laugh at the slapsticks, antics and issues of its characters, and does so even when presenting more serious matters. As a matter of fact, M*A*S*H (1972-1983) constitutes a perfect example of sitcom that faces important social issues remaining first and foremost funny. As Brett Mills writes in 2009, M*A*S*H is “a treatise on the horrors of the Vietnam war” (Mills 2009: 7). Set during the Korean war, M*A*S*H deals with the atrocities of battlefields and puts on domestic small-screen scenes of war, death, amputation and ambiguous attitudes towards the US Army and the United States (Marc 1989), but never forgets to add a hint of humour. David Marc wrote about it in 1989:
[…] in a world where the will to laugh is the will to live […] nothing can stop the relentless human tragedy which has no respect for poker games, romance, a bottle on a cold night, or unbearable fatigue. […] Beneath the military uniforms on both sides stand hapless civilians who continually reassert their right and ability to seek happiness – with a joke, with a kiss - in a nightmarish combat zone that is as dangerous to the soul as it is to the body. (Marc 1989: 261)
Another moving theme that situation comedies sometimes deal with is the death of a long-standing character, as happens in the family sitcom 8 Simple Rules (2002-2005), where the family father Paul Hennessy unexpectedly dies of a heart attack in Season 2.
Although a forty-minutes long, heart-breaking episode is run to pay tribute to the character, the comic nature of the show is completely restored in the following episodes where the family is doing its best to live without its patriarch.
About characters’ death Brett Mills writes:
5 A quick shot that records a character’s or group’s response to another character or some on-screen action or event (definition from http://www.filmsite.org/filmterms5.html).
The representation of these deaths in sitcom is ‘allowable’ precisely because they are clearly a momentary respite from the programmes’ comic impetus and don’t instead signal a permanent movement into on-going tragedy. (Mills 2009: 7)
So, despite the general belief, situation comedies are perfectly capable of dealing with pressing or poignant issues, and they actually do, but in a way that suits the show’s major goal – to make people laugh. Even when emotionally moving events are integrated into the narration, the comic nature of the show is never put aside, comic scenes might be fewer or lowered in tone, but they are there. The laughter must go on!
1.1.2 Viewers’ participation framework in sitcoms
Although many features concerning sitcom, its evolution over the years, its narrative style and technical characteristics have been analysed in the previous section, the peculiar relationship among the sitcom and its viewers has not been touched upon, and deserves special mention when it comes to understanding the mechanisms that regulate the transmission of the informative content of characters’ utterances and that comply with the creation of humour in situation comedies.
As Marta Dynel (2011c and 2011d) lucidly explains, the canonical view of interaction as roughly taking place between a speaker who delivers meanings by means of utterances and a hearer who receives and elaborates these meanings on the basis of his/her cognitive mechanisms and context is not sufficient to account for more elaborated forms of interaction such as the one that involves televised discourse. It follows that the establishment of particularized participant roles is advisable in order to understand not only how inter-character dynamics work but also how spectators approach the vision of televised interactions.
In this framework, Dynel’s distinction between the several participants to mediated discourse comes into help and is here adopted as a useful preliminary tool for understanding how humour is delivered in situation comedies. In her 2011c and 2011d studies on viewers’ participation, Dynel claims that communication in televised discourse in general and in sitcoms in particular is built on two different but interrelated levels, i.e.
the “inter-character level” and the “recipient’s level”, being recipient6 the term adopted to
6 In this dissertation the terms audience, viewer/s, spectator/s and beholder/s will be used as synonyms for recipient/s.
identify the ratified viewers who, in previous literature (Levinson 1988 and Bubel 2008), were identified as “overhearers” or “eavesdroppers”7 which, as Dynel (2011c and 2011d) explains, may be misleading terms as overhearers and eavesdroppers are normally considered people who are present when somebody talks but that are neither addressed nor are considered the final addressees of the utterances. In televised discourse, instead, utterances and meanings conveyed by the characters are specifically designed to be received by the viewers, even though they cannot intervene, which seems all the more apparent if we consider that, most of the times, beholders know more than characters do as, unlike characters, they have access to all the dialogues and situations which the actors participate in and are provided with all the information necessary to make adequate inferences (Dynel 2011c and 2011d).
Returning to the two levels of communication, at the inter-character level there are all the dialogues, polylogues and monologues that occur among the characters who, being the situation comedy a tool devised for communication, deliver information that will be interpreted by the recipient. Moreover, Dynel (2011c and 2011d) explains, conversations taking place among the characters are constructed on the basis of real-life exchanges and we can notice that the same roles we, as interactants, cover in our everyday conversations are covered by characters in situation comedies as well. These conversations are however constructed by a crew composed by the members who participate in the production (the
“collective sender” in Dynel’s terms), whose presence the recipients often forget about, but who are in charge of designing the exchanges that occur in situation comedies in a way that enables the recipients to make desired inferences and be amused by what they watch and hear. In other words, the collective sender produces utterances for the recipient who receives them by means of the characters that are used as a sort of communicative channel, and those utterances are cleverly devised in order to send particularized inputs that the viewer will interpret, thus disclosing the meaning intended by the collective sender8.
Another problem to be addressed is the reason why spectators, when watching sitcoms, find certain events amusing, even though they would not laugh at all if they were to happen in real life. This could be explained by taking into consideration Victor Raskin’s differentiation between “bona fide” and “non-bona fide” modes of communication (Raskin 1985), where bona fide is “the ordinary information-conveying mode (no lying, acting
7 For critical overview see Dynel (2011c and 2011d), Levinson (1988) and Bubel (2008).
8 I will return on the inputs sent by a sender to a receiver in the next chapter, when Sperber and Wilson’s
“Relevance Theory” will be addressed in the discussion.
joking, etc.)”, whilst in non-bona fide mode “speakers are not committed to the truth of what they say” (Raskin 1985: 89). As previously mentioned in this section, situation comedies work on two different, albeit interrelated, levels of communication: on the one level, there are the communicative exchanges between the characters and, on the other level, there are the recipients that constitute the audience that can only receive the meanings expressed by the characters, but are prevented from interjecting in the dialogues.
Besides, as Dynel (2011c and 2011d) cleverly highlights, the relationship between the characters works more or less in the same way as it does in real life between real people (exception made for the fact that characters’ lines are pre-constructed by the collective sender, whose aim is to convey meanings to the recipients) so, supposedly, characters are in the bona fide mode of communication when conversing, as real people are supposed to be when communicating. This means that characters, as people in general, are supposed to respect the Gricean Cooperative Principle that states that conversational contributions must abide by conditions of truthfulness, sufficiently informative import, relevance and unambiguousness (Grice 1975). As Raskin himself postulates when explaining the bona fide mode of communication:
Bona fide communication is governed by the co-operative principle introduced by Grice (1975). According to this principle, the speaker is committed to the truth and relevance of his text, the hearer is aware of this commitment and perceives the uttered text as true and relevant by virtue of his recognition of the speaker’s commitment to its truth and relevance. (Raskin 1985: 100-101)
This definition cannot be applied solely to real persons but also to fictional characters, as their communicative exchanges function is the same way as real ones do.
Recipients, on their side, are aware of the fact that the exchanges between the characters are constructed by writers on the basis of supposedly real-life interactions, but also know that what they are watching is fictional so, even though they may develop some feelings towards the characters in the long run and become so engrossed that they are completely absorbed by the ongoing visual events, it is also true that no real empathy or emotional involvement is required, therefore it is assumable that when approaching the vision of a sitcom they by default assume the non-bona fide mode to be in operation and are amused in virtue of the fact that what is happening on screen is not happening in real life to real people. Evidence for this is to be found in Dynel (2013a), where the scholar
argues for the fact that although characters’ interpersonal communication resembles real- life patterns of interaction, an orientation towards the amusement of the recipient is to be noticed by virtue of the construction of the characters made by the collective sender who, often, confers quirky and uncanny personalities to the characters and gets them involved in implausible events. In the matter of this we should, nonetheless, bear in mind what Culpeper (in Dynel 2013b) observes with regard to dramatic discourse. The fact that characters are uncanny and situations are improbable does not mean that the recipient completely moves away from reality when watching fictional events. A dimension of reality is always preserved in the background of the recipient’s mind, therefore it seems appropriate to conclude that what happens on screen is always tested against the real world. This means that idiosyncratic characters and improbable situations are not humorous per se, but are humorous because inconsistent with what would happen in the real world.
