Classes are done for the day, there are no pressing assignments due and all your friends are going out of town for the weekend; that means it's time to turn on the tube for most students. As we forget our long day of classes, we ready ourselves for a relaxing hour or two. Little do we know that we can learn more from TV shows than we would like to.
In her article about The Family Guy, Amanda Busch states “the American middle-class white family tends to be over-stereotyped to make the cartoon comical, and so people can laugh at what is at least half true in American culture.” This is exactly why television intrigues us. The “half-truths” and the “over-stereotyped” characteristics of television shows are a reflection of exactly what we come in contact with every day within our culture.
For an even longer period of cartoon history, The Simpson's has used common stereotypes similar to the middle-class white “Family Guy” cartoon family for almost sixteen full-length, prime time seasons. David Chapdelaine introduces each Simpson's character as a certain stereotype in our culture and compares each of the characters to a certain personality from our culture. David discusses the reflection that each member of any American family can identify with a character of the Simpson's
The most popular prime time format, situation-comedy, is famous for taking characteristics of common personalities and stereotypes to an extreme level. Maggie Carr writes about early sit-coms in her article, “Our Fathers Being Portrayed as ‘Hapless, Benign Man-Children' in Today's Sitcoms?” There is an obvious progression when viewing older sit-coms and comparing them to present day sitcoms, yet both generations of shows contain derivative characteristics from our American culture.
Late Night and Comedy sketch shows like Saturday Night Live and Chappelle's Show have a different brand of culture interpretation. Brad Connors and Mike Conway discuss the cultural reflections of humor in satire-sketch shows. In the Chappelle's Show article Brad discusses Dave Chappelle's brand of racism humor. Dave Chappelle uses racism as his anchor for humor, and runs with the shock value it has on the average American. Mike Conway discusses Saturday Night Live's brand of humor in light of American politics. Using political satire and popular characters from American politics, Saturday Night Live finds cultural common ground with all Americans through famous faces in the U.S. and International governments.
Late night televisions' talk shows are primarily based on political humor as well, as discussed by Angela Carr in her article “The Late Night Leaders.” Angela discusses the political views of late night TV shows such as Conan O'Brien , Jay Leno and Dave Letterman push. Angela describes the shallow promotion of political views in these shows and how a poorly-informed late night audience turns to these views for their political education.
Humor in the media thrives on American cultural stereotypes. Introducing these stereotypes as characters in TV shows and sketches for the purpose entertainment is a formula for laughs. Will this formula dictate or hinder American culture in the future? I guess we'll just have to stay tuned.
Dave Chapdelaine