Introduction

This book is about comedy in the cinema and on television. As such it is particularly, and necessarily, diverse in its scope and concerns. Comedy is itself a varied phenomenon, both in the range of forms it encompasses – from the joke to the sit-com – and in the range of defining conventions it can involve: from the generation of laughter, to the presence of a happy ending, to the representation of everyday life. Moreover, discussion of these various forms and conventions necessitates drawing on quite distinct – and diverse – fields of study, from narrative theory to philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis.