Written for Writing: Film Focus (Film R1B), UC Berkeley, Spring 2020.

Long considered formulaic and tediously stable, the genre of situation comedy (hereafter sitcom) has historically tended to receive little scholarly attention. As John Hartley notes in the Television Genre Book, sitcoms have “a remarkable stable semiotic history…continuing to the present day with few fundamental changes”1. This criticism is scarcely unfounded as a precursory glance at any popular television streaming service will reveal that most of the legion of television sitcoms all seem to follow the same stock structure that has come to define the genre: a plot that revolves around the life of a a group of, more often that not six, characters engaging in pithy dialogue with the subsequent conflict and romance that emerges from their interactions driving the narrative forward. Apart from this banality of structure, sitcoms have been levelled with criticism of their content enforcing stereotypes and of being heteronormative2, neurotypical3 and patriarchal. As a final nail in the coffin, sitcoms are accused of subverting the traditional anarchic role of comedy and that rather than upsetting the status quo through humour they further reify and substantiate its grip on culture.

With this backdrop of understandable, if not justified critique, it should come as little surprise that most scholars, barring few notable exceptions, have paid little heed to the sitcom genre. While agreeing in principle with this critical consensus, I believe a handful of recent titles in the last decade or so possess such substantial value in their treatment of the genre and in their escapement of its traditional trappings that a closer look is warranted.

In particular, I will argue that the American television show Community transcends its ostensible sitcom origins through a radical self awareness of its own underlying semiotics, thus allowing it to both fruitfully engage with sitcom’s aforementioned criticism as well as sufficiently distancing itself from the genre’s canonical structure so as to require a reimagining of the genre. I will further argue that Community achieves this through its high degree of narrative complexity and an extensive employment of what Jason Mittel terms as operational reflexivity4, all of which are manifested by the specifics of Abed Nadir, one of the main characters in the show.

Community created by Dan Harmon consists of six seasons that aired on NBC from 2009 to 2015 and follows the lives of seven students at Greendale, a fictional community college in Colorado, and the ensuing shenanigans they engage in together as a study group. My essay will be confined to an analysis of the first two seasons. While broadly billed as a comedy by NBC and listed as such on IMDb, it is frequently referred to as a sitcom by critics and fans alike and finds itself included in the scholarship of the genre.5

However, it is prudent to avoid blindly accepting any such genre label regardless of how entrenched it may be in the cultural milieu. As Mittell convincingly argues in his seminal essay on television genre theory, television genres are best approached as discursive practices, which while being relatively stable are also inherently active processes. Mittell explains the seeming contradiction of this stability amid flux through a model of discursive clusters that are “contingent and transitory, shifting over time and taking on new meanings and definitions in different contexts”6.

Though Mittel finds Rick Altman’s conception of genre problematic due to its emphasis on a textualist mode of analysis, he accepts that Altman’s pioneering syntactic/semantic approach remains highly useful for the analysis of individual texts. As Altman delineates in his original essay, a process oriented genre theory can either focus on the semantics or the syntax of the text. “The semantic approach thus stresses the genre’s building blocks, while the syntactic view privileges the structures into which they are arranged”7. Hence, a semantic approach to sitcom would focus on its set pieces of character tropes, revisited locations and the existence of a laughter track whereas a syntactic approach would note the centrality of humour in a sitcom.

Where does Community stand in all this? At the outset, Community certainly seems to embody both the semantics and syntax of its sitcom brethren. It’s main characters Jeff, Britta, Shirley, Pierce, Troy, Annie and Abed seem like simple stereotypes, reinforced by the opening scene of the show wherein the Dean is giving a welcome speech while the camera focuses on the different characters in a series of shots -

Dean: What is community college? Well, you’ve heard all kinds of things. You’ve heard it’s “loser college” for remedial teens, twenty-something dropouts, middle-aged divorcées, and old people keeping their minds active as they circle the drain of eternity.

Most of Community’s scenes take place in the diegetic world of the college with the principal location being the study room in which the group gathers to study a different class each season and while Community does not have a laughter track, it is hardly unique among sitcoms for the omission. Syntactically, Community clearly spells out its intent of producing humour with a constant barrage of jokes and the plot consisting mainly of the characters going on wild capers.

