ABSTRACT
Sanders Show. The intervention of the stand-up mode of address, or the self-conscious construction of narratives which assume that the audience has a collective knowledge of sitcom characters and conventions, has led to a systematic redefinition of the sitcom as a closed context. Carry Shandling, for example, can operate as a stand-up comic and a sitcom character in one episode, sometimes directly speaking to the audience and revealing all the mechanisms by which the show is constructed, and sometimes being in character playing out the anticipated narrative. The ideological flux thus made possible by the breaking of both televisual rules and generic conventions further destabilises any coherent political position, except one directly attributed to the authorial voice. This ‘voice’, whether it be Shandling, Seinfeld, Margaret Ho in All American Girl, Brett Butler in Grace Under Pressure or even Roseanne Barr in Roseanne, is always challenged by competing discourses, which enable the viewer to engage in a variety of interpretations.
