Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
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Lingua 197 (2017) 16--33
www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua
Sitcom humour as ventriloquism
Thomas C. Messerli
Department of English, University of Basel, Nadelberg 6, 4051 Basel, Switzerland
Received 8 February 2017; received in revised form 10 May 2017; accepted 11 May 2017
Available online 31 May 2017
Abstract
Ventriloquism has been used as a source domain to conceptualise a range of different aspects of discourse, meaning-making and
understanding, and in Cooren's (e.g., 2010) view on a communicative constitution of reality even as a model for communication at large. In
Telecinematic Discourse (TCD), the language of fictional film and television, the notion that characters onscreen speak on behalf of
someone or something else is a particularly tangible representation of the duality of communicative levels by which TCD is usually
characterised. Moreover, Goffman's (1986/1974) canonical understanding of ventriloquism, as well as the employment of the same term
in neuroscience, film studies and narrative theory point to additional understandings of ventriloquism that are relevant for the
understanding not just of TCD, but also for humour therein. This paper brings together such different views of ventriloquist effects
and uses examples from sitcoms to demonstrate how ventriloquism can be used as an alternative to the traditional spatial understanding
of the communicative setting of TCD. These examples originate from Anger Management and Two and a Half Men, which are regarded
here as two connected acts of ventriloquism, staged by actor Charlie Sheen and producer Chuck Lorre as part of their public feud in 2011.
Analysing these scenes through the lens of ventriloquism provides a dynamic view of agency and an understanding of the television
audience as active viewers who infer ventriloquists based on the dummy actions encoded in the multimodal text surface.
© 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Anger Management; Communicative levels; Humour; Sitcom; Telecinematic discourse; Two and a Half Men; Ventriloquism
1. Introduction
Participation structures in Telecinematic Discourse (TCD), i.e., the communication in and of fictional film and television,
are typically conceptualised with either of two prevalent spatial metaphors: In the duality of simultaneous events that
characterise such communication, the actions and interactions within the fictional, or diegetic, world are either understood
as embedded within or as resting upon the communication between some form of authorship or sender and the actual
audience (see e.g., Bubel, 2006, 2008; Bednarek, 2010; Dynel, 2011; Piazza et al., 2011; Messerli, 2017a). In other
words, the real world of authors and viewers is a container in which the diegetic world is placed, or it is a foundation on
which a stage is constructed. The diegetic world, on the other hand, is either understood as that stage or as a second
container within the first. Humour in such settings may take place in a space that is separated from that of the audience.
Situated on that stage or in that second container, it may be a self-contained event that audiences observe by looking up to
or into the diegetic space. They are amused from a distance. Or, indeed, humour may transgress the walls of the second
container or the height of the stage, and depend upon the audience's ability to perceive not just humour in the diegetic
E-mail address: [email protected].
URL: http://www.thomasmesserli.com.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2017.05.006
0024-3841/© 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
T.C. Messerli / Lingua 197 (2017) 16--33 17
world, but also the container or the stage in or on which it occurs. This second type of humour requires awareness of the
constructedness of the fictional artefact (but not necessarily the manner in which it is constructed).
These two spatial ontological metaphors function well to explain the participation structures of TCD and of humour
therein, if participant roles are understood as static and dependent upon the type of artefact and perhaps the particular
audience receiving it. I will argue here, however, that such a spatial understanding of the dual or even multiple
communication channels of TCD falls short when audiences and individual audience members are thought of in a more
dynamic sense, as participants that are positioned and repositioned by diegetic events. Such a dynamic conceptualisation
is however necessary especially when it comes to the understanding of comedy and humour (see Brock, 2015; Messerli,
2016). I propose then to observe the communicative setting of humour in TCD through the lens of ventriloquism, which has
been a fruitful source domain for the concretisation of a vast array of different concepts in different disciplines -- many of
them relevant for the way in which communication in and of audiovisual artefacts can be theorised. By discussing the
relevant literature in Section 2 and applying the empirical findings and theoretical concepts to the domain of TCD in
Section 3, I will approach this particular setting from a new vantage point and demonstrate the usefulness of ventriloquism,
which puts the focus on the different agents that are involved in communication with the television viewers, for the
understanding of the dynamic audience. This discussion is done with the help of excerpts from two American sitcoms, Two
and Half Men (CBS, 2003--2015) and Anger Management (FX, 2012--2014). The central research question this article
asks is deceptively simple: How do we need to understand and how can we successfully model the participation structure
of telecinematic communication in general and humour therein in particular? Using research from a range of disciplines,
some of which are not typically considered when theorising humour and the pragmatics of humour, my conceptualisation
of telecinematic humour as ventriloquism offers an audience-centred and performance-based conceptualisation of
comedy that highlights the different agents from which the communication is ultimately perceived to emanate. The fictional
characters through which humour is performed are understood as endpoints of multiple chains of agencies, with these
chains being dependent both on the experiential and communal knowledge of the audience and on the context that is
being constructed within the particular artefact itself.
2. Ventriloquism in different strands of research
I follow the view here that humour can be understood in terms of incongruity and resolution in the sense of Suls (1972),
i.e., stimuli in a linear narrative activate a narrative frame that evokes certain expectations in readers or viewers, with each
new stimulus being measured against those existing expectations. As long as new stimuli are congruous with viewer
expectations, no humour will ensue -- if, however, a narrative element occurs that does not fit expectations but whose
presence in the narrative is nonetheless plausible, the readers or viewers will find the resulting resolvable incongruity
humorous. In the case of sitcoms and more generally TCD, these stimuli occur as part of staged and mediated
performances, and as a result telecinematic humour is multimodal and generally multifaceted both with regard to its
production and reception. While I will return to the exact setup of sitcom humour in the discussion of examples in Section 3,
I want to first propose here an understanding of the communicative setting of telecinematic humour that serves as a useful
alternative to the extant spatial models. This understanding of communication and humour in film and television as a form
of ventriloquism will be outlined in the following sections. I will start by discussing various ways in which ventriloquism and
ventriloquism effects have been adapted in different disciplines to explain a range of different phenomena -- all of them will
be shown to be relevant for the understanding of telecinematic humour and thus inform the view I propose in Section 3.
2.1. Perceptual ventriloquism
A first understanding of ventriloquism that needs to be taken into account here stems from research in cognitive
psychology on multi- and cross-modal perception. Interested in cross-modal effects on perception, i.e., whether co-
occurring visual and auditory stimuli affect the perception of each of the two modalities, Vroomen and de Gelder (2004:
142) describe the well-documented phenomenon of the ventriloquism effect as follows: ‘‘[W]hen auditory and visual
stimuli occur in close temporal and spatial proximity, the perceptual system assumes that a single event has occurred.’’ A
prime example is indeed the performance of a ventriloquist. It depends upon the illusion that the voice the audience hears
when the puppet's mouth opens and closes emanates from the puppet itself rather than the puppeteer who moves it with
her hand: Because of the visual stimulus provided by the visibly articulating puppet (and in the absence of a competing
visual stimulus in the form of lip movements by the puppeteer), the audience's perception of the sound shifts enough into
the direction of the puppet to make puppet action and voice appear to be a single event. In a range of experimental
settings, Vroomen and de Gelder (2004) showed that this effect is very robust even when participants were trained to
ignore the visual stimulus, and that ‘‘[a]ttention towards the visual distracter is not needed to obtain a ventriloquism effect’’
(Vroomen and de Gelder, 2004: 144).
18 T.C. Messerli / Lingua 197 (2017) 16--33
2.2. Technological-ideological ventriloquism
That this effect is central to the reception of film by audiences was also taken up in film studies by Altman (1980: 76--77):
Indeed, the ventriloquist's art depends on the very fact which we have found at the heart of sound film: we are so
disconcerted by a sourceless sound that we would rather attribute the sound to a dummy or a shadow than face the
mystery of its sourcelessness or the scandal of its production by a non-vocal (technological or ‘‘ventral’’) apparatus.
In what is at least partially a defence of the importance of sound in film, Altman's interest goes beyond the perceptual
basis for the unification of sound and image. He finds in ventriloquism the answer for the roles each of the two modes have
in cinematic meaning-making. For Altman, the purpose of the ventriloquised dummy is to utter that which the ventriloquist
dare not speak in his or her normal voice. Mapping this idea to the target domain of cinema, he finds a similar mechanism
for sound and image: Whereas the sound functions as the head voice of the ventriloquist, the image is the dummy that is
being ventriloquised. Associated with the belly, it is the ventral voice that ‘‘speaks a more sincere, personal, and
unguarded language, a language no longer watched over by the censorship of the conscious mind’’ (Altman, 1980: 78).