However, instilled in the very beginning of the show is a level of self awareness or in common parlance ‘metaness’ that grows in scope as the show progresses and whose growth begins to undermine one’s initial assessment of Community as simply a sitcom. The source of this self awareness lies in the character Abed, a film student possessing a self declared obsession with pop culture and an encyclopaedic like knowledge of film and television, knowledge that he frequently draws upon in making intertextual references. We see this in the very first episode when Abed remarks how the scene is like Breakfast Club, with the disparate characters all together in the library. Crucially, Abed’s references are not depicted as merely in pursuit of being witty, like most reference humour in sitcoms, but rather reflect his attempts at understanding people; it is heavily suggested though never explicitly confirmed that Abed has Aspergers’, with Jeff even stating it outright in the pilot episode. This characterisation of Abed is key to Community’s uniqueness as a sitcom and lays the foundation for the entirety of the metaness of the show and will be the main subject of interest for the rest of this paper.

However, before diving into an in depth exploration of Community and Abed, it is necessary to lay out one last theoretical consideration. In his 2006 paper on narrative complexity in television, Mittel introduces a key concepts for this essay, that of operational reflexivity. Mittell observes a trend of sitcoms that are narrative complex, a phenomena he defines as a “distinct narrational mode” that produces a “redefinition of episodic forms under the influence of serial narration.”8 An important feature of a narratively complex text is the “foregrounding of plot development such that relationship and character drama emerge from the plot” and not vice versa, criteria that Community definitively fulfils. Importantly, Mittell comments that a potential consequence of such a complex narrative is the ability for writers to create moments wherein we can relish the “process of narration as a machine rather than engaging in its diegesis”, an attraction he labels as ‘operational reflexivity’. With these formal underpinnings in place, we are now well positioned to understand the role Abed plays in Community.

As mentioned earlier, the ingenuity of Community fundamentally arises from the extent of its ‘metasemiotics’ that arises through the characterisation of Abed. We witness Abed taking his first film class in S1E3 and that moment acts as a baseline for the parallelised development of Abed’s prowess as a filmmaker and the extent of Community’s metasemiotics. It is almost as if Abed himself is the creator of Community, a connection explicit made early on in S1E9 where the rest of the characters watch Abed’s film videos that contain dialogue from the previous week’s episode -

Troy: All of Abed’s films are about us. Check it out.

[Abed’s video plays with dialogue between characters from previous week’s episode]

Britta: Those people look just like us. We had almost that exact conversation last week.

Troy: Yeah – but Abed posted this video two weeks ago.

What is remarkable about this instance is the connection between the diegetic and non diegetic timescales, episodes of Community like most sitcoms were aired once a week, and Abed’s creation of the video two weeks prior reinforces the notion that he created the preceding episode. When confronted about this later in the episode, Abed explains his prescience by stating he knows the other characters exceedingly well and that he’s “a student of human character”.

Furthermore, Abed displays a hyper awareness of his own fictionality, as seen at the beginning of S1E2 where he comments after a PA announcement by the Dean -

Abed: I like it. It makes every ten minutes feel like the beginning of a new scene of a TV show. Of course, the illusion only lasts until they say something they’d never say on TV – like how much their life is like TV. There, it’s gone.

Abed’s awareness ramps up in intensity as the show progresses, with the first line of the beginning of S2 being Abed stating “And we’re back”. This awareness manifests in not just a complete acceptance of his own fictionality but a realisation that he can utilise this to even improve his diegetic world, as witnessed in dialogue from the same episode -

Abed: Hey Jeff, do you have any hillbilly cousins?

Jeff: I wish. Why?

Abed: How about a wealthy uncle. Or an old drinking buddy that may or may not have had a sex change?

Jeff: Abed, why are you mining my life for classic sitcom scenarios?

Abed: I guess I’m just excited for the new year, looking for ways to improve things. I’m hoping we can move away from the soapy, relationshippy-stuff and into bigger, fast-paced self-contained escapades.

This is operational reflexivity at its finest. According to Mittell, the pleasure afforded by such reflexivity is that of allowing viewers “to engage at the level of a formal analyst, dissecting the techniques used to convey spectacular displays of storytelling”. However, Community goes a step forward, by letting Abed take the place of the viewer, it sandwiches another layer of reflexivity and we vicariously enjoy this anatomisation via Abed. In doing so, Community effectively delivers an exegesis of the sitcom, as seen in the above dialogue, the show both mocks the genre’s often used tropes as well as poking fun at itself for utilising the trope of ‘soapy relationshippy-stuff’. This metareflexivity essentially allows Community to engage with the discursive pattens of the sitcom genre directly and thereby altering them.

We see this again in dialogue later on from the same episode -

Abed: Shirley would you consider spinning off with me? We could open up hair salon together

Shirley: I don’t understand, is this you being meta?

where the object of mockery is now the sitcom industry as a whole and its tendency to frequently produce spinoffs of successful characters. Interestingly, the above dialogue also hints at the show’s awareness of its own metaness, an occurrence that is brought to full tilt in S2E5, where much of the episode is devoted to Abed making a meta-film, as he describes to Shirley -

Abed: We need a Jesus movie for the post-postmodern world. […] I want to tell the story of Jesus from the perspective of a filmmaker exploring the life of Jesus.

