Acclaimed for its fast-paced narrative, as well as for its quick, often sleazy humor, CBS’s sitcom How I Met Your Mother reached its finale earlier in 2014, after nine labyrinthine seasons, whose purpose seemed to be to avoid the very topic they were meant to recount: the encounter between the protagonist and the mother of his children.
Despite its undeniable aesthetic and comic qualities, the show has always proven controversial in the treatment of its main themes, particularly love and romance, and gender relations. Through an analysis of the text’s deep system of values, this paper will trace the show’s line of ethical responsibility: on one side of it lie the qualities that make How I Met Your Mother a genuine kind of comedy, which continues and reinvents the tradition of American sitcom; on the other, the elements and the properties of the comedy genre are distorted and exploited to the benefit of a system of values that’s not quite as progressive or liberating as the show claims to be.
Whether or not we believe that comedy has a higher purpose, eliciting laughter from its audience isn’t its only (or even its ultimate) goal. The text provokes this laughter through judgment, and with strong suggestions on how to process and, possibly, assimilate the underlying axiology. In the case of a text that crosses the line of responsibility often and seemingly without consequences, tracing this line is more than just an intellectual exercise, but becomes a way to gauge the relevance and the impact of the show within its wider cultural context.
About the presenterAntonio Savorelli
Antonio Savorelli is a semiotician with a PhD in Communication and New Technologies, a web designer, and a classically trained violinist. By day he’s the Web Development Manager at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. His research on new American TV comedy was published in 2010 by McFarland & Co., as Beyond Sitcom: New Directions in American Television Comedy.