In light of this, it seems wise to conclude that in televised media talk in general, and in sitcom in particular, a peculiar kind of viewers’ participation framework is to be expected.
The dyadic repartition of roles that entails the presence of a speaker and a hearer cannot hold when it comes to televised discourse and a frame that takes into consideration not only the roles covered by characters, but also the viewer as a recipient who makes inferences but does not intervene and the collective sender who acts as a deus ex machina that creates characters and delivers meanings to the recipient through them, is advisable.
Furthermore, an analysis of sitcom also requires the fundamental understanding that when approaching the vision of sitcoms the viewer is caught in a play frame that enables him/her to test the events on screen against his/her reality, but is also aware of the fact that fiction is always in the air and that s/he can safely laugh acknowledging that what s/he is watching is not really happening.
1.2 The Big Bang Theory (2007-)
The Big Bang Theory is an American sitcom produced by Chuck Lorre Productions and Warner Bros and aired on the CBS television network. It aired for the first time on September 24, 2007 and is currently in its eighth season.
According to Nielsen9 ratings, it has become one of the most loved situation comedies over the years, reaching 20.4 million viewers and winning second place in the Top 10 List of TV shows during the week spanning from January 14 and January 20, 2015 (data collected from http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/category/weekly-tv-ratings-rankings/, on February 16, 2015).
Thanks to its great success, the show has won several awards during the years, as well as receiving countless nominations and awards won by the single cast members and producers (from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0898266/awards on February 16, 2015).
The Big Bang Theory revolves around Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) and Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki), flatmates and physicists who work together at Caltech University, Pasadena, California. Their geeky and introverted personalities clash with the sociability and friendliness of their neighbour Penny (Kaley Cuoco), an aspiring actress who enters their lives as well as their social group, also including spatial engineer Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg) and astrophysicist Rajesh Koothrappaly (Kunal Nayyar). The four scientists may be perfectly at ease when lost in their experiments, but they are absolutely clueless and clumsy when it comes to social situations and Penny, with her whimsical personality and common sense, will help them expand their worlds.
Apart from its clearly humorous background based on the clash that occurs between the nerdy personalities of the four male protagonists and the fanciful Penny, and the funny situations in which they all get involved, the sitcom presents many of the characteristics enlisted in the last section. For instance, in The Big Bang Theory the characters form a peculiar kind of family: although not related in the strictly biological sense, they spend significant amounts of time together, both at the workplace and at home, they share experiences and are always willing to help and console each other. They for sure argue a lot, which is one of the main sources of humour, but at the end of each episode friendship and affection always win and the initial peaceful conviviality is restored. No matter what happens, no matter how far they go or how much they disagree, in their unique way they always provide the others with a secure place to return at the end of the day. Furthermore, serious issues are also presented in the sitcom: when Howard’s mother dies in Season 8 the characters rally around to help Howard elaborating his overwhelming pain and the scene is so touching because they are able to create empathy in the audience. As the seasons went
9 Nielsen is a leading global information and measurement company that provides insights and data about what people watch, listen and buy. (Taken from www.nielsen.com)
by, in fact, the beholders grew to love this peculiar character, whose presence was felt only by means of her loud and shrill voice and by the stories of everyday life that were narrated about her by the characters. Characterized as a loving, caring and over-protective Jewish mother, Mrs. Wolowitz was sometimes also capable of extremely annoy her son with her yells and perpetual recommendations and to hit on Howard’s raw nerves, but she nevertheless showed unconditional affection towards him and his friends, whom she also considered as her children as they recognize at the end of Episode 15 when saying “Let’s have a toast. To Mrs. Wolowitz. A loving mother to all of us. We’ll miss you.” (Reynolds, Ferrari and Howe, Season 8, Episode 15, 2015).
