ABSTRACT
Comedy in the world of television The term ‘television’ can imply or refer to a number of distinct things, each of them indicative of important aspects of television as an institutionalized apparatus of representation. The term ‘television’ can, for instance, refer to the television set – an item of domestic furniture, something we can rent or buy and take home with us. The term in this sense is indicative of the centrality of the home, the family, and domesticity both to television and to its audience. It is indicative also of a crucial aspect of television as a technology: the television set is a receiver; it cannot normally transmit sounds and images, despite the fact that it was initially invented as a means of two-way communication. The technology of television is used overwhelmingly to broadcast sounds and images from a centralized, institutional source to a mass audience via receivers located in the home. A further technological feature of television is the nature of its sounds and images and the way they are produced and transmitted. As John Ellis has pointed out, in comparison with cinema, the images and sounds of broadcast television are of poor definition and quality; the image is smaller and hence less suited to spectacle. It tends to occupy a secondary
position with respect to sound, which acts as an anchor point in viewing, and mostly carries both essential information and subordinate detail.1 The sounds and images of television are produced and transmitted electronically. Unlike cinema, their production and reception can to all intents and purposes be simultaneous: television can be broadcast ‘live’. Partly for this reason, the sounds and images of broadcast television, no matter how they are organized, and no matter what the precise temporal relation between the moment of production and the moment of reception may actually be, tend to convey an overwhelming impression of directness and of the present as opposed to the pastness of events represented in the cinema.2