This is to say that sound ventriloquises the image and meets those conditions that Altman finds in manuals for
ventriloquists, viz., (1) that it disguises the true source of the sound; and (2) that it makes all motion of its dummy consistent
with the sound (Altman, 1980: 77). Thus, the cinematic act of ventriloquism serves first of all as a means to disguise the
technology required to produce it and to create a fiction that the audience is able and willing to believe; secondly, it ‘‘permit
[s] the film's production personnel to speak their sub-conscious mind -- their belly -- without fear of discovery’’ (79). The
former describes the specific technological counterpart to perceptual ventriloquism that is paid heed to in (sound) film-
making. The latter is an attempt to explain the goal of film-making as speaking in images what cannot be said in words.
2.3. Narratological ventriloquism
Whereas films can be said to be divided between their auditory and visual modes, narrative theory has long established
that narrative fiction more generally can be rendered in terms of a multiplicity of voices. As O’Neill (1994: 58, his emphasis)
puts it, ‘‘[n]o narrative voice, however apparently objective or unbiased, is ever undivided, for all narrative discourse,
implicitly or explicitly, is compound discourse.’’ Novels as a form of mediated discourse between authors and their
readers, for instance, are communicated through a number of different agents that range from the implied author to the
narrator and on the side of the reception from the narratee to the implied reader. Even at the centre of this communicative
setting, in which a narrator talks to his direct audience, i.e., the narratee, that narrator's voice may not be undivided and
may instead speak through the different characters that populate the novel. This multiplicity of voices has been addressed
from a range of different angles and focusing on different agents within this narrative chain. Booth's (1961) introduction of
the notion of the implied author was met consequently by Iser's (1972) discussion of their counterpart, the implied reader.
They both shed light on the fact that within a literary text, it is not just narrators and characters that are constructed, but also
the fictional personae of an author and a reader that author is speaking to. Moreover, Genette's (1980/1972) well-known
classification of narrators highlights their position in relation to the narrated events and makes clear that within the frame of
implied authors speaking to implied readers, there is a range of different vantage points from which the embedded story is
told. That novels are thus multi-voiced in many different ways has been aptly captured by O’Neill (1994) in what he calls
ventriloquism effect, which will be renamed to narratological ventriloquism effect here in order not to confuse it with the
perceptual ventriloquism effect discussed in Section 2.1.
Ventriloquism in this narratological sense first of all refers to the narrator's voice, or indeed voices: Apart from using her
own, primary voice, the narrator can also ventriloquise the fictional characters, as the ventriloquist's dummies, in order to
speak with additional, secondary voices. As O’Neill (1994: 59) points out, this happens in different ways, which range from
the clear separation of voices in the mimetic case of a narrator that lets her characters utter direct speech, to more diegetic
cases, in which the narrator reports the characters’ dialogue rather than to include their voices. Between those endpoints
of the scale, a narrator using free indirect discourse creates ‘‘an example of an overtly mixed or compound discourse’’
(O’Neill, 1994: 59), which makes the borders between primary and secondary voices more fuzzy. The diegetic case, on
the other hand, at first appears to be resting on an undivided voice, at least on the level of the narrator speaking to his
narratee. However, O’Neill points to a second type of ventriloquism, which -- as will become clear in Section 2.4 -- is
reminiscent of yet another, socio-pragmatic, understanding of ventriloquism that Goffman (1986/1974) has termed say-
foring. Explicitly or implicitly, the narrator may utter what she assumes would be the response of the narratee at that
particular point in the narration. Finally, O’Neill discovers ventriloquism in a third sense by approaching literary
communication through Greimas's semiotics. I will refer the reader to O’Neill (1994: 76--82) for the discussion and
exemplification of how abstract narrative slots such as actants and narratants are realised on two different levels, that of
the story and that of the text. What is important here, however, is that as a result of this distinction, the narrator needs to be
T.C. Messerli / Lingua 197 (2017) 16--33 19
understood in a more abstract sense as a position rather than as a person, and thus as ‘‘identifying the point of utterance of
the narrative voice’’ (O’Neill, 1994: 77). While there may be a typical position for the narrator between the implied author
and the character, O’Neill (1994: 78) emphasises that the narrator's voice ‘‘can be ‘thrown’ so that it appears to come
either from position C (character) or position A’ (implied author).’’ The different points on the scale of narrative positions
(author--implied author--narrator--character--narratee--implied reader--reader) are constructs of the text, and the reader
infers the respective positions based on her understanding of that text. Thus, the reader interacts with the text-as-dummy
and infers from this interaction what ventriloquist or what ventriloquists may animate it.
2.4. Ventriloquism as a discourse strategy
The multi-voicedness of authors and literary texts in narratological understandings of ventriloquism, which is particular
to the communicative setting of narrative fiction, finds its more general equivalent in sociological and pragmatic research.
For instance, as has been mentioned in the previous section, a narrator assuming the voice of a narratee can be seen as a
literary exemplification of say-foring as it is used by Goffman (1986/1974). Indeed, in order to characterise how ordinary
talk is framed, Goffman goes back and forth between staged, theatrical performance and ordinary conversation. He starts
from the generally accepted assumption that speakers can act out characters not their own on stage and finds that in non-
staged interaction, speakers also speak not as individual actors, but are split into principals, who are responsible for what
is being said, and animators who make the utterance (Goffman, 1986/1974: 516ff.). This separation of roles is of course
later expanded to the canonical distinction author--principal--animator (Goffman, 1979). The notion that a speaker can be
regarded as someone that animates the message she utters is clearly already akin to the ventriloquist animating her
dummy. More specifically, however, Goffman (1986/1974) speaks of forms of ventriloquism in his categorisation of the
figures through which we can speak in ordinary talk. This speaking through figures includes the use of natural, staged,
printed and cited figures as well as say-foring, which occurs when a speaker ‘‘puts words in another's mouth’’ (Goffman,
1986/1974: 534), of which speaking on behalf of a child or a pet are examples. As Lorenzo-Dus (2009: 33) puts it in her
adaptation of say-foring to television discourse, ‘‘[t]he ventriloquiser allegedly gets inside the ventriloquisee and speaks
for the latter, making public his/her personal intentions, feelings and views.’’
This understanding of ventriloquism is also taken up in the discourse analytic work of Tannen (2004, 2010) who uses
the term ventriloquising to describe ‘‘instances in which speakers frame their utterances as representing others’ voices’’
(Tannen, 2010: 310) and regards it as a form of borrowing others’ identities. Importantly, Tannen notes that what formally
resembles reported speech is in fact not a representation of what others have previously said, but functions as ‘‘a way for
speakers to represent their own meaning’’ (Tannen, 2010: 310). In her analyses of interactions between family members
who ventriloquise each other (Tannen, 2010) as well as their pets (Tannen, 2004), Tannen explicitly builds on work by
Schiffrin (1993) and Scollon (2001) who have termed similar conversational strategies ‘‘speaking for another’’ and
‘‘through baby talk’’ respectively (Tannen, 2004: 403). As she notes, the term itself is often attributed to Bakhtin (1981),
who in fact never used it but did speak of language that ‘‘would appear to be at a certain distance from [the author's] lips’’
(Bubnova and Malcuzynski, 2001: 299, quoted in Tannen, 2004: 404). This distancing effect is also found by Tannen in the
family interactions she examines. She finds that the family members achieve a range of conversational functions when
they speak through their dogs or through other family members. These functions include giving instructions (Tannen,
2010) as well as shifting away from an argument or into a humorous frame (Tannen, 2004). More generally, Tannen (2010:
308--310) links the instances of ventriloquism in her data to existing work on indirectness in language, which includes
among others Bateson's (1979) abduction and Bakhtin's (1986/1952--53) dialogicality. The two notions are similar in that
they find language use to be not so much performance based on a language system, as a form of interaction with previous
utterances, which are appropriated and related indirectly in the act of speaking. Tannen (2010: 310) complements this
dialogical view of utterances with the finding ‘‘that meaning in interaction comes not only from associations with others’
words but also from associations with others’ identities, as suggested not only by those words but also by the voices those
words create.’’ In other words, by ventriloquising others, speakers find a way of putting distance between themselves and
their utterances and of appropriating certain traits of the dummies they animate.
