Comedy as a literary genre can be defined as

4 GENRE STUDY AND TELEVISION

Jane Feuer

The term genre is simply the French word for type or kind. When it is used in literary, film, or television studies, however, it takes on a broader set of implications. The very use of the term implies that works of literature, films, and television programs can be categorized; they are not unique. Thus genre theory deals with the ways in which a work may be considered to belong to a class of related works. In many respects the closest analogy to this process would be taxonomy in the biological sciences. Taxonomy dissects the general category of “animal” into a system based on perceived similarity and difference according to certain distinctive features of the various phyla and species. As one literary critic has remarked, “biological classification is itself an explanatory system, which has been devised primarily to make sense of an otherwise disparate group of individuals and which is changed primarily in order to improve that sense. While robins and poems are obviously different, the attempt to make a reasoned sense similarly dominates their study.”1 In a similar way, literature may be divided into comedy, tragedy, and melodrama; Hollywood films into Westerns, musicals, and horror films; television programs into sitcoms, crime shows, and soap operas. Genre theory has the task both of making these divisions and of justifying the classifications once they have been made. Taxonomy has a similar task. However, the two part company when it comes to the question of aesthetic and cultural value. The purpose of taxonomy is not to determine which species are the most excellent examples of their type or to illustrate the ways in which a species expresses cultural values or to show how that species manipulates an audience—to mention varying goals of genre classification. But rather than discussing genre analysis as a whole, we should distinguish among the uses of the term for literature, film, and television.

Traditionally, the literary concept of genre has referred to broad categories of literature (such as comedy and tragedy) that tend not to be treated as historically or culturally specific manifestations. For example, Aristotle defined tragedy as an ideal type according to which any particular tragedy must be measured. Even though he drew upon the theater of his own society (classical Greece) for his models, Aristotle spoke of “tragedy” as a kind of overarching structure that informs individual works. Once the ideal structure was achieved, Aristotle implied, tragedy could then have its ideal impact on an audience. (In a similar way, although Hollywood film genres are constructed from actual films, the genre itself is frequently spoken of as an ideal set of traits that inform individual films. Thus, although many individual Westerns do not feature Indians, Indians remain a crucial generic element.)

Drawing on Aristotle, the literary critic Northrop Frye attempted in the 1950s to further develop the idea of classifying literature into types and categories that he called genres and modes. Frye commented that “the critical theory of genres is stuck precisely where Aristotle

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left it.”2 Frye attempted to further differentiate among types of literature. He classified fiction into modes according to the hero’s power of action—either greater than ours, less than ours, or the same as ours—arriving at such categories as myth, romance, epic and tragedy, comedy, and realistic fiction according to the hero’s relationship to the reader. Frye points out that over the last fifteen centuries these modes have shifted, so that, for example, the rise of the middle class introduces the low mimetic mode in which the hero is one of us (pp. 33–35). As for genres, Frye distinguishes among drama, epic, and lyric on the basis of their “radical of presentation” (that is, acted out, sung, read), viewing the distinction as a rhetorical one with the genre being determined by the relationship between the poet and his public (pp. 246–47).

We can see that the traditional literary view of genre would have only a limited application to film and television. The literary categories are very broad ones. Such literary types as drama and lyric, tragedy, and comedy span numerous diverse works and numerous cultures and centuries. Film and television, however, are culturally specific and temporally limited. Instead of employing a broad category such as “comedy,” we need to activate specific genres such as the “screwball comedy” (film) or the “situation comedy” (television), categories that may not correspond to or necessarily be subspecies of the literary genre of comedy. As we will see, attempts to measure the comic forms of mass media against the norms of drama are doomed to failure. At this point in the development of film genre theory, the concept has been applied most usefully to American film and television. Moreover, literary genres tend to be—to employ a distinction from Todorov—theoretical to a greater extent than do film and television genres, which tend to be historical.3 The former are “deduced from a preexisting theory of literature,” whereas the latter are “derived from observation of preexisting literary facts.”4 That is to say, some genres are accepted by the culture, while others are defined by critics.