Moving on the more technical plan, we can notice that The Big Bang Theory’s structure is built on the double level that Feuer (1992) claims for modern sitcoms. Every episode in fact revolves around a problem whose solution must be encountered by its very end, thus providing occasional viewers with the satisfaction of watching a narrative closure without being forced to watch further as when cliff-hangers are introduced. On the other side, however, characters’ relationships evolve during the series, which enhances aficionados’
will to follow the series in order to discover if, for example, the relationship between Penny and Leonard will work or if Raj will ever be able to talk to women without being drunk. As far as their personalities are concerned, however, we notice that they do not go through evident changes: from the first season on, every character preserves his/her own peculiarities in terms of behavioural characteristics, none of them will ever have a sudden change or a maturation, which is another feature typical of situation comedies. In situation comedies, as opposed to reality, characters often fall on the same behavioural patterns, without actually learning from their errors.
Another aspect is the recording in front of a live studio audience: every week the episode is shot in front of a public whose reactions to the slapsticks and funny behaviours are recorded and included in the editing. The laughter provides the creators with immediate responses from real persons before the airing of the show and helps domestic viewers to get involved in the sitcom as, although they might be sitting alone when watching the sitcom, the beholders feel as if they are laughing in company, a factor that, as many psychologists10 have noticed in their studies on the responses to humour, increases the amusement and the sense of participation to the experience.
10 See Section 1.1 for reference.
Finally, many of the features devised in the previous section about viewers’
participation framework are to be noticed in The Big Bang Theory. Apart for the obvious repartition between collective sender, characters and recipients, the most striking characteristic is the construction of the characters, above all Sheldon’s character, a complete portrayal of whom is given in the next section. In The Big Bang Theory characters are the product of stereotypes that are present in our everyday lives. These stereotypes, however, are exaggerated to the extent of creating uncanny and improbable characters, whose behaviour and actions would be extremely absurd in real life; and the same holds for the situations in which they get involved which, on the reality level would be excessively frustrating and challenging for real people, but which, on the fictional level, come out as extremely pleasurable and amusing to watch.
1.3 Sheldon Lee Cooper: a portrayal
Although every character would deserve special mention, for they all show extremely funny peculiarities and behaviour, this dissertation will focus first and foremost on the character of Sheldon whose personality clashes so immensely with everyone else’s to the extent that he stands out as the most entertaining character of the sitcom. His relationship with his friends and peers is in fact so influenced by his quirky social conducts that often results in extremely engaging situations.
Sheldon Lee Cooper is one of the four main characters of the American television sitcom The Big Bang Theory, he is portrayed by actor Jim Parsons, who won four Primetime Emmy Awards in 2010, 2011, 2013 and 2014, a Golden Globe Award in 2011, a TCA Award in 2009 and a Critics’ Choice Television Award in 2011 for his portrayal11.
Sheldon was born in Galveston, Texas in 1980 and was raised, along with his older brother and twin sister, by Mary Cooper, a devout Catholic, and George Cooper, an alcoholic who, due to weight problems, died when Sheldon was fourteen.
Sheldon has an IQ of 187, he entered college at the age of eleven and, by the time he turned fifteen, he obtained a Bachelor of Science, Master of Science, Master of Arts, PhD and Doctor of Science; moreover, he is the youngest person at the time to receive the Stevenson Award. He is now a theoretical physicist working at Caltech University of Pasadena, California12. As he confides to his friends while playing the Christmas version
11 Found on: http://www.cbs.com/shows/big_bang_theory/cast/62329/
12 Found on: http://the-big-bang-theory.com/characters.Sheldon/
of the board game Dungeons and Dragons, the only person who encouraged him to pursue scientific work was his grandfather who, unfortunately, died when Sheldon was still a young boy (Lorre, Kaplan and Holland, Season 6, Episode 11, 2012).
As far as his personality is concerned, Sheldon is not only portrayed as the typical nerd, but his characteristics, behaviour towards other people and peculiarities are often over- exaggerated, moreover there have been speculations about the fact that Sheldon’s personality is consistent with Asperger Syndrome, although creator Chuck Lorre and co- creator Bill Prady denied the character is on the autism spectrum and rather referred to his behaviour as “Sheldony” (Lorre and Prady, 2014).