2.5. Constitutive ventriloquism
A final theoretical framework that needs to be included here is the all-encompassing view of ventriloquism offered by
Cooren (2010, 2012, 2013) and Cooren et al. (2013). He uses ventriloquism as a metaphor not just for a particular
discourse strategy used when a speaker pretends to speak through someone or something else, but for communication at
large. Following Derrida (1988), Cooren (2010: 28) first of all regards any communication as telecommunication in the
sense that any act of speaking necessarily has a material dimension and that even when speakers interact face-to-face
they do so through the signs and texts they produce and thus from a distance. These material products of communication
20 T.C. Messerli / Lingua 197 (2017) 16--33
are not simply described as distant extensions of the speaking agent by Cooren, however -- they are understood as
entities that can be animated and that can have agency themselves in communication. One key example Cooren (2010:
29) provides is a note stuck to a wall in a hospital in the Congo, which states -- among other things -- that medical staff must
wear protective gear when decontaminating instruments. Anyone interested in the analysis of discourse would agree of
course that something is communicated through this note. Cooren, however, is adamant that this note is not just a tool of
communication, i.e., that the case is not simply that of an agent communicating through the note as a tool. While, as he
states, ‘‘the note does not do anything in and of itself’’ (Cooren, 2010: 30, his emphasis), he considers its communicative
actions to be those of an agent for whatever author wrote it and whatever principal that author represents.
First of all, this note in the hospital serves as an example for the understanding of textual agency that Cooren discussed
in earlier work (Cooren, 2004, 2008). In this view, stating that the medical staff member that put up the note on behalf of
Médecins Sans Frontières was simply communicating to other staff members through that note would mean ignoring the
role of nonhuman agency. Instead, Cooren (2004: 378--379) states that the person putting up the note appropriated the
note and with it its powers that include communicating across time and space. While texts and other objects are seen as
active participants in communication, which do ‘‘things that humans alone could not do’’ (Cooren, 2004: 388), the actions
they perform can at the same time be attributed to the human and nonhuman agents that have appropriated them for their
purposes. This is to say that the importance given to nonhuman and in this case textual agency is not meant to reduce
human agency.
This negotiation between human and nonhuman agents is where ventriloquism comes into play. The material signs
and texts we produce are examples at a basic level of communication of how we animate other things into speaking on our
behalf. In other words, to interact means to create ‘‘textual, gestural, or kinesic agents that speak and act on [one's]
behalf’’ (Cooren, 2010: 90) and thus to communicate through ‘‘beings’’ that have at least some autonomy. The metaphor
of ventriloquism seems abundantly clear at first sight, with a speaker/ventriloquist animating such nonhuman agents/
dummies. However, an important notion that Cooren (2010: 170) adds is ‘‘that interactants are ventriloquised as much as
they ventriloquise.’’ In the context of organisational communication, which Cooren is mainly interested in, this means for
instance that when someone speaks in the name of justice, she first of all animates justice into becoming an active agent
within that interaction. At the same time, however, justice in this case also ‘‘ventriloquises the ventriloquist’’ (Cooren et al.,
2013: 263), i.e., it animates her into performing in a specific manner.
Before I turn to the application of ventriloquism to telecinematic humour, I need to add that this constitutive
understanding of ventriloquism can in many ways be regarded as the flipside of the interpersonal pragmatic
understanding of identity construction, as it is described in the seminal article by Bucholtz and Hall (2005). Identity is
understood there as an emergent product of interaction, as a quality that interactants construct by positioning themselves
in a particular fashion. One aspect of this discursive process of identity construction is what Bucholtz and Hall (2005: 598)
call the relationality principle, which states that in interaction, we use intersubjective strategies to put ourselves in a
particular relation to other groups and entities, e.g., we position ourselves as similar or different, as authentic or as having
authority (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005: 598--605). Thus, when a spokesperson of a company speaks, Bucholtz and Hall would
point to processes of authorisation and authentication to explain how the particular person can successfully position
herself as someone who has the legitimate right to represent the company. What Cooren's understanding of ventriloquism
emphasises is that in doing so, the spokesperson and the company she represents both construct each other's identities
and animate each other into being agents within that particular interaction.
2.6. Ventriloquism effects and chains of agencies: terminology used in this paper
The previous sections have discussed the use of ventriloquism as an ontological metaphor in various disciplines.
Applied to the domain of telecinematic discourse, they are understood here as complementary in the sense that they can
shed light on different ventriloquist effects that are at play during the reception of films and television, and will all be shown
to be valid concepts for the understanding of sitcom humour in Section 3. However, before progressing to applying the
concept of ventriloquism empirically, some terminological clarification is necessary at this point. In accordance with the
subsections in this section, I will distinguish the following levels of ventriloquism effects in television reception: (a)
perceptual ventriloquism effects, which refer to the perceptual system assuming a single event based on co-occurring
auditory and visual stimuli; (b) technological ventriloquism effects, which refer to the facilitating of (a) through the
technological affordances employed for televisual meaning-making; (c) narratological ventriloquism effects, which refer to
the chain of narrative voices that are inferred by the viewers; (d) say-foring effects, which refer to the act of speaking for
another agent; (e) constitutive ventriloquism effects, which refers to different agents within the chain of agency reciprocally
animating each other into being.
That notion of chain of agency (Cooren, 2010) or chain of agencies (Cooren, 2008) refers to the assumption that any
communicative action cannot be pinpointed to one particular locus or agent. Instead it always entails a stream of different
T.C. Messerli / Lingua 197 (2017) 16--33 21
communicators, from the gestures a speaker uses to communicate, to the speaker, to the author of the spoken utterance
to more abstract entities on behalf of which the communicative act may take place. In many ways, this chain of agency can
thus be seen as an elaboration of Goffman's understanding of participation roles and of Levinson's (1987) further
development of what he terms production roles in particular. Even though Levinson (1987) deems reception to be the
analytically more difficult side of communication, he already points out that the different production roles he distinguishes
are not always clearly separable. For instance, as he mentions, transmitters may or may not play a part in the origin of the
message (Levinson, 1987: 177). Within Cooren's more dynamic framework of chains of agency, the individual roles
involved in the production of communicative acts are not only difficult to separate, but are also necessarily fragmentary.
Since ultimately ‘‘there is no origin of action’’ (Cooren, 2008: 13), it follows that the Goffmanian principal and Levinsonian
categories like ultimate source or author are not fixable to any particular agent. Put differently, it is true for any agent that
‘‘their very action can always be attributed to other agents, whether upstream (the entities of whom or which they are
positioned as acting on behalf or incarnating) or downstream (the entity they are mobilising to interact)’’ (Cooren, 2008:
14). Having acknowledged that communicative agency is a fuzzy concept, it nonetheless needs to be added here that
conceptualising telecinematic humour as ventriloquism does not render useless the canonical classifications of
participants or production roles. Concepts like the simple model of animator, author and principal have value as
prototypes of particular loci on the chain of agency, and they will be retained here as anchors for the ventriloquism-based
analysis of telecinematic disourse.
3. Telecinematic humour as ventriloquism
3.1. The production context of Anger Management and Two and a Half Men
Having outlined the relevant theoretical background that informs the view of telecinematic humour as ventriloquism I
propose here, I will move on in this section to adapting the key notions discussed in the literature to the particular domain of
humour in telecinematic discourse (TCD), which I will also refer to as telecinematic humour. I will do so by focussing on
examples from two American sitcoms whose production histories are connected in a particular way: Two and a Half Men
(CBS, 2003--2015) and Anger Management (FX, 2012--2014). While being in many ways typical representatives of how
humour is constructed in sitcoms, they are also good examples of what could be termed paratextual humour, i.e., humour
that goes beyond the fictional story in which it is embedded and thus requires its receivers to be familiar with current affairs
in the broadest sense and more specifically with events in the public lives of those involved in the production of the
particular sitcom episode they are watching. The two sitcoms at hand are connected through the actor Charlie Sheen, who
played the lead role for eight seasons of Two and a Half Men (TAAHM) and for the entire run of Anger Management (AM).
To contextualise the example from AM I introduce in the next section, and the examples from TAAHM that follow later
(Sections 3.5 and 3.7), I will briefly address the circumstances that led to Sheen's dismissal from TAAHM and to his role as
the main character on AM. My summary here is informed by an article in the Washington Post, which was published on the
occasion of the TAAHM finale (Yahr, 2015), and I refer the reader to that article for a more detailed chronology of the
individual events.
After a range of drug-related incidents that led to Sheen being sentenced to rehab several times, CBS put TAAHM on
hiatus in the middle of its eighth season in 2011. In a month of tabloid stories, Sheen after that gave several interviews in
1
which he repeatedly attacked producer Chuck Lorre and the quality of TAAHM. Chuck Lorre responded in a vanity card in
his other sitcom Mike & Molly (CBS, 2010--2016). Sheen continued to attack TAAHM, in sometimes incoherent manner
and full of self-aggrandizement, until CBS finally decided to let him go. While CBS described Sheen's behaviour as self-
destructive (Yahr, 2015), he nonetheless managed to capitalise on the publicity, first by starting a live tour and gaining a
million Twitter followers in record time, then with a contract for a new sitcom, Anger Management, with the television
network FX. Meanwhile, TAAHM continued, with Sheen's onscreen character, Charlie Harper, written out of the sitcom.