Literary criticism, which has been around much longer than either film or television criticism, has described more genres from the theoretical or deductive perspective. Film and television criticism still tend to take their category names from current historical usage. For example, although Homer did not refer to his own work as an “epic” poem, both industry and critics employ the categories of “Western” and “sitcom.” One of the goals of film and television genre criticism is to develop more theoretical models for these historical genres, not necessarily remaining satisfied with industrial or commonsense usage. Thus, in film genre study, the theoretical genre called film noir was constructed out of films formerly grouped under the historical labels “detective films,” “gangster films” and “thrillers.” Indeed, even melodramas such as Mildred Pierce were discovered to possess the stylistic traits of this newly created theoretical genre.

Television studies is too new a field to have yet greatly differentiated between historical and theoretical genres; however, we are now attempting to redefine, if not reclassify, some of the received categories such as soap opera. Originally a derisive term used to condemn other forms of drama as being hopelessly melodramatic, the term soap opera has been refined in a confrontation between such historical examples as the afternoon serial drama, prime-time serials, and British soap operas. British “soaps,” for example, cause us to question the equation of the term soap opera with the mode of melodrama, because their own mode might better be described as “social realism”; they possess none of the exaggeration and heightened

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emotion and elaborate gestures of their American cousins. And the middle-class, slowly unwinding, woman-centered world of afternoon soaps bears little resemblance to the fast- paced plutocratic worlds of Dallas and Dynasty.

Out of this confrontation emerges a new conceptualization of the genre, in which the continuing serial format is not necessarily equated with the descriptive term soap opera. Thus we can retain the method of the literary definition of genres without necessarily retaining their content. The literary concept of genre is based upon the idea, also common to biology, that by classifying literature according to some principle of coherence, we can arrive at a greater understanding of the structure and purpose of our object of study. Thus the taxonomist begins with already existing examples of the type. From these, she/he builds a conceptual model of the genre, then goes on to apply the model to other examples, constantly moving back and forth between theory and practice until the conceptual model appears to account for the phenomena under consideration. (Of course, this is a lot easier when the genre is already complete and not, as with television, in a constant state of flux and redefinition.)

As Rick Altman points out, every corpus thus conceived reflects a particular methodology. The constitution of a generic corpus is not independent of, nor does it logically precede, the development of a methodology.5 According to another literary critic, “What makes a genre ‘good,’ in other words, is its power to make the literary text ‘good’—however that ‘good’ be presently defined by our audience.”6 We might substitute the word useful for the word good here. Genres are rhetorical and pragmatic constructions of an analyst, not acts of nature. The biological analogy is useful here also. Although those animals that we label “dogs” and “cats” exist naturally, to label them “mammals” is to construct a category that is not natural but culturally constructed. After all, Spot and Morris have no need to call themselves mammals— biologists do. Similarly, each genre analyst has a reason for constructing the genre categories he or she claims to “discover.” For example, Soap Opera Digest has always covered prime- time soap operas, even when that means placing The Young and the Restless and Twin Peaks in the same category. It is useful for the fan magazine to attract both audiences to its pages. On the other hand, as Jim Collins notes in his chapter, highbrow critics are motivated to place Twin Peaks in a separate category because they feel called to police the boundaries between “art” and “trash,” and they want to claim that Twin Peaks is art.