In creating Sheldon’s character the authors manipulated an array of cultural assumptions about nerds, so the studies conducted by professors Monica Bednarek (2012) and Mary Bucholtz (1999 and 2001) on the construction of nerdiness in sitcoms and on typical behaviours among people belonging to the nerd community respectively, supply a useful insight into understanding the character’s personality and the reasons why, despite his many antics, the audience finds him amusing and enjoyable. These studies will therefore serve as a base for the following description of Sheldon’s character and, besides, short excerpts taken from Sheldon’s communicative exchanges and examples of his behaviour towards other people will also be taken into consideration to show the validity of his portrayal.
Bednarek (2012) claims that nerds are commonly believed to share an array of stereotypical traits that allow them to stand out when among other people but, although these traits are clearly a consistent base upon which The Big Bang Theory’s characters are constructed, what we can easily notice when watching the sitcom is that they are not only exploited in order to create characters that can be recognized by the audience as members of the category under which nerd people would fall, but often manipulated and over- exaggerated to such an extent that they create comical effects. This over-exaggeration occurs, above all, in the case of Sheldon’s character, whose peculiarities and idiosyncrasies are hyperbolized beyond every limit and constitute the very essence of his funniness. In this respect, intelligence is one of the most striking traits that Sheldon presents, but describing the character simply as clever would be an understatement, because he is portrayed not just as a very intelligent person but rather as a genius. His outstanding IQ allows him to succeed essentially in every field that concerns science or knowledge in general; moreover, as a young boy, he was a child prodigy who entered university at the early age of eleven. He also claims to have an eidetic memory that allows him to virtually
remember anything from his childhood on: “I haven’t forgotten a single thing since the day my mother stopped breastfeeding me.” (Sheldon Cooper in Stern and Chakos, Season 2, Episode 1, 2008). Sheldon’s remark is clearly intended as a joke created to entertain the public, but is also symptomatic of the fact that the character is represented as able to remember even the most insignificant thing.
Sharp intelligence, in this case, goes hand-in-hand with the knowledge of everything that concerns science and technology. Although Sheldon’s main interest is theoretical physics (String Theory being his primary research field), his knowledge embraces several other fields such as chemistry, biology, medicine, literature, geology, engineering, computer science, astronomy and much more, none of them being particularly relevant to him. In fact he often remarks that theoretical physics is the only subject worth studying, being it the only one capable to unravel the mysteries of the universe. As he contemptuously reveals to Penny: “I am a physicist, I have a working knowledge of the entire universe and everything it contains.” (Sheldon Cooper in Prady and Aronsohn, Season 2, Episode 18, 2009).
“An interest in sci-fi and fantasy and related activities” (Bednarek 2012: 203) is also to be noticed. Sheldon shares with his friends a great interest for sci-fi and super-heroes’
movies and television shows such as Star Trek, Star Wars, Firefly, Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate and Lord of the Rings. The four friends are also often seen while reading comic books and the references made to their beloved fictional characters (such as Batman, Spiderman, The Flash, Aquaman, Superman etc.) are countless. Moreover, Sheldon wears T-shirts depicting comic book heroes on a daily basis. Sheldon’s obsession for sci-fi movies is also particularly relevant because he often tends to make confusion between what is real and what is fictional and to rely upon what his beloved heroes would do when he needs to solve a problem, which clearly generates humorous outcomes as he obviously does not have superpowers and critical situations hardly have the same outcome as in movies.
The passion for board games, card games and video games is also to be taken into consideration: Sheldon and his mates are passionate gamers of World of Warcraft, Halo, Mario, Dungeons and Dragons and The Mystic Warlords of Ka’a. Furthermore, Sheldon himself has created a number of games through the years: Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock, an advanced version of the hand game (Prady, Season 2, Episode 8, 2008), Three- Person Chess (Lorre, Molaro and Kaplan, Season 4, Episode 22, 2011), Research Lab (Lorre and Aronsohn, Season 3, Episode 7, 2009) and Counter-factuals, created in
collaboration with his girlfriend Amy Farrah Fowler (Lorre, Prady and Reynolds, Season 4, Episode 3, 2010).
