The Sitcom

Book excerpt: In this new Routledge Television Guidebook, Jeremy G. Butler studies our love-hate relationship with the durable sitcom, analyzing the genre’s position as a major media artefact within American culture and providing a historical overview of its evolution in the USA. Everyone loves the sitcom genre; and yet, paradoxically, everyone hates the sitcom, too. This book examines themes of gender, race, ethnicity, and the family that are always at the core of humor in our culture, tracking how those discourses are embedded in the sitcom’s relatively rigid storytelling structures. Butler pays particular attention to the sitcom’s position in today’s post-network media landscape and sample analyses of Sex and the City, Black-ish, The Simpsons, and The Andy Griffith Show illuminate how the sitcom is infused with foundational American values. At once contemporary and reflective, The Sitcom is a must-read for students and scholars of television, comedy, and broader media studies, and a great classroom text.