Benign violations in the suburban ensemble dramedy

Abstract

Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren’s benign violation theory (BVT) argues that humour is produced when three conditions are met: we perceive a situation as potentially violating, we perceive it also as benign, and the two perceptions occur simultaneously. This model is applied as a means to analyse comedy in screen media. BVT is motivated to describe the cognitive dissonances inherent to comedy spectatorship, and to perform hermeneutic readings of screen humour using a particular case study in dramedy cinema: the suburban ensemble film, including works such as The Kids Are All Right, Little Miss Sunshine and American Beauty. After surveying some of the key humorous stimuli recurrent across the genre, I then turn to other comedic texts that deal with family and domestic studies with a striking lack of pathos – in particular the cartoon series Family Guy. This comparison underscores an analysis of the ethics of benign violations in narrative media that is centred on the resolution of its fundamental affective dissonance, and the way this resolution might guide later critical thought. The article ultimately demonstrates the uses of BVT as a hermeneutic tool, and one that might help us isolate an ethics of comedy in media.

Keywords:

• Benign violations
• ethics
• family
• suburbia
• affective
• incoherence
• dramedy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Where affective incoherence refers to a discrepancy between positive and negative valence that occurs when our concept of the goodness or badness of things is contradicted by our embodied experience of them, mixed emotion can refer to any mix of so-called “primary emotions,” regardless of valence.

2 Consider the honking, spluttering vehicle of Little Miss Sunshine, or editing that compounds the slapstick of its screen presence.

3 This tension has occasionally been addressed as the “melancomic” across a different set of contemporary films, such as Thomas’s (2012) work on Wes Anderson, yet the term tends to refer to another mode of ironic address that focuses us upon the filmmaker’s artifice: a gentle distancing effect that is offset by sympathy for character.

4 This might also help explain the rising appeal of the much-discussed comedy of “awkwardness.” Duncan (2017) writes that associated “cringe comedy” requires a mental labour that contradicts presumptions of comic media as pure autotelic relief or play.

5 Quirk signifies a kind of hedging, as McDowell (2010, 1) points out, “for marketing purposes ‘quirky’ suggests a film to be a unique, and therefore desirable, product – though simultaneously not so unique as to discourage those who might be repelled.” McDowell identifies the quirky as a spectrum of stylistic sensibilities engaging some manner of spectatorial ironic distance from onscreen eccentricity – and this includes a dramatic irony, whereby audiences have a comprehension of diegetic eccentricity not acknowledged by the players themselves (Wes Anderson’s films are a good example of this).

6 The kind of quirky performance value we find here has more unfamiliarity and revelatory uplift to be reduced to Sianne Ngai’s (2012) famous aesthetic categories: it does not match squarely with the commoditised, fetishized powerlessness of the cute, the hyperactive productivity of the zany, or focus on production in lieu of substance when we demote an artistic statement to the “merely interesting,” or just a cut above boredom, sameness. There is more going on here.

7 This is, in fact, a primary example of the Indie 2.0 thesis: that narratives of authenticity circulating indie cinema movements describe the investments made by patrons of the indie discourse more than they describe independent filmmaking practice.

8 Of course some films, such as the Judd Apatow dramedies, motivate both hyperactive shock humour and frank social renegotiation humour, and so it is possible to achieve both modes within one production. The suburban ensemble dramedy, however, works almost exclusively within the satirical conventions of the latter.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wyatt Moss-Wellington

Wyatt Moss-Wellington is Assistant Professor in Media and Communication Studies and Director of Teaching in the School of International Communications at The University of Nottingham Ningbo China. He is the author of Narrative Humanism: Kindness and Complexity in Fiction and Film and co-editor of ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze, both released by Edinburgh University Press in 2019. Moss-Wellington received his PhD from the University of Sydney in 2017. He is also a progressive folk multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter, and has released four studio albums: The Kinder We (2017), Sanitary Apocalypse (2014), Gen Y Irony Stole My Heart (2011) and The Supermarket and the Turncoat (2009).