Nerds are also often described as socially awkward persons, who struggle to make friends and are hardly accepted by their peers (Bednarek 2012). In relation to this, Mary Bucholtz in her essay on the linguistic features present in the speech of members of the nerd community claims that “nerds are members of a stigmatized social category who are stereotypically cast as intellectual overachievers and social underachievers” (Bucholtz 2001: 85), and Sheldon does not fail to show these features. His social group is composed of only four persons, he shows great difficulty in getting along with his peers and colleagues, has no conversational skills whatsoever and is completely oblivious of social cues, moreover he claims to have “212 friends on MySpace” (Sheldon Cooper in Lorre and Prady, Season 1, Episode 1, 2007), although they hardly fall under the definition of
“friends”. Nevertheless, although unsociability is a trait typically attributed to nerds, what is peculiar in Sheldon’s character is that his social awkwardness does not seem to bother him and, in addition to this, Sheldon even states that “maintaining five friendships promises to be a Herculean task.” (Sheldon Cooper in Prady and Rosenstock, Season 2, Episode 13, 2009). During one episode, however, Sheldon creates the “Friendship Flowchart” in order to befriend his peer and colleague Barry Kripke, but it turns out to be only a trick that he uses to get access to the open science grid computer (Prady and Rosenstock, Season 2, Episode 13, 2009), therefore proving his lack of interest in actually making new friends.
Last but not least, characteristics such as physical awkwardness, indifference towards sports and sexual inactivity (Bednarek 2012) are evident in Sheldon’s portrayal. As far as physical awkwardness is concerned, during one episode Sheldon decides to go jogging with Penny, but ends up falling down the stairs of his building (Prady, Aronsohn and Holland, Season 4, Episode 2, 2010) which causes the audience to laugh because of his total clumsiness, while on the other side he reveals he is no good at sports when fighting with Barry Kripke over a new office at the university (Lorre, Prady and Holland, Season 5, Episode 17, 2012). Speaking of sexual inactivity, when asked by Penny, Sheldon points out that he has never kissed a girl (Lorre, Aronsohn and Goetsch, Season 4, Episode 1, 2010), and even asserts that sexual intercourse is of no interest to him, being it “messy, unsanitary and involving loud and unnecessary appeals to a deity” (Sheldon Cooper in Lorre, Aronsohn and Goetsch, Season 4, Episode 1, 2010), hardly a representation one would have in mind if asked to define the concept of intercourse.
In addition to all these traits, Sheldon also shows some distinguishing linguistic features. Mary Bucholtz, in studies conducted in 1999 and 2001 respectively, addresses the issue of nerd girl’s speech, and claims that the girls share some linguistic features that help to classify them as members of the nerd community: i.e. use of hypercorrect grammar and lexis, use of textbook register and avoidance of current slang. Even though Bucholtz’s essays only concentrate on real-life female nerds, her research can also be applied to the study of a fictional male nerd character, given the fact that, as specified earlier in this section, these features constitute the point of departure for Sheldon’s characterization and can be traced in his linguistic behaviour, although clearly magnified in order to produce humorous effects.
As far as the hypercorrect use of language is concerned, Bucholtz refers to it as
“superstandard English” (Bucholtz 2001: 88) and defines it as:
[…] a variety that surpasses the prescriptive norm established by the standard. […]
Superstandard English contrasts linguistically with Standard English in its greater use of “supercorrect” linguistic variables: lexical formality, carefully articulated phonological forms, and prescriptively standard grammar. It may also go beyond traditional norms of prescriptive correctness, to the point of occasionally over- applying prescriptive rules and producing hypercorrect forms. (Bucholtz 2001: 88)
While linguistic hypercorrectness is generally not so evident in Sheldon’s speech, the character makes wide use of lexical formality when speaking. Throughout the whole situation comedy, Sheldon constantly shows his exceptional intelligence and remarks his belonging to an élite of mentally superior human beings, often comparing himself to eminent physicists of the calibre of Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, by making use of scientific language and very formal periphrasis even in his everyday speech, thus generating confusion and misunderstanding in his listeners, as can be noticed in the following communicative exchange between himself and Penny:
Example 1
Sheldon: Well, let’s see. We might consider Schrödinger’s cat.
Penny: Schrödinger? Is that the woman in 2A?
Sheldon: No. That’s Mrs. Grossinger. And she doesn’t have a cat, she has a Mexican hairless, annoying little animal, yip yip yip yip…
Penny: Sheldon!
Sheldon: Sorry, you diverted me. Anyway, in 1935, Erwin Schrödinger, in an attempt to explain the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, he proposed an experiment where a cat is placed in a box with a sealed vial of poison that will break open at a random time. Now, since no- one knows when or if the poison has been released, until the box is opened, the cat can be thought of as both alive and dead.
Penny: I’m sorry, I don’t get the point.
Sheldon: Well of course you don’t get it, I haven’t made it yet. You’d have to be psychic to get it, and there’s no such thing as psychic.
Penny: Sheldon, what’s the point?
Sheldon: Just like Schrödinger’s Cat, your potential relationship with Leonard right now can be thought of as both good and bad. It is only by opening the box that you’ll find out which it is.
Penny: Okay, so you’re saying I should go out with Leonard.
Sheldon: No, no, no, no, no, no. Let me start again. In 1935, Erwin Schrödinger…
(Lorre and Prady, Season 1, Episode 17, 2008)
When asked by Penny whether or not is a wise choice to date Leonard, Sheldon provides a very convoluted explanation of a quantum mechanics theory and expects her to drive an appropriate conclusion from what he says, but what the character does not realize is that Penny, because of her lack of background knowledge of physics, has nothing against which to measure and compare Sheldon’s advice and is therefore driven to extrapolate the most obvious conclusion, which does not mirror Sheldon’s thought.
However, the communication does not fail because Penny is unable to intuitively grasp Sheldon’s point, but because Sheldon himself is not able to explain in what way Schrödinger’s paradigm is useful to solve her problem, thus rendering the use of lexical formality inefficient and entirely pointless. On the one side, the use of such a fancy lexis is one of the major sources of amusement for the audience because Sheldon, even when his thoughts are clear to him, seems incapable of appropriately conveying a point, and on the other side because the beholders can see the other characters struggling when it comes to understand Sheldon’s words.
As it can be noticed, in this case the use of superstandard English also goes hand in hand with the use of textbook register. Sheldon’s “advice” comes across as detached and mechanically spoken: it feels like he is reading a science book out loud or giving a lecture to a class of students of physics. Sheldon is probably more that willing to help Penny, but because of the way in which he formulates his advice this cannot transpire.
In addition to the use of formal language, Bucholtz also notices a lack of current slang in the linguistic behaviour of nerds, and states that:
One characteristic of superstandard English is its lack of current slang. By avoiding particular linguistic forms, speakers can separate themselves from the social category indexically13 associated with such forms; thus the absence of slang in nerds’ speech symbolically distanced them from their cooler peers. (Bucholtz 2001: 89)
Nevertheless, a point has to be clarified. Bucholtz seems to refer to the lack of slang in nerds’ speech as a voluntary rejection aimed at distancing nerds from their peers, while in Sheldon’s case it seems more suitable to consider this absence as unawareness, because even when he attempts slang or colloquial communication he does not seem to handle it rightly and the outcome often results forced and unnatural, as can be observed in the following excerpt of communication:
Example 2
Sheldon: Penny, hello!
Penny: Hey, Sheldon!
Sheldon: What is shaking14? Penny: I’m sorry?
Sheldon: It’s colloquial, a conversation opener. So, do you find the weather satisfying? Are you currently sharing in the triumph of some local sports team?
Penny: What’s wrong with you? You’re freaking me out.
Sheldon: I’m striking up a casual conversation with you. S’u’up?
Penny: Please don’t do that.
Sheldon: All right. But I’m given to understand that when you have something awkward to discuss with someone, it’s more palatable to preface it with banal chitchat.
Penny: So, this wasn’t the awkward part?
Sheldon: No.
[…]
Penny: Always nice talking to you, Sheldon.
13 As explained in Bucholtz’s essay (2001), “indexicality” is a semiotic process through which language ideologies perform cultural work. It involves the establishment of a connection between a linguistic form and its social significance through the recognition of their repeated conjunction.
14 What Sheldon wanted to say is “What’s shaking?”, a slang form that means “What is going on?” and used as a form of greeting, but failing to use the contracted form he also fails to convey the meaning attached to it, therefore causing Penny to be unable to understand the slang. (Definition retrieved on http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=What%27s+Shaking%3F)
