Situation Comedy, Character, and Psychoanalysis

On the Couch with Lucy, Basil, and Kimmie

D.T. Klika

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781501354908
• eBook ISBN: 9781501327391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

Situation Comedy, Character, and Psychoanalysis puts the sitcom character on the analyst's couch and closely examines the characters of Basil Fawlty, Lucy Ricardo and Kim from Australia's Kath & Kim, in order to reveal the essential elements that must exist in a sitcom before even the first joke is written. Original in its approach, D.T. Klika uncovers major findings about the sitcom as well as human behavior and relationships that we find 'arresting' and even "familial". By offering a new way of reading the sitcom using psychoanalytic theory, this book can be used as a basis for engaging in critical discourses as well as textual analysis of programs. Psychoanalytic theory enables a reading of character motivations and relationships, in turn elucidating the power struggle that exists between characters in this form of comedy. Situation Comedy, Character, and Psychoanalysis shines a light on what is at play in the sitcom that makes us laugh, and why we love the characters we do, only to discover that this form of comedy is more complex than we first thought.

1

It Begins with the (Key) Character

There is thus Narcissism, misrecognition and alienation in the moment of the mirror.¹

Characters constitute much of the pleasure of sitcoms through gags, jokes, and comic performance. Often categorized as “types” such as The Hedonist, The Idiot Savant, The Operator, or depicted as recognizable stereotypes such as the effeminate male or harridan housewife, many are descendants of archetypal ancestors, in particular the fool, trickster, truth-teller, rogue, and comic hero. Such descriptors explain to some degree a character’s comicality, but not the character’s perpetual entrapment, a marked characteristic of the sitcom.

Bergson defines the comic character as an unconscious victim—the disjunction between how the character sees him/her self and the reality within which they exist generates comicality. In order to better understand the comic characters’ unconscious, I dissect the psychical nature of the sitcom character to elucidate why they remain “trapped” in the situation from which they attempt to escape yet repeatedly fail. To that end, I observe the characters from two Australian comedies, Pizza and Kath & Kim, the British classic Fawlty Towers alongside Patricia Mellencamp’s analysis of the American classic I Love Lucy, to view them as suffering some degree of narcissistic disorder that precipitates an identity at odds with the world within which they exist.² In seeking to understand the dynamics of the character’s behavior rather than determine why the character has those characteristics, I begin with the proposition that the comic character is an unconscious victim, and harbors some degree of narcissism. Freudian psychoanalytic theory assists in understanding the traits of narcissistic behavior. By examining such traits—or extremes of the continuum of what is normal, this chapter locates the psychological disorder the comic characters appear to manifest, and thus nuances what instantiates the sitcom characters’ view of themselves and the world around them. Post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory further assists by articulating how identity is constructed and how such construction contributes to certain behavior.

Narcissism is central to psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic thinking; seen as part of ego maturation, it structures identity and the way the subject engages with the external world. It is a difficult and complex psychological notion that cannot be simply defined as bad or delusional behavior. The term derives from the Greek myth of Narcissus, translated by the Roman writer Ovid in 8 AD: Narcissus is the hunter youth in love with his mirror image, his self-love enabled by an adoring mother, reinforced by the disembodied nymph, Echo. The myth enables a reading of the characters in the sitcom as being a derivative of either Narcissus or the little-mentioned Echo.

For Jacques Lacan, three registers of the psyche operate in the development of identity: the Imaginary, the site of primary identification (the mirror stage) and ego formation, the Symbolic as the register of the social, and the Real, located beyond the Symbolic, the site of anxiety and trauma. In order to be accepted in the society and its culture, an individual can either surrender their desire or seek to have their desire satisfied by compensating it in return for recognition in the society. It is the desire to be recognized in the Symbolic that can generate anxiety in the Real; the “law of desire” is betrayed through the adoption of the socio-Symbolic. Characters such as Lucy, Basil, and Kim strive to attain an identity in the social and thus the Symbolic but fail, leading to the supposition that they are simultaneously caught in an entrapment of which they are unaware. As such, this chapter is concerned with the comic character’s psychical construct developed in the Imaginary and their ego in the “mirror stage,” the conflict, tension, or anxiety shaped by desire, and imposed by the Real that they then experience in the Symbolic. While desire is determined in psychoanalysis as compensating for some lack, I offer that, through Kristyn Gorton’s theorizing, it also enables motivation.³

John Reddick’s translation of Freud’s 1914 paper “On the Introduction of Narcissism,” along with Lacan’s schema of psychical and ego maturation provide a theoretical framework for this undertaking.⁴ Patricia Mellencamp’s reading of the 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy enables further exploration of the character’s unconscious entrapment within what she describes as a “discursive containment.”⁵ Furthermore and by mobilizing the concept of “echoing,” my aim is to understand the nature of dependency between (comic) characters and how such relationships both affect a sense of self and behavior in the social. In doing so, I deduce that some characters have psychical constructs that embody both Narcissus and Echo.