Shirley: That sounds… very appealing to filmmakers.

Abed: See, in the filmmaker’s film, Jesus is a filmmaker trying to find God with his camera. But then the filmmaker realizes that he is actually Jesus, and he’s being filmed by God’s camera, and it goes like that forever in both directions like a mirror in a mirror, […] And the movie’s called “Abed”. All caps. Filmmaking beyond film. A meta-film. My masterpiece.

Abed and the rest of the school grow increasingly enamoured with the whole project even as it grows more and more ridiculous. Abed begins to be treated with increased awe and respect as he wholeheartedly taken on the persona of a filmmaking Jesus and one of the students even comments with great gravitas “I heard the deleted scenes are the scenes, and the scenes are the deleted scenes”. The awe-struck reaction from everyone barring Shirley towards the increasingly farcical project strongly suggests to us that the whole thing is a parody and the episode ends with Abed realising his movie is ‘absolute crap’. Thus the episode serves to simultaneously satirise the show itself for all its previous engagements in meta humour as well as the extent to which viewers can suspend their skepticism in their delight of all that is meta. Yet the satire is undercut with a comical truthiness embedded in one of Abed’s lines “The film is the story, the story is us, we are the film”, since the film is in fact the story of the episode and that the characters are in fact a film. This softening of the otherwise cutting satire is crucial to Community’s appeal, it is not simply tearing down sitcom’s conventions but rather acknowledging and revitalising them.

Another fine example of Community’s meta-commentary is in S2E16, aptly titled Intermediary Documentary Making. The entire episode is filmed in a mockumentary style with shaky handheld footage and floating headshots, reminiscent of the comedy verité used in sitcoms like The Office and Modern Family. As Brett Mills accurately notes9, comedy verité shifts “the source of humour in the television comedy from the constructed joke to the observation of a comic event” and Intermediary Documentary Making stays faithfully true to this, with much of the humour of the episode arising from the comic events that unfurl as Pierce tries to take revenge on the rest of the group. Moreover, Community’s awareness of doing this frames the humour as arising from the observation of the constructed nature of the observation of a comic event.

Once again, the satirical tone of the episode primarily arises from Abed, witnessed in his comment at the start of the episode -

“But I’m excited about the narrative facility of the documentary format. It’s easier to tell a complex story when you can just cut to people explaining things to the camera”

And we see exactly this throughout the episode as it uses exposition dumps from the characters to move the plot forward. The episode continues to layer criticism against the mockumentary format towards the end where Abed comments -

“Fortunately if your documentary is turning out to be just as messy as real life, you can wrap it up with a series of random shots [the visual is a series of random shots of the characters] which when cut together under a generic voice over suggest a profound thematic connection. I’m not knocking it. It works”

The genuineness of Abed’s last two lines are borne out by the execution of the entire episode that acts as evidence that the style does indeed work; by toeing the line between parody and homage Community effectively situates to a position where it both addresses potential criticism of sitcom whilst extending the very definition of the genre.

Community’s self awareness is not restricted to Abed but rather bleeds over to the rest of the characters. In S2E8, the entire episode takes place within the study room as Annie holds the rest of the group hostage because of her suspicion that someone stole her pen. Abed quips how “This is starting to feel like a bottle episode”, making reference to episodes in television serials where characters stay within an enclosed space together, usually done for budgetary reasons. The group keeps trying to leave before Jeff puts his foot down -

Jeff: Lockdown! Abed, seal the doors! Nobody leaves ‘til this pen shows up!

Abed: I don’t like this.

Jeff: Yeah, well, tell that to the pen you might have. [on phone] Gwynnifer! Hi, it’s me, I can’t make it. I’m doing a bottle episode!

This instance highlights a common pattern wherein upon Abed shining a torch on the inner machinations of the show, the rest of the other characters join in and adopt his view as canon. This feature allows Community to push its metaness to full throttle with several of its episodes being elaborate spoofs, the first being S1E21 of the mafia genre and is followed by S1E23 of action. S2 has several such episodes, such as S2E6 of zombie movies and S2E9 of Pulp Fiction. Finally the last two episodes of S2 are a two part series with the first part spoofing the Western genre and the second spoofing Star Wars, the continuity of the episodes deliberately utilising the syntactic similarities between the two genres. The engendering of these spoofs are all invariably tied back to Abed, for instance the mafia spoof occurs when he mentions “It’s like a mafia move” and a voiceover in his voice continues, “As long as I can remember; I always wanted to be in a mafia movie. We stopped being a family and started being a family in italics”. Here, and in other episodes we see additions of paratextual elements such as voiceovers as well as alterations in the intro and credit scenes that also reflect the change in genre that occurs in such spoof episodes.

