Abstract
This essay examines the television programs Will & Grace and Queer as Folk through the lens of a comic frame to argue for each show’s potential to change our social culture. Because television culture is oriented to heterosexual and Christian perfection (i.e. heterosexuality and Christianity as normative identities), gays, lesbians and Jews are rendered Other and thereby tragically framed. By reading Queer as Folk and Will & Grace together and employing the Burkean notion of perspective by incongruity, this article argues that neither show’s characters exist within the tragic binary of victim/villain. Rather, the use of humor offers the necessary perspective by incongruity to comically correct the tragic frame of heterosexual and Christian perfection.
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Notes
Throughout this piece, the terms gay and lesbian are used because they primarily reference specific character’s identity. However, when larger claims about identity are made, lesbian and gay act as stand-ins for all members of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered) community.
W&G was a staple on NBC’s “Must See TV” Thursday night line-up. Throughout the series’ run W&G earned 83 Emmy nominations, won 16 Emmy Awards, and was ensconced in the Nielson top 20 for half its network run. W&G also won a People’s Choice Award, a Golden Globe, an American Comedy Award, two GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) Media Awards, and a Founders Award from the Viewers for Quality television.
To be fair, however, the critics were responding to the initial seasons of W&G, which were significantly different than the later seasons during which Will has boyfriends and Jack and Will kiss.
Burke’s (1959) conception of Others as scapegoats, their resulting tragic frames and the potential for comic correctives, also known comic frames, are strategies that, according to Christiansen and Hanson (1996), “humorously points out failings in the status quo and urges society to correct them through thoughtful action rather than tragic victimage” (p. 161). In their analysis of ACT UP’s (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) campaign to raise awareness about HIV and AIDS in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Christiansen and Hanson highlight Burke’s comic corrective as the persuasive power necessary to cause social change. Contemporary usage of Burke is supported by Barbara Biesecker (1997), who claims, “Burke’s work productively supplements contemporary understandings of the relations of structure to subject” (p. 9) and authors Sanchez and Stuckey (2000), who suggest a comic frame served as the essential mechanism for American Indian activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Demo’s (2000) analysis of the Guerilla Girls’ success finds them using a “comic politics of subversion,” and DeLaure (2011) reads Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man as a performance of green identity in the comic frame.
For examples, Jews are often seen as victims of the Holocaust or villainous money hoarders and gays and lesbians are often seen as victims of bad parenting or villainous sexual predators.
This is my own term and can be elsewhere seen in: Silverman (2012) Queer Jewish performativity on Sex and the City. (Article Submitted to: Critical Studies in Media Communication).
The author would like to recognize that Jews were by no means the only victims of the Nazis. Their reach extended far beyond the six million Jews who were killed to the five million Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, communists, and many other groups. However, on Folk, only Jews are discussed when referencing Nazis and the Holocaust.
Proposition 14 is a fictional ballot measure on Folk, one that came 7 years before the real-life California, Florida, or Arkansas versions in 2009—the most well-known of these initiatives was Proposition 8 in California.
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Silverman, R.E. Comedy as Correction: Humor as Perspective by Incongruity on Will & Grace and Queer as Folk . Sexuality & Culture 17, 260–274 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-012-9150-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-012-9150-5