For the first of my two chosen television programmes, which is Men behaving badly there are four main characters, Dorothy, Debs, Gary and Tony. The two guys in this situation comedy have what’s known as “masculine characteristics”. For example, lack of emotional awareness, immaturity. This is also proven by Gary’s and Tony’s feelings about lesbians and how they fell that in fact lesbians are how they are because they couldn’t get any men in the first place. The two girls in this situation comedy are what we know as typical female qualities such as forgiving, understanding and mature. This gives a balance of the “stereotypical ideas”.
The men are stupid, juvenile, always talking about females and female forms, drinking beer and are over all an extreme exaggeration of a “typical male”. On the other hand we have the females who both have jobs and are independent and rather intelligent. Having these two opposites and this rather odd match gives us the view of a comical relation. This is because of the two completely different personality qualities. It makes the audience question what such an intelligent, independent female would be doing with such a selfish dependent male. For this exact reason the audience find this amusing because of the strange set up and the gender stereotypical exaggerations. The situation comedy depends on our knowledge of the fact that these two individual personalities being together are quite ridiculous.
In my chosen episode the opening scene is the four main characters sitting around the TV watching a soap opera and having a conversation about how its unfair that the men in these programmes never get their clothes off as much as the women. In this scene all the characters show their gender stereotypes. This is also shown by the mise en scene. The conflict of the group is found amusing because of their clash of opinion, which is sourced by their gender tendencies (masculine and feminine characteristics).
My other chosen TV situation comedy is The Office. There are four main characters David Brent, Tim, Dawn and Gareth. Even though there are much more main male characters there is a balance of gender due to the arrival of David’s boss Jennifer Taylor Clarke.
The sit-com is based upon a set of employees working in a dingy office in Slough under the orders of David Brent: the stereotype of a working class male. He uses his power of his employees to the full extent and doesn’t hold his female staff members in such high regard as the men. However when Taylor Clarke comes to visit he is forced to hide his real feelings and act like he has respect for all his employees. This is shown in the scene where he gives TC a tour of the warehouse (where he was supposed to have fired an employee, but instead lies and invents someone to fire). In this scene he introduces TC to a number of the workers while they are watching a video of two dogs having sex. Normally he would have stopped and had a laugh with the ‘lads’ but instead he is shown as quite nervous. The camera uses quite erratic framing to try and show as much of the set as possible to show who is really in charge. At first David is centred in the frame but when TC comes in the camera swings, free hand, to manually focus on her to show the equilibrium has been broken by the arrival of this woman and create a sense of chaos.
While David is showing TC around Gareth has been given the task of finding out who made pornographic images of David. Now Gareth is not really a typical male stereotype and is portrayed as a weak, stuttering coward that is trying to live up to a more macho image. This is shown when he is ‘interrogating’ Dawn and Tim. Although the camera is continuously focused on Gareth it is easy to tell that he is in fact not really in control over the situation and Tim is just finding it funny how useless he is at doing this investigation. While Gareth is making empty threats about how he has the power to fire anybody he wants to Tim is constantly interrupting him:
Gareth: "In this room, I have special-"
Tim: "Needs?"
Gareth: "No, I am a special-"
Tim: "Needs child?"
Gareth: "No. And that’s not even funny"
This shows that although Gareth thinks he has all the power to boss people around, in fact Tim is in control of the situation and simply makes fun of the ‘underdog’ male.
