Thesis Christ: “Sitcoms are a Parfait, Not a Funnel Cake”

For this week’s edition of Thesis Christ, the Quest spoke with senior Madi Coleman, an English major thesising on sitcoms and their value as an entertainment and artistic genre within the television medium. Parts of our conversation have been edited for clarity.

Coleman has been an avid sitcom viewer and admirer for her entire life and has dreams of writing her own sitcoms someday. While she originally wanted to write a creative thesis, her access to the academic resources available at Reed allowed her to pivot to a more critical approach, especially when she found out she could work with Professor John Sanders, who teaches film classes in the English department. “I like thinking about sitcoms on a critical level. When will I have the chance to do this again with an advisor like John Sanders, who arrived at the perfect time, you know, and I was like: I need to take advantage of being at [a] school that does not necessarily serve my needs in terms of filmmaking and making sitcoms, but it can definitely help me in my journey of understanding sitcoms. When am I going to sit down for a year and think about this, if not this year?” In summarizing her goal for the thesis overall, Coleman said,  “My goal is to have readers view sitcoms in the same way that I do. Because I view sitcoms very emotionally.” 

Coleman’s thesis attempts to emphasize sitcoms as a unique art form in the film and television media space, hoping to encourage viewers of sitcoms to think more critically about why they are so effective as comedic entertainment and to value the artistic craft that goes into creating such efficient and indelible stories. Coleman elaborated, saying, “Sitcoms, I feel like, are often talked about in this very simplistic way of like, you turn it on, and it's 20 minutes of laughter and you get to forget all your worries. And that's true. But I also think that the sitcom is such a special art form that isn't appreciated enough because of these underlying tensions between the medium of television and the goal of comedy.” 

In her first chapter, Coleman links sitcoms to aspects of comedy theory, including the “superiority theory,” which she describes as “where you are above what you're laughing at,” and “another theory about incongruity, things not matching up.” Coleman described the ice rink campaign announcement scene from Parks and Recreation as a perfect example of how sitcoms can create situations that both humiliate the characters and also allow the audience to gain emotional attachments to them: “We're laughing at these characters falling and messing up what is an important event for Leslie. But I also love Leslie so much and I want her to succeed, right? So it's a really weird kind of moral quandary. I'm like, ‘Haha, you're failing! And I don't want you to fail and I love you!’ And so I'm kind of talking about how sitcoms want to make you laugh, but they're built on you caring about the characters.”

But Coleman made it clear that sitcom characters don’t always have to be good people to be likable. George Costanza from Seinfeld was her example, attributing his likability to his emotional honesty, despite the many characters flaws he possesses and the mistakes he always seems to make: “There's something really almost sweet about a person who does not care about showing all of their insecurities and like everything that they know people will disagree with.” Her third chapter is about the meta-narratives of sitcoms, which confront how sitcoms are almost always self-aware and never take place in the real world that we all know. Coleman described a dichotomy between the escapism of sitcoms and their relatability: “The laugh track used to be a thing. That's literally telling us that it is artificial. But now it's, ‘How do we show that this isn't real, but it is real?’ And so there's an escapism to Seinfeld in that, this is a world where I could steal that loaf of bread that I want to steal from that old lady. The sitcom simultaneously wants us to escape and relate.”

The strict structure of sitcoms – almost always 22 minutes on cable television – is addressed in Coleman’s second chapter, as well as how sitcoms juggle longer storylines with the satisfaction of individual episodes. Coleman explained, “The platonic ideal is: here's something that you can enjoy without context. Enjoy it for 30 minutes. And so any episode, you can jump in, but also it's a TV show. You want people to come back and so you have to provide something for people who care about the characters.” The Office was Coleman’s primary example of this phenomenon, as she described how any episode of that show could be watched without any context, yet what kept people coming back consistently was the overarching storylines, especially the romance between Jim and Pam: “The Office is such an episodic show, but it has this lifeline that you come back every week for. At the time people were like, ‘I just want to see the Jim and Pam episodes.’ The top-rated episodes of The Office are all the ones that have big plot moments. And so it's strange that this thing that we're all like – ‘Oh, it's a sitcom, we just enjoy it quickly’ –  is all about longevity when it presents itself as not that.”

Coleman’s favorite sitcom is Community, which she uses heavily in her third chapter on meta-narrativity. Coleman argues that Community is the most metatextual of all sitcoms because it often enters into different genres where characters on the show will play characters from pop culture, and the tone will shift within the world of the show, and none of the characters appear to have a problem with it. “The show puts on these seemingly artificial things, of genres and other tropes. Abed is always talking in references. So it's like, ‘you guys aren't exactly Ross and Rachel.” And you hear this on every level: ‘You're keeping us from being friends,’ and stuff like that. But the show is this examination of media itself, because Abed was raised on TV and understands other people and his relationships to them through TV, and Jeff, the other main character, these two are both Dan Harmon’s [the creator’s] surrogates. Jeff was raised by TV and just uses the panache of it. And Abed is looking for the substance beneath it using the panache to access the substance.” It is this exact self-aware aspect of sitcoms that Coleman thinks is the real magic behind them: “These characters seem more real by admitting that they're not, by being like, ‘we're just gonna level with you: we're not real. But now that you believe me, you kind of believe in me a bit more too, right?’”

Coleman described the process of thesising on sitcoms as a “spiritual experience,” finally being able to put all of her thoughts into words about “the thing I love most in the entire world.” Coleman expressed deep admiration and gratefulness for Sanders in helping her write the best possible thesis she could: “I have all these emotions about sitcoms that I couldn't really express. I was just like: I know this is right. I know this is what the sitcom is, I know this is what makes it special while I'm watching it, but I don't know how to talk about it. And so my thesis meetings have kind of been like therapy, because [John’s] just like, ‘you can write from your heart. It's okay. And then we're gonna make it into facts and an argument.’”

In closing, Coleman expressed distaste for sitcoms’ transition to streaming services as having disrupted the tried-and-true model of 22-minute episodes. She hopes that television studios and streaming services will begin to recognize the value of the traditional sitcom format, and creators will realize the potential of that format for streaming and how they “treat every second like the valuable real estate that it is.” For Coleman, the finalized episode is always the best possible version of an originally much longer script. Summarizing her thesis and her personal passion for the medium, Coleman said, “I think sitcoms are the most human of all the art forms precisely because of how they're forced to tell stories slowly. Because change in our lives doesn't exist in an episode, you know? Just like how I have changed over these four years, it will take four years for Dwight to learn not to kill cats! The gradual change is realistic.”