Abstract
Sitcoms attract some of the largest television audiences. This chapter conducts a qualitative and quantitative analysis of how leading sitcoms of each decade from the 1950s to the present represent self-interest. Similar to presidential speeches, they reveal an increasingly narrow and selfish understanding. Interesting too is the way they treat, and often rely on, hypocrisy for their humor. Here too there is a shift that “normalizes” previously frowned upon selfish behavior.
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Notes
- 1.
Darrell Hamamoto, Nervous Laughter: Television Situation Comedy and Liberal Democratic Ideology (New York: Praeger, 1989), p. 10.
- 2.
The coding and the initial analysis of sitcoms from the 1950s to 2008 were carried out by Dartmouth students Ben Reed, Jen Ross, and Mike Whitticom. The charts were updated by Timothy James Potenza.
- 3.
According to Judy Kutulas, “Who Rules the Roost? Sitcom Family Dynamics from the Cleavers to the Osbournes,” in Mary Dalton and Laura Linder, The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), pp. 49–59, “family is the one experience to which virtually all viewers can relate. It evokes symbols and images advertisers like. And its plot possibilities are endless.”
- 4.
Ella Taylor, Prime-Time Families: Television Culture in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, p. 24.
- 5.
Judy Kutulas, “Who Rules the Roost?,” p. 51.
- 6.
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, part 3, ch. 8, pp. 558–563.
- 7.
Ibid., p. 561.
- 8.
Ibid., pp. 560–563.
- 9.
U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000 Special Report, “Married-Couples and Unmarried Partner Households: 2000,” February 2003, p. 1.
- 10.
Daphne Lofquist, Terry Lugaila, Martin O’Connell, and Sarah Feliz, “Households and Families: 2010,” U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 Census Briefs, April 2012.
- 11.
Janice Littlejohn, “State of Television’s Family Sitcoms Is Not SO Funny,” Valley News, Television Listings, 20 July 2008, pp. 1–2.
- 12.
Ella Taylor, Prime-Time Families, p. 25.
- 13.
Hamamoto, Nervous Laughter, p. 25.
- 14.
David Pierson, “American Situation Comedies and the Modern Comedy of Manners.” in Mary Dalton and Laura Linder, eds., The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), pp. 35–46.
- 15.
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, Part 2, ch. 2, pp. 482–484.
- 16.
Sharon Marie Ross, “Talking Sex: Comparison Shopping through Female Conversation,” in Dalton and Linder, Sitcom Reader, pp. 111–124.
- 17.
Facebook, Duck Dynasty, https://www.facebook.com/duckdynasty/ (accessed 12 April 2017).
- 18.
David Barstow, Susanne Craig Russ Buettner, and Megan Twohey, “Donald Trump Records Show He Could Have Avoided Taxes for Nearly Two Decades, New York Times Found,” New York Times, 1 October 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-taxes.html (accessed 9 October 2015); “Latest Election Polls 2016,” New York Times, 9 October 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/polls.html (accessed 9 October 2016).
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Lebow, R.N. (2018). I Love Lucy to Modern Family. In: The Politics and Business of Self-Interest from Tocqueville to Trump. International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68569-4_4
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