The characteristics that make the popular artifacts of movies and television “good” may not correspond to the generic “good” of literary works. It is due to their nature as artifacts of popular culture that films and television programs have been treated in a specific way in genre studies. Genre study in film has had a historically and culturally specific meaning. It has come to refer to the study of a particular kind of film—the mass-produced “formulas” of the Hollywood studio system. This concept of formula has been defined by John Cawelti:

A formula is a conventional system for structuring cultural products. It can be distinguished from invented structures which are new ways of organizing works of art. Like the distinction between convention and invention, the distinction between formula and structure can be envisaged as a continuum between the two poles; one pole is that of a completely conventional structure of conventions—an episode of the Lone Ranger or one of the Tarzan books comes

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close to this pole; the other end of the continuum is a completely original structure which orders inventions—Finnegans Wake is perhaps the ultimate example.7

In this view, the concept of genre stems from a conception of film as an industrial product. That is, the particular economic organization of the film industry led to a kind of product standardization antithetical to the literary concept of an authored work. Genre offers a way for the film and TV industries to control the tension between similarity and difference inherent in the production of any cultural product. Whereas we expect each bar of Ivory soap to be exactly like the last one we purchased, we expect each Hollywood film we see to be in some ways unique. But completely unique products don’t mesh with the system of production regularity and division of labor upon which Hollywood is built. Thus, the classical Hollywood narrative style and genres help to regulate the production of difference by producing their own differences within very circumscribed structures of similarity. In addition, as Cawelti and others have pointed out, genres provide filmmakers with an easy-to-use creative toolbox. Just one shot of horses on the horizon is necessary to establish that a film is a Western. Thus, film genre study is grounded in the realities of the film industry, even though, in theory, any genre critic is free to construct any genre he or she wishes.

Within the institution of film criticism, however, the concept of genre was initially employed to condemn mass-produced narratives such as Hollywood studio films for their lack of originality. It was assumed that genre films could not have any artistic merit, because they were not original works and because they were not authored works. These standards of evaluation are based upon a romantic theory of art that places the highest value on the concepts of originality, personal creativity, and the idea of the individual artist as genius. Ironically, it was through an attempt to establish a romantic, author-centered model for film that the concept of genre began to take on a more positive meaning in film criticism. The auteur policy attempted to reconceptualize the anonymous products of the Hollywood assembly line as the creations of individual artists, assumed to be the directors of the films. The author was constructed by attributing unity—whether stylistic or thematic or both—to films that bore the signature of certain directors. One would think that the auteur approach would have further invalidated genre criticism. However, it was discovered that certain authors expressed themselves most fully within a particular genre—John Ford in the western or Vincente Minnelli in the musical. In some sense, then, genre provided a field in which the force of individual creativity could play itself out. Some viewed the genre as a constraint on complete originality and self-expression, but others, following a more classical or mimetic theory of art, felt that these constraints were in fact productive to the creative expression of the author. Thus genre study evolved within film studies as a reaction against the romantic bias of auteur criticism.

When film studies turned toward semiotics and ideological criticism, the idea of the genre as a threshold or horizon for individual expression gave way to an interest in the genres themselves as systems and structures. Thomas Schatz has referred to the semiotic interest in genre as “the language analogy.” He says that genre can be studied as a formalized sign system whose rules have been assimilated (often unconsciously) through cultural consensus. Following Claude Lévi-Strauss, Schatz views genres as cultural problem-solving operations.

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He distinguishes between a deep structure that he calls film genre and a surface structure that he calls the genre film. The genre film is the individual instance, the individual utterance or speech act (parole). The film genre is more like a grammar (langue), that is, a system for conventional usage.

According to Schatz, the film genre represents a tacit contract between the motion picture industry and the audience, whereas the genre film represents an event that honors that contract. According to this linguistic view, a film genre is both a static and a dynamic system. However, unlike language, individual utterances do have the capacity to change the rules.8 Over many decades, for example, the film Western changed from a classic pattern in which a lone hero saved civilization to a professional pattern in which a group of comrades shared adventures outside the boundaries of any community. The TV sitcom in the 1970s and after also moved away from the nuclear family as its basic setting and toward “families” of unrelated adults that formed in the workplace. In both cases, these shifts in the film genre correlate to changes in the culture outside. The most difficult task of the genre critic is to adequately account for these correlations. Ultimately, genre criticism is cultural criticism.

