Anything for a Laugh: Creating and Maintaining Humour from Script to Subtitling in the British TV Situation Comedy

Media language presents, in great part, a written-to-be-spoken-text, and situation comedy is no exception. Situation comedy was originally broadcast via radio where the lack of image was compensated by an emphasis on purely verbal humour, often prompted by canned laughter. TV sitcom, on the other hand, presents a complex web of multimodal texts that interact with and support each other according to the form(s) of communication that the listener/viewer chooses to resort to. These texts make up the pre-production (the script), production (performance on screen), post-production stages (subtitles for the hard of hearing). The original sitcom script compresses numerous facets of the language of humour (Nash 1985, Chiaro 1990, Norrick 1993) into a 30 minute slot by combining stand-up comedy, gags, farce, wordplay in the form of punning and double entendres, in quick succession, all of which test the audience’s general knowledge (Norrick 1993) but do not add anything to the plot. However, the role of the subtitles for the hard of hearing is of particular interest, not only for the fact that the written-to-be-spoken text becomes another written one, but also for the processes of simplification and explicitation (Baker 2000) they undergo where it is essential for the writer to avoid loss in meaning (e.g. wordplay in homophony) and at the same time adhere to the technical rules of synchronization and number of characters on the screen. This paper will therefore discuss the relevance of recycling, recontextualisation or hybridization of texts not necessarily into a new genre but within the same genre. In particular, it aims to provide practical examples of the ways in which the conveyance of humour remains a more or less comprehensible whole in the light of a “missing” element (lack of sound) and to discuss to what extent it is subsequently possible to compensate such “transposition” loss.