Cult british TV comedy by Leon Hunt

Author:Leon Hunt [Hunt, Leon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Popular Culture, Art, Film & Video, Performing Arts, Television, General
ISBN: 9781526102362
Google: l225DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2015-11-01T03:13:07+00:00

5

Community and intimacy: from laugh track to commentary track

According to Andy Medhurst, ‘Comedy says to us: you’re among friends, relax, join in’ (2007: 19). While proponents of more confrontational or ‘experimental’ forms of comedy might challenge (or at least qualify) this proposition, it seems safe to accept that comedy does require some sense of belonging. The nature of this belonging might vary hugely, along lines determined by nation, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age. It might also vary significantly in size (or imagined size) between the unifying community of mainstream entertainment that Medhurst seems to particularly have in mind, or the more subcultural belonging that ‘cult’ and ‘alternative’ comedy seem to offer. This chapter examines the role of two types of affective relations mediated by sound tracks accompanying TV comedy – recorded laughter and DVD commentaries – that can be seen as helping to position the spectator/listener by means of what Misha Kavka calls ‘fictions of presence’ or ‘virtual relations’ (2008: 12). Television, Kavka suggests, is ‘a technology of intimacy, a machine that functions by drawing viewers close’ (Ibid.: 5), but TV forms that involve a studio or ‘canned’ audience, from quiz to chat show to sitcom, also mobilize a rhetoric of communal belonging and even participation.

Recorded laughter has played a long and important role in broadcast comedy, simulating ‘liveness’, perceived as providing cues for the viewers’ laughter and locating them within an electronic ‘community’. While it reinforces nostalgic accounts of ‘One Nation TV’ – all of ‘us’ laughing ‘together’ – recorded laughter has been contested to some degree from its beginnings as a broadcasting convention (Smith 2005) and seemed in danger of becoming obsolete, in sitcom at least, in recent years. The DVD commentary, on the other hand, offers what Thomas Doherty calls an ‘imaginary friendship’ between viewer and artist, not a community but ‘a new order of intimacy’ (2001: 78). This mediated intimacy takes on particular force in comedy – as a League of Gentlemen fan comments, ‘it’s like listening to a great private conversation between best friends’ (quoted by Hunt 2008: 37). If recorded laughter is part of the legacy of broadcast TV, of being positioned within a mass audience, the DVD commentary belongs more to the era of ‘new media’ and ‘individual consumer choice … highly diversified content, atomized reception, and customizable interfaces’ (Kompare 2005: 198). Both impact on the textuality of TV comedy. Recorded laughter or its absence can determine the pacing and performance of comedy, manage expectations around the tone and frequency of jokes. DVD commentaries form an ‘intratext’ (Brookey and Westerhaus 2002: 25) with the original programme, but the secondary text can sometimes break out of its supplementary role, perhaps most of all in the unruly field of comedy. Sometimes the DVD commentary doesn’t know its place and might make us laugh as much as, if not more than, the primary text.

To laugh or not to laugh

Recorded laughter has, for much of its history, been perceived as ‘an especially mundane part of the

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