The language analogy sees an active but indirect participatory role for the audience in this process of genre construction. For the industrial arts, the concept of genre can bring into play (1) the system of production, (2) structural analysis of the text, and (3) the reception process with the audience conceived as an interpretive community—that is, a social grouping whose similarities cause them to interpret texts the same way, as opposed to completely individual interpretations. Rick Altman relates the concept of genre to that of the interpretive community. In his view, the genre serves to limit the free play of signification and to restrict semiosis. The genre, that is to say, usurps the function of an interpretive community by providing a context for interpreting the films and by naming a specific set of intertexts according to which a new film must be read. The genre limits the field of play of the interpretive community. Altman sees this as an ideological project because it is an attempt to control the audience’s reaction by providing an interpretive context. Genres thus are not neutral categories, but rather ideological constructs that provide and enforce a pre-reading.9

In a similar way, Steve Neale sees genres as part of the dominant cinema’s “mental machinery,” not just as properties possessed by texts. Neale defines genres as “systems of orientations, expectations, and conventions that circulate between industry, text, and subject.” Any one genre, then, is both a “coherent and systematic body of film texts” and a coherent and systematic set of expectations. Neale agrees with Altman that genres limit the possibilities of meaning by both exploiting and containing the diversity of mainstream cinema.10 Drawing upon Altman and Neale, we can conclude that each theoretical genre is a construct of an analyst. The methodology that the analyst brings to bear upon the texts determines the way in which that analyst will construct the genre. Genres are made, not born. The coherence is provided in the process of construction, and a genre is ultimately an abstract conception rather than something that exists empirically in the world.

Thus we can distinguish a number of different reasons why the concept of genre has figured in both popular and critical discourses as an “instrument for the regulation of difference.”11 From the television industry’s point of view, unlimited originality of programming would be a

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disaster, because it could not assure the delivery of the weekly audience, as do the episodic series and continuing serial. In this sense, television takes to an extreme the film industry’s reliance upon formulas in order to predict audience popularity. For the audience—as members of various interpretive communities for American mass culture—genre assures the interpretability of the text. Through repetition, the cultural “deep structure” of a film genre “seeps to the surface.” The audience—without conscious awareness—continually rehearses basic cultural contradictions that cannot be resolved within the existing socioeconomic system outside of the text: law and order versus the idea of individual success (the gangster genre); nature versus culture (the Western); the work ethic versus the pleasure principle (the musical).

The approaches to genre that we have discussed might be summarized under three labels— the aesthetic, the ritual, and the ideological approaches. Although in practice these are not absolutely distinct, in general we can use them to distinguish among different approaches that have been taken toward film and television genres. The aesthetic approach includes all attempts to define genre in terms of a system of conventions that permits artistic expression, especially involving individual authorship. The aesthetic approach also includes attempts to assess whether an individual work fulfills or transcends its genre. The ritual approach sees genre as an exchange between industry and audience, an exchange through which a culture speaks to itself. Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch refer to television as a “cultural forum” that involves the negotiation of shared beliefs and values and helps to maintain and rejuvenate the social order as well as assisting it in adapting to change.12 Most approaches based on the language analogy take the ritual view. The ideological approach views genre as an instrument of control. At the industrial level, genres assure the advertisers of an audience for their messages. At the textual level, genres are ideological insofar as they serve to reproduce the dominant ideology of the capitalist system. The genre positions the interpretive community in such a way as to naturalize the dominant ideologies expressed in the text. Some ideological critics allow for constant conflict and contradiction in the reproduction of ideology, as the ruling ideas attempt to secure dominance. A more reader-oriented ideological model would allow for the production of meanings by the viewer as well. Thus recent approaches to genre have attempted to combine the insights of the ritual approach with those of the ideological approach. According to Rick Altman, “because the public doesn’t want to know that it’s being manipulated, the successful ritual/ideological ‘fit’ is almost always one that disguises Hollywood’s potential for manipulation while playing up its capacity for entertainment. . . . The successful genre owes its success not alone to its reflection of an audience ideal, nor solely to its status as apology for the Hollywood enterprise, but to its ability to carry out both functions simultaneously.”13

