British Comedy Guide

What Makes a Sitcom? Page 2

Quote: Nat Wicks @ September 10 2010, 9:44 AM BST

I thought it had a very similar character humour to Shameless, but without the dramatic events..

I don't think it's the style of humour that decides if something is a sitcom or not.

It's probably the proportion of comedy to drama. Something like shameless has a dramatic storyline and plot elements etc. and throws some funny in now and then. Him and Her, while not having a blatantly 'comedy' storyline was there to make gags and have funny things happen.

No doubt there's some sort of sliding scale between comedy and drama and various shows fall in various places on it. Perhaps your opinion on whether something is a drama, a comedy drama, a dramatic comedy or a full blown comedy depends on how funny you find the jokes used.

Maybe. Not usually though. There are loads of comedies that I don't find funny or I don't get but it's quite clear to me which side of the line they fall on. I think maybe I saw Him & Her as too much of an accurate portrayal of younguns so didn't see any jokes/humour injected that weren't just normal actions.

I'm of course not saying it isn't a comedy. With all the recent debatings going on really, I've always known which side of the fence I sat on, just not with this one!

I call Shameless a comedy drama as it's roughly 50/50 of both. Something like Grandma's House is more comedy than drama.

I think people get needlessly tied in nots over definitions. To me there are either comedies or dramas. Some dramas can be very funny, but they're still drama. The reverse is true for comedies, they can contain drama but are essentially comedies.

Him & Her is definitely a sitcom, at least according to the definitions of a sitcom in my dictionary.

What makes a sitcom? A comedy(a dramactic piece of a pleasant or humourous character/incident suggesting comic treatment) series in which the same characters appear in each episode, which depends for its humour on the behaviour of the characters in particular, sometimes contrived situations.

When in doubt check the dictionary folks! :)

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