Legen- wait for it- dary

Sitcoms. We all watch them we all love them and they are always there to give us a laugh. But why are sitcoms so great? Isn’t reality TV taking over the market which has existed for many many years? I personally doubt that will ever happen. Sitcoms are great because of their rhetorical standing. There is an audience for them because people like to get away from their humdrum life and be entertained. Sitcoms fulfill this need and also do it in a very inexpensive way, which in turn creates another audience. An audience of people who would like the additive of cheap entertainment to their lives. If we focus more on specific sitcoms, we can see that there are different subgroups of this general audience. People want to laugh at nerdy jokes, and the Big Bang Theory is born. A different audience wants to laugh at the stupid things that happen at work, so The Office is created. Any successful sitcom has been created at a time where the exigence is perfect.

Furthermore, sitcoms either poke fun or support the common places we have in our society. In most family sitcoms there is the episode where x child actor/actress steals lies or cheats. This is something that our society finds wrong so x child gets punished, or reprimanded in some way. Or the sitcom includes the mischievous male child who gets into all sorts of crazy things. We find these situations amusing because they are common things that happen in society and we can each relate.

Then there are the sitcoms that are so general that anyone could love it at any point in life. Think about it; Golden Girls, Friends, and How I Met Your Mother are all just a group of friends in different adventures. You don’t have to be an elderly white woman to understand the jokes in Golden Girls, nor do you have you be a twenty-something year old living in New York to find the jokes in How I Met Your Mother funny. These are each pretty much the same concept the only difference is they were created at the right time for them to be successful.

Essentially, I do not see a world without sitcoms. As we continue to grow as a society, things change and we have more situations to poke fun at. No one would walk away from a good laugh and as long as that continues to be provided there will always be an audience for sitcoms.