In this new Routledge Television Guidebook, Butler analyzes the sitcom's position as a major media artefact within American culture and will provide a historical overview of the genre as it has evolved in the US. Butler examines discourses of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation that are ever always at the core of humor in our culture and interprets how those discourses are embedded in television's relatively rigid narrative structures. The book is organized around the sub-genres through which the sitcom has cycled: for example, the rural sitcom, the workplace sitcom, the...

In this new Routledge Television Guidebook, Butler analyzes the sitcom's position as a major media artefact within American culture and will provide a historical overview of the genre as it has evolved in the US. Butler examines discourses of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation that are ever always at the core of humor in our culture and interprets how those discourses are embedded in television's relatively rigid narrative structures. The book is organized around the sub-genres through which the sitcom has cycled: for example, the rural sitcom, the workplace sitcom, the...