The Situation Comedy As an example of the generic approach to television analysis, I have chosen to discuss the

most basic program format known to the medium—the situation comedy. In general, television taxonomy has not yet advanced to the point where a clear distinction between historical and theoretical genres has emerged. Thus all TV genres in some sense remain historical genres,

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those defined by a consensus between the industry, TV Guide, and the viewing audience. The sitcom is no exception. We are all capable of identifying its salient features: the half-hour format, the basis in humor, 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.

Nevertheless, different methodologies for defining the genre have produced different notions of the sitcom as genre. I will discuss the ways in which three critics have approached the genre in order to demonstrate that each has constructed a different genre called the sitcom. David Grote takes an aesthetic approach to the genre and finds that it lacks dramatic development of any kind, serving merely to reassert the status quo. Horace Newcomb also finds the genre limited in its capacity for ambiguity, development, and the ability to challenge our values; however, because he takes a ritual view, he does see the genre as basic to an understanding of the reassurance the television medium provides for its audience. David Marc appears to believe that certain authors can make the sitcom form into social satire; his would also represent an aesthetic approach. Finally, my own approach will be a synthetic one, viewing the sitcom as a genre that did develop, for historical reasons, in the direction of the continuing serial.

The most literary—and consequently the most negative—view of the television sitcom is taken by David Grote.14 According to Grote, television has completely rejected the type of comic plot that has dominated the comedic tradition from Greek and Roman times, a type that, following Northrop Frye, he calls “new comedy.” In the tradition of new comedy, a very basic arrangement of plot and character has predominated. In it, a young man’s desire for a young woman meets with resistance, usually by her father, but before the end of the play, a plot reversal enables the boy to get the girl. This is the plot of Greek New Comedy which can be dated back to 317 B.C., but it is also the plot of Shakespearean comedies, Hollywood romantic comedies, and many musical comedies. Although few would dispute the longevity of this plot paradigm, many might question Grote’s next step, which is to make a sweeping historical generalization about the social meaning of new comedy and then to use that generalization to disparage the sitcom as a new form of comedy that rejects that social meaning. According to Grote, the comic plot is social in nature because the forces that keep the lovers apart always represent social authority. The resistance of the young lovers to the parental figure thus represents a threat to power, authority, and stability, because, according to Grote, in this type of comedy father never knows best.

At the end of the traditional (“new”) comedy, there is a celebration—usually the wedding of the young people, to which the father is invited back in. The authority figure actually admits that he was wrong and the rebellious children right. The basic comic plot uses the young couple’s union to symbolize the promise of the future, guaranteeing the possibility of personal change and, with it, social change. In this way Grote assumes that the basic comedy plot has held the same meaning in different cultures and throughout history, thus conceptualizing the genre as an ideal type with a single, ahistorical, acultural meaning. His next step is even more universalizing: he claims that the TV sitcom completely rejects both the form and the meaning of this traditional comic plot, thus symbolizing the “end of comedy” as a progressive social force.

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Grote bases his static conception of the sitcom form on its nature as an episodic series, that is, a program with continuing characters but with a new plot (situation) each week. Thus, no matter what happens, the basic situation can’t change. From this, Grote generalizes that the sitcom resists the change of the traditional comic plot and indeed resists change of any kind:

The situation comedy as it has evolved on American television has rejected more than the traditional comedy plot. Not only does boy not pursue and capture girl, he does not pursue anything. The principal fundamental situation of the situation comedy is that things do not change. No new society occurs at the end. The only end is death, for characters as well as for the situation itself, the precise opposite of the rebirth and new life promised in the celebrations of the traditional comedy. The series may come on every week for no more reason than that it is convenient for the network and the sponsors, but the messages that accompany those weekly appearances are the messages of defense, of protection, of the impossibility of progress or any other positive change. . . . That such a change occurred is curious, but that such a change occurred in the largest mass medium known to man, in the most progressive and changeable society in Western history, and was immensely popular, is almost incredible. Everything the traditional comedy stood for, at every level of art, psychology, philosophy, and myth, has been overthrown in this New Comedy of American television.

I have chosen to discuss Grote’s “construction” of the genre not because I think it is the construction that does the most “good” for the texts, but rather because I think it takes to an extreme a very common view that the TV sitcom is by nature a conservative and static form. The goal of the sitcom, according to Grote, is to reaffirm the stability of the family as an institution. Thus Grote moves, as would any genre analyst, from an identification of the formal features of the text (in this case the nature of the episodic series and the fact that each episode returns to the equilibrium with which it began), to a generalization about the meaning of these features (they represent a rejection of change of any kind), to a social, cultural, political, or aesthetic interpretation of the genre (the sitcom represents the end of the progressive potential of the traditional comic plot). If we accept Grote’s premises, his conclusions are not illogical. However, his entire argument depends on an acceptance of his belief that after centuries of progressiveness, the meaning of comedy suddenly shifted to a regressive one for no reason other than that the television medium has transformed history. Many would find this difficult to accept as an historical explanation.

Yet even the more complex “ritual” view constructed by Horace Newcomb bases its model for the genre on the formal qualities of the episodic series. To Newcomb, writing in the early 1970s, the sitcom formula provides a paradigm for what occurs in more complex program types and provides a model of a television formula in that “its rigid structure is so apparent.”15 The situation is “the funny thing that will happen this week.” Next week there will be a new situation 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 conflict: “The only movement is toward the alleviation of the complication and the reduction of confusion” (p. 34). Thus Newcomb sees the sitcom as providing a simple and reassuring problem/ solution formula. As the audience we are

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reassured, not challenged by choice or ambiguity; nor are we forced to reexamine our values. When the sitcom shifts its meaning away from situations and toward persons, we find ourselves in a slightly different formula, that of the “domestic comedy,” says Newcomb. Newcomb defines the domestic comedy as one in which the problems are mental and emotional; there is a deep sense of personal love among members of the family and a belief in the family—however that may be defined—as a supportive group. Although, as with the sitcom, the outcome is never in doubt, for the domestic comedy “it is also true that there is more room for ambiguity and complexity, admittedly of a minimal sort. Characters do seem to change because of what happens to them in the problem-solving process. Usually they ‘learn’ something about human nature” (p. 53). Newcomb goes on to point out that the form of the domestic comedy may expand when problems encountered by the family become socially or politically significant (as in All in the Family or M*A*S*H.)

Newcomb thus constructs the sitcom as the most “basic” of the television genres in the sense that it is the furthest from “real world” problems encountered in crime shows real world forms and value conflicts encountered in soap operas. It is, in a sense, formula for formula’s sake; the very ritualistic simplicity of the problem/solution format gives us a comforting feeling of security as to the cultural status quo. Newcomb thus constructs a ritual view of the genre, but a ritual view based on an essentially static conception of the episodic series such as had informed Grote’s more universalized and literary account. Newcomb’s major interpretation is his equation of the form with a cultural meaning of stability and reassurance. For it is equally possible to view the static nature of the sitcom form as having the potential to challenge our received norms and values.

This is the move that David Marc appears to make in “The Situation Comedy of Paul Henning.”16 Marc attributes the subversive potential of such sitcoms as The Beverly Hillbillies to the presence of an author—in this case, the producer Paul Henning—thus making his an aesthetic conception of genre (that is, an author can work in a banal genre like the sitcom and transform it into an individual statement). Nevertheless, the argument for the subversive potential of the static sitcom form need not depend upon the aesthetic conception but may be seen to lie in the ideology of the genre itself, quite apart from what a particular author may choose to do with it.