Narcissism and the comic character

What constitutes the ego and its development is the central concern for theories of narcissism both within psychoanalysis and in analytical psychology. As a term in every day usage, narcissism is often used to describe the shallowness and self-absorption of modern individuals whose characteristics tend toward pathological or extreme modes of behavior. Narcissistic traits and their extremities are further defined by social expectations and codes. And while a common view of a narcissist is someone who is grandiose with a sense of self-importance, “specialness,” entitlement, preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love, those afflicted with this personality disorder are often arrogant, selfish, and verbose, along with having an incapacity to love others or show, even experience, empathy.⁶ However, narcissism is essential to both ego maturation and identity formation—it’s what gets us out of bed each day to achieve our goals.

Freud initially defines narcissism as a state of “oneness” with the world, where boundaries between the subject and the external world and its “objects,” including the mother as the primary love-object, are blurred. Using the term “his majesty the baby,” Freud suggests that the indulgence of the individual and its infantile view of the world arrests ego development, feeding feelings of omnipotence and grandiosity that the individual not only seeks to maintain, he/she refuses to surrender; humans are “incapable of forgoing gratification once they have enjoyed it,”⁷ and the narcissistic perfection of their childhood, which they are unable to retain, is retrieved through idealization and ego-ideals. As such, ego defenses are created as a way of retaining those early experiences.

Most theories of narcissism focus on the construction of the self and/or the ego, the relationship between the ego and the libido, and how the ego attaches itself to objects in order to exist and develop in the external world. It is on this point that debate is commonly centered: What determines a pathological state? Object-relations theory focuses on how the subject develops through its “attachment” (or not) to objects rather than libidinal drives that Freud sees as something to be controlled because the dammed up libidinal energy, in the failure of satisfaction, needs to be cathected elsewhere. As such it creates a lack that needs to be fulfilled. Theorist and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott offers that it is from experiencing some degree of omnipotence that the subject develops a sense of self and a lack of omnipotence, in the early years, compels the ego to perpetually seek out experiences to fulfill that lack, often enabled through power and its need that has not been normatively experienced.⁸ In listing birds of prey, even criminals and comic heroes as examples of the unassailable ego, Freud asserts we envy the narcissistic posturing of such types as reflections of our own surrendered narcissism. Moreover, the narcissistic ego enables both the achievement of the ego’s wants as well as protection of the ego suffering from some lack or trauma. The defense created by the ego is in response to a lack or traumata commonly rather than fulfillment. Despite the differing views of how pathologies take hold, there is general agreement among many theorists, including Freud, that an unresolved Oedipus complex lies at the heart of narcissistic disorders.

As the ego forms in response to identification with the primary caregiver, the subjects develop an idealization (or “ideal ego”) of themselves while simultaneously “mirroring” those around them in order to have their needs gratified. The central issue becomes the nature of early relationships, which determine the degree of pathology and attachment (or not) to objects, including significant others; this is the basis of object-relations theory. Freud assists in seeing how a character’s ideal ego drives them to achieve their goals, observing that the narcissist aims to “keep at bay anything tending to diminish their ego.”⁹ If the comic character is rooted in a preoedipal or oedipal phase of maturation, as demonstrated by Susan Purdie,¹⁰ understanding how narcissistic traits affect behavior, particularly when an unstable ego is under threat, helps understand motivation as well as the nature of the character’s relationships. It is not the cause of the pathology that is of interest, rather how narcissistic traits affect behavior and the comic character’s engagement with reality and those around them.

Primary or early stage narcissism is determined by the drives of the pleasure principle and its primary processes such as “wish-fulfilling fantasies and the need for immediate instinctual discharge irrespective of its appropriateness”;¹¹ as the individual matures, their ego develops in response to the external world and its reality, utilizing secondary processes such as determination, focus, cohesion, and intelligibility to achieve their goals, engaging the mental function of the reality principle. Having erected an ego defense, the subject then pours their libido into secondary processes to maintain the ego-ideal in order to maintain ego stability. However, and if the maturation process along with the desiring ego is thwarted, the ego becomes captured by its primary processes. Lisa Trahair observes that “the comic is nothing other than the operations of primary process that have managed to force their way through to consciousness . . . the pleasure principle is still operative in the secondary process, but it has been modified to the extent that it takes into account the development of the psyche and the existence of the external world.”¹² When under stress, the individual engages with the world and its reality through those primary processes; they can function but the ego is in a regressed state. What Trahair offers is that not only does the pleasure principle operate in the secondary process, in doing so the full range of secondary processes are not engaged. In other words, secondary process thinking is harnessed in order to achieve primary process goals. If the ego-ideal has been created as a narcissistic defense, then the subject views the external world from an infantile perspective and engages with it on that level. Differentiating between primary and secondary ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Text and Program Referencing
• Abbreviations
• Introduction (Re)Reading the Sitcom
• 1 It Begins with the (Key) Character
• 2 The Perpetual (Power) Struggle of Sitcom Relationships
• 3 Echoing the Key Character
• 4 The Tension of the (Closed) Narrative
• 5 Premise, Performance, and the Discursive Frame
• Conclusion Sitcom: A (Comic) Site of Struggle
• Appendix—Theory in Practice
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Programography
• Index
• Copyright Page