Abstract
Rosie White’s unique and illuminating new book proposes queer theory as an appropriate lens through which to view television comedy and the exploration of gendered identities that is one of its key elements. For White, the genre is built on a normative account of gender but is ultimately able to expose its use of heteronormative gender roles as a consequence of its very nature as a comedic text. Having exposed the limitations of gender identities, these comedic television texts then invite viewers to examine and challenge structurally reinforced binary accounts of gender.
Television Comedy and Femininity notes from the outset that comedy television is often viewed as the ‘poor cousin’ to realist drama or ‘quality TV’ within academia, but goes on to acknowledge that, in spite of this, ‘a canon of work on comedy television has emerged, as has a subsidiary body of material on gender and comedy’ (p. 19). This book adds to a steadily growing list of vital publications exploring the comedy genre and the role of gender within it, such as the work of Judith Halberstam and Kathleen Rowe’s highly influential, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter, which is both cited and built upon by White. White draws on a range of examples from both UK and US television, often citing less-seen programmes which have received little-to-no academic attention to date such as sketch show Smack the Pony (1999–2001) alongside popular sitcoms such as I Love Lucy (1951–1957).
The book consists of five chapters, moving chronologically through the US television comedy genre over the course of the first three chapters before transitioning to focus on UK television. White is keen to note, however, that the book is ‘not intended as an historical overview of how television comedy has worked to queer gender’ but is rather an attempt to examine ‘the potential of particular shows to expose how gender is always queering itself in comic work’ (p. 203). Stand-out moments include the first chapter, which works as both a literature review and an analysis of how femininity can be queered in the earliest US sitcoms through an exploration of the work of Gracie Allen, Martha Raye, Eve Arden and Lucille Ball. White notes how the 1950s sitcoms starring Ball and Allen such as I Love Lucy and The Burns and Allan Show (1950–1958) repeatedly satirise the domesticity in suburban life even though the programmes themselves used the setting of suburbia as a normative trope. Heteronormative gender roles are being used in much the same way across these 1950s sitcoms and White’s entertaining textual analysis of the programmes supports this. Moreover, the focus on queering age and the retirement home sitcom is an idiosyncratic and fascinating choice of topic for the book’s fifth chapter and could serve as a springboard for providing opportunities for future academic scholarship.
Nuanced argument runs throughout the book, most notably in the chapter examining the popular television comedy, Parks and Recreation (2009–2015). The show has received some academic attention over the past decade from scholars such as Jason Mittell as a consequence of its visual and narrative style. However, White uses the show’s fictional setting of Pawnee, Indiana to examine the extent to which the show plays out queer possibilities of gender and sexuality in a rural location as opposed to the more flexible urban environments depicted in 30 Rock (2006–2013) and Sex and the City (1998–2004). One of the book’s strengths lies in its ability to clearly outline the queer and transgressive potential gestured towards in the characters and narratives of both Parks and Recreation and The Big Bang Theory (CBS, 2007–2019) (the focus of the book’s third chapter). This analysis is particularly refreshing to find in an examination of the sitcom subgenre which is often quite rightly perceived as conservative in its nature. Inevitably, both programmes ultimately shift into a heteronormative gear as they reach their respective conclusions. For White, these shows ‘fail to live up to their queer potential’ and are demonstrative of how ‘a liberal agenda focused myopically on masculinity and a heteronormative “logics of success” works to confine its characters’ (p. 201).
White acknowledges that the further you examine comedy, the less funny it becomes: ‘If you want to examine comedy you destroy its sense of humour (which may be a bad thing), but if you want to examine gender you destroy its certainties (which, I propose, is a good thing)’ (p. 3). It is a testament to the quality of writing in this book that it is not only able to illustrate the potential flexibility of gender norms in comedy television, enriching the texts in the process, but was also able to elicit laughter from this reader on multiple occasions. The book moves coherently and elegantly with sound logic and sense of purpose from one chapter to the next. A strong recommendation for both scholars and students who are interested in television, comedy and gender studies.