Instead, a new lead character was introduced (played by Ashton Kutcher).
3.2. An example of multimodal humour in Anger Management
As a starting point, example 1 presents the very first scene of the first episode of AM, which marks actor Charlie
Sheen's return to the television screen:
1
A vanity card is a written text displayed at the end of the episode, comparable to a blog post, which Chuck Lorre regularly includes in episodes
of his sitcoms to comment on the production and a wide range of other current events.
22 T.C. Messerli / Lingua 197 (2017) 16--33
Example 1: Anger Management, Season 1, Episode 1, 00:00:00–00:00:16 Charlie is shown in a close-up facing the camera directly. The background only reveals that he is indoors, no further
details about the room are visible.
1 Charlie: you can’t fire me, I quit. (.) + -----makes a punching movement with the right arm----+ {thump sound} Charlie: think you can replace me with some other guy? go ahead, it won't be the same.
+-----makes a punching movement with the right arm----+
{thump sound}
LT: hahahaha
2 Charlie: you may think I'm losing, but I'm not. I'm- +---turns around----+ {Cut to long shot of the room, which reveals that it is a large living room with several armchairs and a sofa, on which there are three men looking at
Charlie}
Charlie: =anyway, you get the idea. LT: hahahahahahahahahahahaha
+ Charlie
As I have done elsewhere (Messerli, 2016), I will use the audience laughter that is broadcast as part of the sitcom as a
marker of humorous intentions by the collective sender of the sitcom. This leads to the identification of two instances of
intended humour in excerpt 1, HI 1 (humorous instance 1) and HI 2, as is indicated in the numbering in the leftmost column.
Following an incongruity-resolution approach to humour as it is presented in Suls (1972), I regard the intended humour in
these and all other instances as the result of something unexpected that disrupts the narrative frame that had been evoked
up to that point. The incongruity surprises the viewer and at the same time permits the finding of a satisfactory explanation
as to why this incongruous element is nonetheless plausibly present within the narrative. In an abstract sense, theorising
these or any other HIs is thus a fairly straightforward affair. However, in the case of example 1, at least the reader
unfamiliar with the sitcoms I refer to here will have noticed that it is not necessarily easy to explain either the narrative
frame or the way it is disrupted here.
Of course, contrary to a joke, humour in sitcoms is multimodal -- both in the sense that character actions, gestures and
facial expressions are meaningful and that so is camera work and the mise-en-scène at large (see Bednarek, 2010) --, and
it makes sense then to also include the auditory and visual stimuli that the viewer processes in the first twelve seconds of
this episode. Apart from hearing the dialogue, we also see a close-up of a middle-aged man, who we may recognise as
Charlie Sheen. He stands in front of a non-descript, slightly out of focus interior background and looks straight into the
camera and therefore at us, the viewers. While speaking, he thrusts his chin upwards in an aggressive gesture, and
afterwards clenches his teeth, leans forward and punches something that is below the camera frame and thus invisible to
the viewer. While we cannot see this punch, there is an audible thump we need to assume is the result of it. Similar
gestures, including a head tilt and another chin thrust, accompany the continuation of the dialogue, there is another punch.
Finally, the third time, Charlie stops after ‘‘I’m’’ and turns to his right; there is a cut to a long shot that shows not only the full
body of the actor/character, but also reveals that he is standing in a huge living room, left of him a sofa with three men that
look at him and to his right an inflatable doll, which we infer to be the target of the punches we had just seen him throw. He
shrugs his shoulders and puts his hands together while saying, as a punchline, ‘‘anyway, you get the idea.’’
Much of the multimodality of this scene serves the establishment of a pattern and its surprising disruption: The two
completed intonation units are telecinematically framed as close-ups, and are followed by punches; the third intonation
unit is interrupted, does not end with a punch and cuts to a long shot. The repetitive nature of this setup that leads to the
humorous instance in the example triggers viewer expectations that are reinforced multimodally, with repetition occurring
in gesture, in the size of camera shot, in intonation patterns, and in the dialogue Charlie engages in with an off-screen
2
interactant -- manifest in the vacillation between direct address to a ‘‘you’’ and clauses in the first-person. These
expectations are followed by surprise in the form of a new camera perspective, the character/actor turning sideways, and
a sudden interruption in the utterance. Thus, the formal structure of the audiovisual text is at the same time prototypical for
2
For a discussion of the functions of repetition in sitcom humour, see Messerli (2017b).
T.C. Messerli / Lingua 197 (2017) 16--33 23
humour -- setup in two steps, punchline in the third -- and specific to the meaning-making of telecinematic discourse, with
the different modes working together to create expectations and surprise.
While the construction of this humorous instance is transparent on the text surface, it is less so in terms of the meaning
that is thus encoded. In other words, the mechanism by which the incongruity is realised is comparatively simple, but the
essence of that same incongruity is not as easy to pinpoint. Based on the context of this episode and generic knowledge
about sitcoms, the viewers gather that what they see is an actor portraying a character who is currently expressing his
anger by verbalising his frustration and punching an as of yet undefined item. Given the lack of information about his
surrounding space due to the close-up, there may be surprise when it is revealed that this character is in fact not alone, but
in presence of three other people. As the majority of the contemporary American audience will have known, however, the
key to this humorous instance lies in recognising that the interrupted intonation unit is an allusion to a particular quote that
is in turn indexical of the meltdown of actor Charlie Sheen. The antonymous pairs, firing and quitting, as well as
successfully or unsuccessfully replacing someone, lead to the expectation that ‘‘you may think I’m losing, but I’m not’’ will
be completed by ‘‘I’m winning,’’ which can be said to be the catchphrase of actor Charlie Sheen's public meltdown in 2011.
Instead of fulfilling this expectation, Charlie stops and turns around and thus surprises the knowledgeable viewers.
3.3. Sitcom humour as a chain of ventriloquism effects
Taking into account this additional, meta-textual information, it becomes clear that the humorous instances discussed
in Section 3.2 are a case of what might be referred to as humour across communicative levels. This is to say that humour
transgresses the borders of the fictional communicative level in which the main character holds his dialogical monologue,
and has him allude to the communicative level between collective sender and television audience, of which knowledge
about well-publicised real-life events concerning the actors is part. To put it in Brock's (2015: 33) terms, the viewers are ‘‘in
two different communicative roles and on two communicative levels all at once.’’ I have previously shown how different
humour constellations dynamically reposition viewers on different communicative levels (Messerli, 2016). However, the
spatial representation of what occurs in this type of humour constellation is not satisfactory, for it is quite clear that both
communicative levels remain fully intact (no walls are broken), and the viewers’ position is dynamic, but also stable in that
they remain a real-life audience that is both aware that what they receive is fiction and that they need to suspend their
disbelief to enjoy it. It seems unnecessary to imagine this dynamic positioning as one of constant oscillation between
levels, or as a form of paradoxical co-presence on two planes: What we see is always some type of dummy that is
animated by some type of ventriloquist.
To begin with, willing suspension of disbelief is dependent on perceptual and technological ventriloquism effects (see
Sections 2.1, 2.2 and 2.6). The viewers perceive of the visible articulation by the actor and the sound they hear through the
speakers as a single event, with the ventriloquised image thus disguising the technological nature of the television
broadcast at hand. In the case of fictional film and television, this disguise goes beyond the technological, however, and
the viewers are aware of course that the character Charlie Goodson they hear speak in this excerpt does not simply do so
on his own behalf, but as part of a chain of agency (to use the terminology of Cooren, 2010) which includes other agents.
These other agents are always present, but may make themselves manifest in different ways on the surface of the
audiovisual text. Thanks to the metacommunicative cues that they receive when watching Anger Management, viewers
may note that the character Charlie Goodson is played by the actor Charlie Sheen and that the shared first names of both
figures may indicate other commonalities. They will also be aware that there is a particular television network that is
responsible for the production and broadcast of the sitcom, and that there are other agents that serve as the authors of the
artefact and formulate what the actors will voice -- a responsibility usually shared by scriptwriters, directors and producers.
It is important to note here that telecinematic discourse as a particular form of ventriloquism does only present the
dummy, i.e., the visible screen including the characters and their surroundings, to its audience, while the ventriloquist,
which in this case is in fact a conglomerate of different agents, remains hidden, carefully concealing their figurative lip-
movements in order to allow the audience to believe that the dummy is animated in and of itself. The open secret that
actors speak not as themselves but through the characters they represent is kept by adhering to a number of conventions
of film-making, which includes the passive denial of the presence of a camera -- i.e., that the actors/characters will not
point at or directly look into the camera --, as well as constraining the characters’ knowledge, manifest in their utterances
and actions, to what the characters could know based on their fictional experiences rather than the real-life experiences of
the actors that portray them.