It is these episodes and their frequency of occurrence that fundamentally raise questions about Community’s designation as sitcom. The show’s adeptness at reconfiguring both the syntax and the semantics of these episodes to create emulations par excellence suggests that each of these episodes should be treated as members of the genre they mirror. However, notwithstanding that doing so would be pragmatically ineffectual, we run headfirst into the fact previously mentioned, that generally speaking, most people consider Community a sitcom. Even more crucially, while throughout this essay I have shown how the meta nature of Community separates it from other traditional sitcoms, the end evaluative result of its operational aesthetic by the audience is, in fact, a humorous response. Even when spoofing Star Wars, the show is making its viewers laugh.

In effect, Community echoes Mittel’s sentiment in his comment that “Even if we cannot provide an essential definition of a genre’s core identity, we all know still know a sitcom when we see one”.10 By virtue of resisting a simplistic generification, Community bolsters Mittell’s argument that a comprehensive understanding of genre is fundamentally intertextual as well as being reliant on larger cultural and industrial practices that are associated with texts that fall under a genre’s discursive cluster.

Finally, it is important to consider the significance of Abed’s portrayal as being on the spectrum. In S1E21, he mentions how he uses films and tv shows to talk to people because the day to day world makes no sense to him. Indeed, Abed’s obsession with pop culture and his metareflexivity can be read as his way of cognitively thinking about the world, sorting out interpersonal relations and dynamics through the systematic categorisation of television and film genre. As autism scholar Julia Rodas notes, this kind of systemising is a common cognitive feature of people with autism, which is often represented by clinical texts as a pathological symptom. However, she further notes that “autistic writes more usually suggest that collecting and organising might be better understood in positive terms, as central to autistic cognition, aesthetic and culture.”11 By positioning Abed as the source of Community’s wildly pleasurable operational reflexivity as well the spring of its creativity and originality, the show pushes forward this positive view of autistic ‘cognition, aesthetic and culture’ as well as pushing back against the neurotypical hegemony that exists in most media representations. Community thus effectively leverages its comedic power to upset the traditional systems of thought that work to define cultural experiences.

Ultimately, Community does everything that sitcom is accused of not doing and does it with a panache that makes it more than deserving of the cult status it has come to ascend to. It’s as Abed’s catchphrase goes ‘Cool, cool, cool’.

Bibliography

  • Battles, Kathleen, and Wendy Hilton-Morrow. “Gay Characters in Conventional Spaces: Will and Grace and the Situation Comedy Genre.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 1 (2002): 87–105. ↗
  • Creeber, Glen, ed. The Television Genre Book. 3rd ed. London: Bloomsbury Publishing / BFI, 2015. ↗
  • Loftis, Sonya Freeman. Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. ↗
  • Mittell, Jason. “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television.” The Velvet Light Trap 58 (2006): 29–40. ↗
  • Mittell, Jason. “A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory.” Cinema Journal 40, no. 3 (2001): 3–24. ↗
  • Rodas, Julia Miele. Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. ↗
  • Mills, Brett. “Comedy Verite: Contemporary Sitcom Form.” Screen 45, no. 1 (2004): 63–78. ↗
  • Savorelli, Antonio. Beyond Sitcom: New Directions in American Television Comedy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. ↗
  • Altman, Rick. “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.” Cinema Journal 23, no. 3 (1984): 6–18. ↗

  1. Glen Creeber, ed., The Television Genre Book (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015). ↩︎

  2. Kathleen Battles and Wendy Hilton-Morrow, “Gay Characters in Conventional Spaces: Will and Grace and the Situation Comedy Genre,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 1 (2002): 87–105. ↩︎

  3. Sonya Freeman Loftis, Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). ↩︎

  4. Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television,” The Velvet Light Trap 58 (2006): 29–40. ↩︎

  5. Antonio Savorelli, Beyond Sitcom: New Directions in American Television Comedy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010). ↩︎

  6. Jason Mittell, “A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory,” Cinema Journal 40, no. 3 (2001): 3–24. ↩︎

  7. Rick Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” Cinema Journal 23, no. 3 (1984): 6–18. ↩︎

  8. Mittell, “Narrative Complexity,” 29–40. ↩︎

  9. Brett Mills, “Comedy Verite: Contemporary Sitcom Form,” Screen 45, no. 1 (2004): 70. ↩︎

  10. Mittell, “A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory,” 10. ↩︎

  11. Julia Miele Rodas, Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 117. ↩︎