Television comedy

Television comedy had a presence from the earliest days of broadcasting. Among the earliest American television programs were variety shows including the Texaco Star Theater featuring Milton Berle; comedy acts often taken from vaudeville were staples of such shows. Similarly, many early BBC shows were light entertainment, offering a series of guests from the music hall era - singers and comedians amongst them.

The range of television comedy is extremely broad to the extent that anything under the heading comedy can be put before an audience through the medium of television. However, it is true to say that certain genres of comedy transfer to the small screen more successfully than others.

The situation comedy, or sitcom, has been the most common, successful and culturally significant type of television comedy. As the name suggests, these programs feature recurring characters placed in humorous situations. Since the early 1950s with I Love Lucy in the US and Hancock's Half Hour in Britain, sitcoms have always had a special place in the hearts of viewers and gathered highly devoted followers, as the familar characters often become beloved. Often performed before a live audience (or, in some cases, a simulated live audience in the form of a laugh track), sitcoms are seldom presented as realistic depictions of life but often generate honest humor through the relationships between and ongoing development of characters. Since the debut of I Love Lucy television has never been without sitcoms and they have often been the most popular and lucrative of all program types. Even in the early 2000s, the cast of the NBC sitcom Friends were among television's highest paid performers and The Office has captured the British public's imagination on a large scale.

Sketch comedy programs differ from sitcoms in that they do not generally feature recurring characters (though some characters and scenarios may be repeated) and often draw upon current events and emphasize satire over character development. Sketch comedy was pioneered by Sid Caesar, whose Your Show of Shows debuted in 1950 and established many conventions of the genre. American sketch comedy reached a later peak in the mid-1970s with the debut of Saturday Night Live, originally a variety program but soon devoted mostly to sketches.

Stand-up comedy has been fairly well represented on television. Stand-up comedians have long been a staple of variety and late-night talk shows; indeed, talk-variety shows such as The Tonight Show traditionally open with a comedy monologue performed by the program host. Television stand-up reached a peak of popularity on British schedules with the immensely popular ITV programme The Comedians. Their style of comedy was swept away almost entirely in the Britain of the early 1980s when a new generation of stand-ups challenged what they saw as racist and sexist humour and revolutionised the form under the banner alternative comedy. In the US, stand-up comedy programs became popular on many cable television channels beginning in the mid-1980s, as such "brick wall" shows (nicknamed for the stereotypical use of a fake brick wall as a backdrop) were cheap to produce and air. Stand-up humour later had mixed fortunes on the small screen, often shunted away to the small hours or as part of a larger entertainment extravaganza.

Improvisational comedy has recently been popular with television audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, most notably with both British and American versions of the program Whose Line is it Anyway?.

Animated cartoons have long been a source of comedy on television. Early children's programming often recycled theatrical cartoons; later, low-budget animation produced especially for television dominated Saturday-morning network programming in the US. A few prime-time animated comedies, notably The Flintstones and The Simpsons, successfully mixed attributes of traditional cartoons and sitcoms.

In addition to broad comedy program types, comedy often appears on television in much more subtle forms. Comedy is often a necessary part of other programming, particularly drama. Attempts at mixing comedy and drama in various combinations (sometimes known as dramedy) have been attempted over time.

See also

• comedy
• sitcom
• sketch comedy
• List of comedies
• Britcom - list of British sitcoms