Based on the different notions of ventriloquism discussed in Section 2, the interaction as well as the humour in example
1 can be conceptualised as the result of the interplay of different types of ventriloquism. I have already mentioned the
perceptual ventriloquism effects that are required to perceive sound and image as co-constructing audiovisual events and
that at the same time partially mask the constructedness of the audiovisual artefact (i.e., a technological ventriloquism
effect). Following Cooren's view, the gestures -- both in a narrow sense (1) as the character/actor gestures and actions
captured by the camera and in a broader sense (2) as the telecinematic gestures the camera itself together with all other
24 T.C. Messerli / Lingua 197 (2017) 16--33
aspects of television making performs -- can be regarded as agents produced and animated into communicating with the
television audience. The importance of this assumption is particularly clear in the case of telecinematic discourse,
because the willing suspension of disbelief that is required to enjoy the engagement with fiction entails that the audience
assumes the ventriloquist behind the gestures in the first sense to be the character, when they actually know it is the actor
who produces them. The more analytic viewer may also be aware that these character gestures are only visible to the
viewership because they are captured on camera -- in this case, suspension of disbelief allows denying any agency to the
telecinematic apparatus and perceive the capturing as automatic, when it could in fact be identified as the sum of gestures
in sense (2), performed by the director (among others), who is in turn informed by the script.
It follows that the fictional sitcom characters and more generally the diegetic world that is constructed through these
gestures constitute a telecinematic trick that could be called a fictional ventriloquism effect in the constitutive sense: The
manifest gestures or signals that are present at the surface of the audiovisual text are produced by actors, directors and
the like when filming and post-producing the sitcom. The audience, however, is meant to construe them as indices of the
characters and their fictional surroundings. Thus, hiding the means by which the artefact is produced and adhering to the
conventional realism of televisual storytelling amounts to offering a valid visual stimulus to the television audience while
hiding the actual source of the onscreen events: It presents the fictional characters and events as ventriloquists to mask
the actual ventriloquising taking place by actors and the collective sender more generally. As Bednarek (2010: 19) already
points out, one crucial element of this fictional ventriloquism is the fact that characters and actors inhabit the same body:
Any character action is necessarily also an actor's action at the same time. Because of this, any produced signal is
necessarily always ambiguous in the sense that it can be attributed to either character or actor. Assuming an ideal viewer,
who is willing to suspend her disbelief, it seems plausible that by default telecinematic conventions steer audiences
towards inferring the signals to be animated from within the diegetic world. At the same time, however, audiences are
aware that this is ventriloquism. They know that characters do not act in and of themselves, just like gestures do not act on
their own. The character actions, designed for the audience, implicate that some form of ventriloquist who is external to the
diegetic world, animates them. That ventriloquist or those ventriloquists remain hidden, but their identities may emerge at
certain points of the sitcom, as anticipated results for the collective sender, but as surprising, emergent products for the
viewers.
Example 1 demonstrates that this ventriloquist can be located at any number of positions. For instance, the actions
transcribed can be said to be ventriloquised by the genre of the television sitcom. Charlie is framed by the camera in
certain ways and speaks in a particular way because that is how sitcoms are made and that is how characters in sitcoms
talk. Similarly, Anger Management ventriloquises the genre of the sitcom and is ventriloquised by it, and this particular
episode ventriloquises the sitcom Anger Management and is ventriloquised by it. Thus, when Charlie speaks, he may
speak on behalf of the actor Charlie Sheen, of the writers that wrote his lines, of the director that determines the
telecinematic framing of his actions, of the producers that have creative control over the television series, of the narrative
of this particular episode, of the sitcom Anger Management more generally, of the genre of the sitcom, etc.; and
simultaneously, all these ventriloquists speak through Charlie.
3.4. Ventriloquism and the epitext
The distribution of agency to many different loci of television sitcom production is not just a different way of theorising
screen-to-face interaction (to use Bubel's 2008 term), it is also directly relevant to the humour that occurs in example 1.
Whereas the first line is generic and can be assumed to be understood by the audience as a cliché sentence often used in
popular media to redistribute agency from the employer to the employee when employment is terminated, the second line
is more specific: It allows the reading that Charlie Goodson, about whom the audience knows almost nothing at this point,
is not talking about his fictional environment, to which the viewers are now being gradually introduced, but also about the
actor Charlie Sheen who had by then been replaced by another actor, Ashton Kutcher, on Two and a Half Men. To the
knowledgeable viewer, the utterance is thus a clear cue that the onscreen events are not just animated by the character,
but that they or indeed the character itself, are ventriloquised by the actor Charlie Sheen who speaks through them to
address the fact that he was let go in the aftermath of his public meltdown. By reacting in this fashion, by ventriloquising
Charlie Goodson into making a statement through what is, after all, only a part of a fictional sitcom, the agency behind
these utterances can at least partially be moved away from the actor and instead be ascribed to the character Goodson,
and perhaps even to all other potential ventriloquists aside from Sheen that may animate him.
The same instance of ventriloquism that thus reduces the accountability of Charlie Sheen for what could otherwise be
said to be a direct attack on producer Chuck Lorre is also the essence of both humorous instances in example 1. There is
no semantic incongruity proper here, in the sense that two clashing scripts would be evoked by the diegetic events, and as
would be the case in a prototypical joke. Instead, the viewer expectations triggered by the actions in context lead precisely
to the acceptance of the fictional ventriloquism effect, i.e., they reinforce the viewers’ belief that character actions and
utterances are informed by fictional character experiences. The resulting incongruity can be explained by a clash between
T.C. Messerli / Lingua 197 (2017) 16--33 25
the text and what Genette (1997) called the paratext, and more precisely the epitext. The more general term, paratext,
refers to those ‘‘verbal or other productions’’ that ‘‘surround it [the text] and extend it, precisely in order to present it’’
(Genette, 1997: 1, his emphasis). It includes both peritextual elements, which are part of the artefact itself, and distanced
elements that Genette calls epitext:
The distanced elements are all those messages that, at least originally, are located outside the book, generally with
the help of the media (interviews, conversations) or under cover of private communications (letters, diaries, and
3
others). (Genette 1997: 5)
One way of putting simply the mechanism behind the humorous instances in example 1 is thus to say that it creates a
clash between text and epitext. Contrary to the expected constraint that fictional characters are conventionally bound to
only have access to aspects on the hierarchically subordinate fictional communicative level, Charlie makes reference
here to the epitext and thus creates an incongruity between stimuli that results in a humorous effect on the audience. Since
only actors, as representatives of the collective sender, have access to epitextual and more generally paratextual
information, whereas characters do not, the epitextual reference in example 1 amounts to a momentary repositioning of
the dummy Charlie Goodson as the ventriloquist Charlie Sheen. This in turn means that the viewers’ position must follow
that repositioning and look past the dummy to focus on the ventriloquist.
3.5. References to text and epitext in Two and a Half Men
In order to broaden the range of humorous phenomena that can be captured by this view of telecinematic humour as
ventriloquism, I will include two examples from Two and Half Men (TAAHM) at this point, which highlight different
relationships between ventriloquist and dummy and soften what would be considered the boundaries between different
layers in a spatial understanding of participation in telecinematic humour. To introduce these examples, I will briefly explain
their production context here, while bearing in mind the larger context that was described in Section 3.1. The excerpts I will
include are from the first episode of the ninth season and the sitcom finale, i.e., the final episode of the twelfth season. These
two episodes mark the beginning and ending of the four-season run of TAAHM after Charlie Sheen had left the sitcom. On
the fictional level, it starts with the funeral of Charlie Harper, the main character that was played by Sheen in its first eight
seasons, and its final episode then begins with the surprise revelation that Charlie Harper had in fact not died, but is now out
to take revenge on all of those who profited from his disappearance. Many of the scenes in the finale make clear reference to
aspects of its epitext, similar to what has been shown in example 1, and they serve as implicit or explicit attacks on Charlie
Sheen by the producer of TAAHM, Chuck Lorre. The very final scene of the sitcom shows Charlie Harper being killed by a
grand piano that falls on him, and then, as its final movement, shows producer Chuck Lorre sitting in a director's chair and
turning around to the camera to say ‘‘winning,’’ before he, too, is killed by yet another falling grand piano.
Example 2 is a transcription of the very first scene of the first episode of season 9, which starts off the post-Sheen part
of TAAHM:
Example 2: Two and a Half Men, Season 9, Episode 1 “Nice to meet you, Walden Schmidt”, 00:00:00–00:02:27
Alan is speaking at his brother Charlie’s funeral. A pan reveals Charlie’s typical clothes (a short-sleeved blue shirt with
stripes and a pair of shorts) hanging on a coat hanger behind Alan.
(Introductory music is a version of Chopin’s Funeral March sung by repeating the word “Men”, which makes it a
blend of that march with the usual credit music of Two and Half Men.)
1 {Camera pans left past a coffin and reveals Charlie’s clothes and then Alan}
LT: hahahahahahahahahahah[hahaha]
2 Alan: [hello. ](.) I’m Charlie’s brother
Alan. (.) I wanna thank you all for coming. (.) I know this is a- a very sad day for all of us.
Woman 1 speak for yourself!
LT: hahahahahaha[hahaha ]
3 Alan: [o- okay.] uh. (.) I understand that, ah, some of you have-ff
“mixed feeli ngs.”
*---air quotes---* LT: hahahahahaha[hahahaha]
3
While Genette (1997) refers to books in his work on paratexts, there is no reason why an audiovisual artefact could not be conceptualised
using the same terms.
26 T.C. Messerli / Lingua 197 (2017) 16--33
4 Alan: [um. (.) but] I-I-I think we can all agree that Charlie lived life to its fullest and-and
gave it everything he had.
Woman 2: gave me herpes.
LT: hahahahahahahaha
5 Woman 3: &---raises hand---&
chlamydia
LT: hahahahahahahaha
6 Woman 4: %---raises hand---%
vaginal warts
LT: hahahahahahahaha
7 Evelyn:
that he's gone, leaving me with nothing but my memories (.) and my regrets (.) and the listing for
his beaut iful beachfront [Malibu getaway with three bedrooms and three and a half baths (.) and ] a
LT: [hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah]
8 Evelyn: =beautiful panoramic ocean view. (.)
LT: hahahahahaha[haha]
9 Evelyn: [Help ]yourselves to brochures out by the coffee urn.
LT: hahahahahahahaha
10 Alan: Thank you, (.) Mom. [um, any][[way.]]
LT: [hahaha ]
11 Evelyn: [[uh, ]] Open house is Sunday, one to five.
LT: hahahahahahahaha
12 Alan: Okay, uhm, I’d- I'd like to: take a moment to: talk about my brother, um, and his incredible love
for life.
Woman 4: he also loved being spanked.
LT: hahahaha[hahahahahahaha]
13 Woman 5: [while wearing my]panties.
LT: hahahahahaha[[ha]]
14 Woman 6: [[he]] used my panties to make tea.
LT: hahahahahahahahahahahaha[hahahahahahahahahahahaha]
15 Alan: [my- my- my point i:s, um, that-] (.) Charlie lived life on his own
terms and-and never apologized for who he was.
Woman 7: yeah, blah, blah, blah. Why can't we see the body?
LT: hahahahahahahaha
16 Woman 1: yeah, I didn't come all this way to spit on a closed coffin.
LT: hahahaha[hahahahahahahaha]
17 Alan: [o- okay, I understand] how you feel, but, uh, unfortunately due to the circumstances of
his passing, the remains aren't exactly (.) spit-able.
LT: hahahahahahahaha[[hahaha]]
18 Man 1: [[I have a]]question.
LT: hahahahaha[hahaha]
19 Alan: [o- okay. ]u:h, I wasn't planning on doing a Q and A, [[u:h, but go ahead.]] LT: [[hahahahahahaha ]]
20 Man 1: thank you. Charlie owes me 38,000 Dollars for some, let's say, pharmaceuticals.
LT: hahahahahahahaha
21 Man 1: who do I talk to about that?
LT: hahahahahahahaha
22 Alan: uh, we- uh, I think that's something you'll have to discuss with the lawyers. Man 1: yeah. (.) I'd rather not involve
LT: [hahahaha]hahahaha
* Alan
& Woman 3 % Woman 4
T.C. Messerli / Lingua 197 (2017) 16--33 27
The excerpt in example 2 includes 22 humorous instances. Rather than discussing the processes of incongruity and
resolution that create humour in all 22 cases in detail, I will focus here on larger patterns and demonstrate their explicability
through ventriloquism.
Given the setting in this example as well as the plot of the preceding episode, in which Charlie Harper is reported to
have been fatally hit by a subway train in Paris, the obvious theme of most of the HI in example 2 is Charlie as a character.
The narrative frame evoked by the mise-en-scène is that of a funeral. The communicative setting, including the positioning
of the characters, e.g., as speakers in front of a crowd sitting in church benches, and the characters’ clothing further
reinforce that frame. The characters that are part of the main cast of the sitcom, Charlie's brother, Alan, and their mother,
Evelyn, also pay heed to the same frame, and adapt to it at least initially -- Alan by holding a eulogy, Evelyn by expressing
that she is mourning for her son (HI 7). The prevalent pattern for humour construction in this scene exploits this narrative
frame of the funeral and mourning for Charlie, which is enacted multimodally, and juxtaposes it with aspects that do
decidedly not fit that frame. The surprising elements that trigger the humour-evoking incongruities for the most part fall into
the detailed description of Charlie Harper's actions in life, which -- if this excerpt is taken as a measure -- have affected
many people negatively. Other characters who have featured in previous episodes of TAAHM refer to Charlie's drug
abuse (HIs 20--22) as well as his sexual behaviour (Hi 4--6; 12--14), the excessive promiscuousness of which is evaluated
4
as negative here. More generally, the humorous instances here all include facts about Charlie's life that are less than
flattering and thus create a contrast with the focus on fond memories about the deceased that is expected at a funeral.
What is interesting about this scene is the way in which its humour relates to various aspects of shared common ground
between the collective sender and the television audience and thus to different loci at which the audience will infer the
ventriloquist who animates and is animated by the gestures on the surface of the audiovisual text. First of all, insofar as the
individual HIs construct incongruities between the semantic frames of mourning and of sex, drugs and other frames that
are at odds with the traditional eulogy, humour only depends on the communal common ground (Clark, 1996) that the
collective sender will assume between themselves and their audience: The viewers have access to knowledge and
accordingly expectations about what is and what is not part of the proceedings of a funeral, and the descriptions of what
Charlie did in his life are clearly incongruous with those expectations. This is to say that the character interactions are
animated by the narrative frame of the funeral, which is visible in particular by their creation of those gestures -- e.g., Alan's
eulogy and Evelyn's sad voice -- that make it a representation of a funeral in the first place. Secondly, many of the HIs
function as call-backs to scenes that the regular viewer of TAAHM will remember, and they thus also build on experiential
common ground, i.e., they cater to those viewers that have seen Charlie Harper's incongruous behaviour in previous
seasons. In triggering such memories, they make incongruities more vivid and reinforce them, and they thus contribute to
humour. Finally, as in example 1, humour is also informed here by references to events outside the fictional world, insofar
as Charlie Harper's fate is connected to the then recent events in Charlie Sheen's public life. This connection depends on
a range of different factors, which includes the inherent connection between any actor and the character they portray (as
mentioned in Section 3.3). In this case, however, the connection between Harper and Sheen goes beyond the fact that
they inhabit the same onscreen body, and there are clear commonalities between Sheen's public persona and the way in
which Harper is characterised in TAAHM. These notably include drug abuse and sexual promiscuity, which are in turn the
semantic essence of the humorous instances in example 2. More than just serving as general references to shared
aspects between actor and character, they necessarily also activate knowledge about the scandal that led to Sheen's
dismissal, which also involved sex and drugs and at the same time served as an extradiegetic cause for the funeral scene
in the first place.
3.6. Inferring multiple agents
One way of interpreting the tripartite structure of humour in example 2 is in terms of audience design. The collective
sender rewards regular viewers and those that follow celebrity news by referring to the extra knowledge they have access
to due to their viewer experience and reading of news items, respectively. In order to broaden the target audience,
however, they make sure the sitcom's humorous incongruities also work for the less well informed television viewers.
While there are thus 22 humorous incongruities for informed and uninformed viewers alike in the example, the three
different audiences are not equal. It has been pointed out in the humour literature that jokes often do not only rely on one
single incongruity, but may include background incongruities in addition to the main or focal incongruity (Attardo et al.,
2002; Dynel, 2012; Mayerhofer and Schacht, 2013), and Samson and Hempelmann (2011: 181) found in a study on jokes
4
Interestingly, however, the same behavioural pattern of sleeping with as many women as possible is presented in a much more positive light in
the previous eight seasons, as well as in subsequent episodes, when women are again presented as conquests for the newly introduced
character that replaces Charlie and the sitcom thus returns to its unashamed and stereotypical narrative focalisation through the perspective of a heterosexual white male.
28 T.C. Messerli / Lingua 197 (2017) 16--33
and cartoons involving multiple incongruities that removing background incongruities resulted in reduced humour
appreciation and lower ratings of funniness. Similarly, in example 2, access to epitextual information can be regarded as a
basis for background incongruities, which in turn means that humour appreciation will be increased for those audiences
that are more informed. In other words, to get the most out of the opening scene of Season 9 of TAAHM, it is beneficial to
look beyond the current scene and include information from earlier seasons as well as from the news involving Charlie
Sheen.
That characters function as dummies that are ventriloquised not only by the actors that play them, but in this case more
importantly by the producer Chuck Lorre, is thus also directly relevant for humour appreciation. By being interested not
only in character utterances and actions, but also in the agencies that animate them, viewers gain access to background
incongruities, even if it is as simple as understanding that the loss of Harper in the sitcom is also the loss of Sheen, and the
humorous contrast is not only with Harper's but also with Sheen's transgressions. Crucially, then, the ideal viewer does not
decide between either character or collective sender, i.e., between either dummy or ventriloquist, but instead perceives of
every humorous instance as the result of a complex co-production of a dummy in plain sight and a hidden ventriloquist,
who is however manifest in dummy actions and utterances. Example 2 is full of traces of this seemingly paradoxical stance
of the viewers who both play along with the ventriloquist's act while also appreciating its constructedness. If it is beneficial
for the viewers to look beyond the fictional scene at hand, it is no surprise that the collective sender will do work in order to
steer them to those aspects of their previous knowledge whose activation is likely to increase their appreciation of the
humorous incongruities in the text. From a narratological perspective, the diegetic resurrection of the character Charlie
Harper in this scene, which happens through the collective reports about his life, serves as a set of analepses to earlier
episodes of TAAHM and puts the focus on the larger story of the sitcom, which is reinforced by the appearance of
characters that featured in what is now the pre-history to season 9. Epitextual information, on the other hand, is activated
through the references to those behavioural patterns that are common to the fictional and non-fictional lives of Harper and
Sheen, respectively.
From the perspective of the ventriloquised dummies, this means that in each of the HIs in example 2, they do not only
speak on behalf of their present selves, but also on behalf of their past selves, which they animate into being by referring to
this fictional past. This referring back also marks an important contribution to the characterisation of both themselves and
Charlie Harper. Moreover, they speak on behalf of producer Chuck Lorre as that member of the collective sender who has
creative control. Conversely, the two examples can be regarded as a form of interaction between Chuck Lorre and Charlie
Sheen who ventriloquise one or multiple characters in the sitcoms they are involved in to stage a humorous battle.
There are some noteworthy differences between the two examples, however. While the principles of ventriloquism
apply in both cases, i.e., the hidden ventriloquist is animated into being by the performing characters or more generally the
surfaces of the audiovisual texts, this ventriloquist is one collective sender in the case of AM and another in the case of
TAAHM. The ventriloquist could potentially be any subset of those involved in each of the two sitcoms. However, it makes
most sense in this case to simplify the ventriloquism setting to the assumption that AM ultimately speaks on behalf of
Charlie Sheen, whereas TAAHM speaks on behalf of Chuck Lorre.
Just as important for the understanding of the communicative setting of sitcom humour is another difference: Example
2 illustrates instances of humour that function with or without reference to the epitext, which is to say that they are
sufficiently grounded in the fictional story that they are understandable for the television audience even if one were to
assume fully immersed and -- in Clark's (1996) sense -- fully imaginative (and non-appreciative) viewers who are so caught
up in the fictional moment that they are incapable of looking to the larger text, let alone any epitextual information they
might have access to. The incongruities in example 1, on the other hand, are dependent on epitextual knowledge, which is
to say they necessitate a viewer that is willingly playing along while being aware of the constructedness of the performed
monologue. This difference in the positioning of the target audience does however not require a conceptualisation of two
different types of audiences on two different planes. The production, characters, the humour, etc. in both sitcoms are
similar enough that it can be safely assumed that there will have been a large overlap in their actual audiences.
Furthermore, the two examples are not characteristic of each of the two sitcoms in the sense that AM would usually
necessitate less immersed viewers than TAAHM: Either sitcom features HIs that are more or less grounded in the fictional
story and that are more or less dependent on epitextual knowledge (example 3 will illustrate this for TAAHM). First of all,
this serves to support the view that audiences are dynamic and can be repositioned by fictional events and notably by
instances of sitcom humour (Brock, 2015; Messerli, 2016). What the second example illustrates in addition, however, is
that these changes in audience focus cannot be attributed to discrete planes or layers, but need to be understood as
dynamic processes of inferring the ventriloquist at any of the available loci as they were discussed for example 1.
It is important to add here that this inference of the ventriloquist at a particular locus does not deny the existence of the
dummy or the ventriloquist act that is taking place. That the dummy can say what the ventriloquist cannot (Altman, 1980) or
that the dummy gives the ventriloquist power she would otherwise not have (Cooren, 2004) also applies in this case: All
characters possess agency and speak on their own fictional behalf, and all characters are also endpoints of chains of
agency and speak on behalf of a ventriloquist. What the different types of HIs in example 1 and 2 do then is to guide
T.C. Messerli / Lingua 197 (2017) 16--33 29
audience attention to one particular locus and to provide them the opportunity to ascribe agency to a particular
ventriloquist. They do so, however, without denying the multiplicity of co-present agents, which means that alternative
readings remain possible. As a result, stating that Charlie Harper is a chauvinist or that TAAHM is a sexist sitcom are both
possible inferences from watching any episode from its first eight seasons.
3.7. (In-)visible ventriloquists
Example 1 and example 2 both make reference to and require knowledge about the paratatext, but are different in
terms of the way this epitextual information is grounded in the fictional story. Example 3 from the finale of TAAHM
illustrates another relationship between dummies and ventriloquists:
Example 3: Two and a Half Men, Season 12, Episode 15 “Of course he’s dead: Part 1 & 2”,00:29:07–00:29:58 Alan Harper and Walden are at Walden’s (formerly Charlie Harper’s) house, where they both live. Alan’s son Jake who had not appeared on the sitcom in two years surprisingly turns up in the doorway. Alan uses the moment to share with
his son the recent news that Charlie is alive.
1 Alan: here's the thing (.) i- i- it turns out that your uncle Charlie, might still be alive.
Jake: oh (.) that would explain why I got a check for 250,000 dollars and a note that said I'm alive.
LT: hahahaha[hahahaha]
2 Alan: [you have] 250,000 dollars?
Jake: not anymore. I stopped in in Vegas on the way here.
LT: hahahahaha[[ha]]
3 Alan: [[oh]] God. How much do you have le ?
Jake: two and a half million.
LT: hahahahaha[haha]
4 Alan: [a::::h]
£---nearly faints---£
Walden: o:::h
ç---catches Alan---ç LT: Hahahahahaha[haha]
5 Walden: [you] won two and a half million dollars?
Jake: oh yeah (.)it's not that hard, I kept playing craps
LT: Hahahahahahaha[ha]
6 Jake: [oh,] and I kept be ng on come, be
LT: hahahaha[hahahaha]
7 Walden: [wow that's] amazing that you made so much money with such stupid jokes
LT: hahahahahahahahahahahahah
8 £---turns to the camera and smiles---£
ç---turns to the camera and smiles---ç
^---turns to the camera and shrugs his shoulders---^ LT: hahahahahahahaha £Alan ç Walden
^ Jake
While HIs 1--6 serve as context of example 3, I want to focus on HIs 7 and 8 here, which together constitute a two-part
joke targeting Chuck Lorre. As mentioned above, the finale is generally full of references to earlier moments in TAAHM as
well as to the epitext. In HI3, for instance, knowledge about the character Jake who was characterised as dim, goofy and
generally as a no-good is reactivated and serves to motivate and reinforce the incongruity: The regular viewers will share
Alan's assumption in HI 3 that Jake will have lost money in Las Vegas. In HI 4, the fact that Alan nearly faints will be
understood as coherent with his characterisation as penniless, stingy, yet greedy for money, and HIs 5 and 6 tie in with the
30 T.C. Messerli / Lingua 197 (2017) 16--33
simple jokes that Jake was associated with when he appeared regularly on the sitcom. Thus, when Walden in HI 7 jokes
about making money with stupid jokes, Jake is a plausible target. This grounding in the fictional story of course only thinly
disguises that the joke is also targeting Chuck Lorre. The gesture in HI 8 serves as a recontextualisation of the same joke
and this time leaves no doubt that humour here goes beyond the world of the characters: all three characters turn towards
the camera and direct the viewers’ attention to the epitext and more precisely to Chuck Lorre, who is now being targeted as
the one responsible for the stupid jokes.
Even though HI 8 stands out because of the breaking with telecinematic conventions (characters looking straight into
the camera), which serves as a clear hint to the epitext, the humorous instance it constructs is admittedly simple. It is
interesting in terms of agency, however, because it involves the viewers, the characters, the actors and the producer of
TAAHM in one simple joke. The decisive move in this HI is of course the synchronised gesture that all three characters
perform together. They point to the camera and thus metonymically to the epitext, and we, the television audience can
then laugh about Chuck Lorre who might have written, but certainly oversaw those ‘‘stupid jokes’’, and perhaps as well
about ourselves, the accomplices who dutifully laugh about said jokes. But who is the ventriloquist that animates this
gesture? Initially, it is certainly the characters who just performed a series of jokes about each other and their past. In
turning to the camera, however, the characters reveal that they are ventriloquised by actors, since -- as pointed out in the
discussion of example 1 -- only actors have access to the epitext, whereas characters are contained within their fictional
surroundings. Thirdly, however, the fact that they all turn simultaneously points to the orchestration of the scene, to the
scriptedness of their behaviour and thus ultimately to Chuck Lorre as the ventriloquist who animates the scene.
It follows that the simple joke changes in its essence within only a few seconds. The audience at first plays along with
what I have called the fictional ventriloquism effect here and accepts the gesture to be animated by the characters. They
align with the speaker, Walden, and by laughing about the jab at Jake, disassociate themselves from the target. Then, the
viewers’ attention is steered towards the actors who laugh at Chuck Lorre. They witness how the characters seemingly
concede their agency and turn into the actors that animate them. At the same time, however, the viewers see that the
actors, too, are moved in synchrony by yet another ventriloquist, the producer, and they are amused by Chuck Lorre
sanctioning humour targeted at himself, while also appreciating their own complicity in the transgression of the narrative
conventions of TCD. Technically, the complexity of this simple joke is even further complicated by the fact that these
subsequent moves that take the viewers through different parts of the chain of agency behind the gesture in HI 8 are in fact
themselves yet another fiction. The production of the actors’ apparent concession of their character-roles is of course
identical to the production of any other scene in TAAHM. Put differently, the ostentatious revelation of ventriloquists in this
scene is in fact another ventriloquist's trick, which can only pretend to point to its own construction. As is the case with any
mise-en-abyme (see Prince, 1987: 53; Flückiger, 2008: 394--416), of which this scene here is an example, it can only point
from within the containment of the fiction, which means that any gesture reduplicates and fictionalises what it points to.
Irrespective of such meta-fictional considerations, the three moves emphasise (actually or fictionally) the different agents
that are involved in the production of any instance of sitcom humour and that are manifest to different degrees in the
audiovisual text. The television audience is thus guided to one locus or another at any given moment, and in sum is
perpetually reminded that being a recipient of a sitcom means witnessing an elaborate act of ventriloquism.
4. Conclusion
The three examples from the sitcoms Anger Management (AM) and Two and a Half Men (TAAHM) that were discussed
here serve to illustrate the way in which sitcom communication can be conceptualised as a form of ventriloquism. The
dynamic inferring of agencies by the viewers that I have shown to be instrumental for humour comprehension can only
partially be captured with existing spatial models of telecinematic communicative settings. It is this more dynamic
understanding of different roles or agencies as well as the emphasis on a range of coexisting processes (ventriloquism
effects on different levels) that the conceptual ventriloquism metaphor offers as an analytical tool. The examples highlight
in particular what different loci in the chain of agency are involved in sitcom production as communication, and thus point
to how the interacting dummies onscreen -- by which I mean not only the fictional characters, but the whole multimodal
surface of the audiovisual text -- reveal themselves to be speaking not only on their own behalf but also on behalf of the
actors that portray them and of the producer that has creative control over their actions, which includes the jokes they
perform. Any instance of humour in this domain involves the entire ventriloquist chain of agency, which is to say that the
dummies always speak for themselves as well as for all production events that lead to their performance at any time, and
also that within the space of the sitcom, producers and actors as ventriloquists are always communicating with the
television audience by animating these dummies. While in principle all scenes of the two sitcoms are thus identical when it
comes to the way in which they communicate, the different examples reveal that viewers need to be more, or less aware of
this multiplicity of agents depending on the way humour is constructed in any given scene. Example 1 displays humour
that depends on the audience's knowledge of what has here been referred to as the epitext, i.e., to aspects relevant for the
production that are however not part of the text itself. Example 2 also includes such epitextual references, but at the same
T.C. Messerli / Lingua 197 (2017) 16--33 31
time invests more resources into the fictional ventriloquism effect by making sure that the humorous incongruities are not
only sufficiently motivated by fictional events, but are also based on incongruities that can exist in absence of any
epitextual knowledge. Nonetheless, this second example includes clear cues that animate the informed viewers to look
past the fiction and equate the fictional character with the actor Charlie Sheen, who thus becomes the target of most of the
humorous instances in the scene. Example 3, finally, demonstrates the dynamic change within a short humorous scene
from a focus on the fictional narrative frame and incongruities contained within it, to an emphasis on the ventriloquists that
animate that same scene.
Together, the three examples thus provide a partial view of a spectrum between those scenes that can be described as
maximally fictional and are essentially performed jokes independent of any other context than what is immediately
encoded in the scene and, at the other extreme, scenes that are maximally epitextual, as is the case when Chuck Lorre
appears before the sitcom stage and speaks to the audience in the final scene of TAAHM. Between those two extremes is
the range of more typical cases that were exemplified in section 3. They make clear that television viewers are positioned
as an audience that has the perceptual predisposition as well as the will to play along and interpret the dummies’ actions in
this ventriloquist act as animated by the dummies themselves, while at the same time being capable of appreciating the
ventriloquist's role in the act. Given the fact that viewers are used to such chains of agencies from other domains --
Cooren's (2004) example of the note through which an institution can speak to its employees being just one case in point --
the simultaneous recognition of dummy agency and ventriloquist agency in the processing of sitcom humour is not
different in principle from the reception of other acts of communication. However, the way in which audiences are made
aware of the different places from which humorous incongruities are animated, and the self-reflexive way in which the
communicative setting itself is exploited for humour (as was done in example 3) make sitcom humour and telecinematic
discourse more generally a uniquely illustrative example of communication as ventriloquism.
The feud between Charlie Sheen and Chuck Lorre, enacted in and mediated through different texts and practices, is
also carried out in the two sitcoms AM and TAAHM, in which each of the two television personalities create their own
ventriloquist act in order to engage in a sort of humorous battle that served the dual purpose of entertaining their audiences
while also attacking their opponent. In so doing, they make use of a complex form of say-foring and indeed make public
their own views through the sitcoms (Lorenzo-Dus, 2009), which is to say that the sitcoms serve as a way for Lorre and
Sheen ‘‘to represent their own meaning’’ (Tannen, 2010: 310). Whereas in interviews each of the two opponents speaks
on behalf of himself, which also means that these interviews animate into being the two public personae of Sheen and
Lorre, the sitcoms thus continued the interaction in a fictional form: through fictional events that allude directly to epitextual
events without clearly grounding them in the fiction (example 1); through fictional events that are ambiguously motivated
by both the fiction and by real-life events (example 2); or through fictional events that are initially motivated by the fiction,
but slowly turn into gestures that speak as agents on behalf of Lorre and Sheen (example 3).
This polyvalence is mirrored in the understanding of sitcom as ventriloquism, which assumes that all those involved in
the humorous sitcom performance are located at a particular place on the chain of agency, not unlike the narratological
distribution of voices between an author and a reader that was similarly conceptualised by O’Neill (1994). Instead of
envisioning the television audience as co-present on two different planes, the fictional one and the one between
themselves and the collective sender, they are thus understood as interpreters of dummy actions that are animated by
multiple agents at the same time. In the audiovisual text, different degrees of reference to textual and epitextual knowledge
are manifest and thus different agencies are foregrounded at different moments in each of the two sitcoms. This dynamic
understanding of inferring a particular ventriloquist based on textual cues is also mirrored in a dynamic understanding of
the television audience who processes the resulting incongruities that involve any one of the involved agents or several of them at once.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. This research
did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Appendix A. Transcription conventions (based on Jefferson, 2004; Mondada, 2014)
[ ] overlapping speech (including laughter)
(.) gap between utterances
{} telecinematic events such as camera movements, cuts, etc.
< > description of voice quality
= latch
__ stress
: indicates lengthening of the previous sound
32 T.C. Messerli / Lingua 197 (2017) 16--33
., ? ! punctuation indicates usual intonation
haha laughter
* Æ § ^ symbols to identify participants
*----* delimits action/facial expression by participant
*----> action continues on subsequent line(s)
----* action ends
34 number in left-hand column refers to humorous instance
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