Sitcom Quotes

She's cinematic and I'm a fucking sitcom.

People are too lazy and too stupid to think for themselves that we've got sitcoms with canned laughter that let's you know when to laugh if you're to stupid to know when the joke is.

I've always had this theory that God is a sitcom writer who loves to put me in ridiculous situations.

Hot damn, Wip. We’ve got a stone-cold fox on our hands.” Willa flipped Ginger the bird without looking away from the full-length mirror. “This touching family sitcom moment brought to you by the letters F and U.

Politics is not a picture on a wall or a television sitcom that you can decide you don't much care for.

Where do babies come from? Don't bother asking adults. They lie like pigs. However, diligent independent research and hours of playground consultation have yielded fruitful, if tentative, results. There are several theories. Near as we can figure out, it has something to do with acting ridiculous in the dark. We believe it is similar to dogs when they act peculiar and ride each other. This is called "making love". Careful study of popular song lyrics, advertising catch-lines, TV sitcoms, movies, and T-Shirt inscriptions offers us significant clues as to its nature. Apparently it makes grown-ups insipid and insane. Some graffiti was once observed that said "sex is good". All available evidence, however, points to the contrary.

What is it we need to talk about, Lord Sun?” “Matthias, this isn’t an eighties sitcom. I can’t casually accept an orphan into my house for comic relief.

I need you to know: I hated that I needed more than this from him. There is nothing more humiliating to me than my own desires. Nothing that makes me hate myself more than being burdensome and less than self-sufficient. I did not want to feel like the kind of nagging woman who might exist in a sit-com.

I felt like - like I don't know what. Like this wasn't real. Like I was in some Goth version of a bad sitcom. Instead of being the A/V dweeb about to ask the head cheerleader to the prom, I was the finished-second-place werewolf about to ask the vampire's wife to shack up and procreate. Nice. - Jacob

Another thing that no one tells you about drinking as you get older is that it isn’t the hangovers that become crippling, but rather the acute paranoia and dread in the sober hours of the following day that became a common feature of my mid-twenties. The gap between who you were on a Saturday night, commandeering an entire pub garden by shouting obnoxiously about how you’ve always felt you had at least three prime-time sitcom scripts in you, and who you are on a Sunday afternoon, thinking about death and worrying if the postman likes you or not, becomes too capacious.

With Alicia and the Alchemists on the loose, Sydney couldn’t leave a secure location like this without good reason. She contented herself by holing up in a guest room and prepping some spells that would be of use in the search for Alicia tomorrow. That left Dimitri and me to babysit, which seemed like the setup for some sort of wacky sitcom.

Everything comes to an end. A good bottle of wine, a summer’s day, a long-running sitcom, one’s life, and eventually our species. The question for many of us is not that everything will come to an end but when. And can we do anything vaguely useful until it does?

The leap of faith is this: You have to believe, or at least pretend you believe until you really believe it, that you are strong enough to take life face on. Eating disorders, on any level, are a crutch. They are also an addiction and illness, but there is no question at all that they are quite simply a way of avoiding the banal, daily, itchy pain of life. Eating disorders provide a little drama, they feed into the desire for constant excitement, everything becomes life-or-death, everything is terribly grand and crashing, very Sturm and Drang. And they are distracting. You don't have to think about any of the nasty minutiae of the real world, you don't get caught up in that awful boring thing called regular life, with its bills and its breakups and its dishes and laundry and groceries and arguments over whose turn it is to change the litter box and bedtimes and bad sex and all that, because you are having a real drama, not a sitcom but a GRAND EPIC, all by yourself, and why would you bother with those foolish mortals when you could spend hours and hours with the mirror, when you are having the most interesting sado-machistic affair with your own image?

I remembered what Morrie said during our visit: “The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.” "Morrie true to these words, had developed his own culture – long before he got sick. Discussion groups, walks with friends, dancing to his music in the Harvard Square church. He started a project called Greenhouse, where poor people could receive mental health services. He read books to find new ideas for his classes, visited with colleagues, kept up with old students, wrote letters to distant friends. He took more time eating and looking at nature and wasted not time in front of TV sitcoms or “Movies of the Week.” He had created a cocoon of human activities– conversations, interaction, affection–and it filled his life like an overflowing soup bowl.

Don’t know if it’s good or bad that a Google search on “Big Bang Theory” lists the sitcom before the origin of the Universe

On the ground, Cash gave a signal, and all the guys lined up by the pool. In unison, they stripped off their shirts and tossed them onto the grass. An audible sigh- like the ones you hear on a sitcom that is "filmed in front of a live studio audience"- filled the room. It was almost funny, really. Such a strong reaction to a bunch of shirtless boys.

Women's liberation is one thing, but the permeation of anti-male sentiment in post-modern popular culture - from our mocking sitcom plots to degrading commercial story lines - stands testament to the ignorance of society. Fair or not, as the lead gender that never requested such a role, the historical male reputation is quite balanced. For all of their perceived wrongs, over centuries they've moved entire civilizations forward, nurtured the human quest for discovery and industry, and led humankind from inconvenient darkness to convenient modernity. Navigating the chessboard that is human existence is quite a feat, yet one rarely acknowledged in modern academia or media. And yet for those monumental achievements, I love and admire the balanced creation that is man for all his strengths and weaknesses, his gifts and his curses. I would venture to say that most wise women do.

We modern human beings are looking at life, trying to make some sense of it; observing a 'reality' that often seems to be unfolding in a foreign tongue--only we've all been issued the wrong librettos. For a text, we're given the Bible. Or the Talmud or the Koran. We're given Time magazine, and Reader's Digest, daily papers, and the six o'clock news; we're given schoolbooks, sitcoms, and revisionist histories; we're given psychological counseling, cults, workshops, advertisements, sales pitches, and authoritative pronouncements by pundits, sold-out scientists, political activists, and heads of state. Unfortunately, none of these translations bears more than a faint resemblance to what is transpiring in the true theater of existence, and most of them are dangerously misleading. We're attempting to comprehend the spiraling intricacies of a magnificently complex tragicomedy with librettos that describe the barrom melodramas or kindergarten skits. And when's the last time you heard anybody bitch about it to the management?

Inside the hole, the red lips say, ”we all grew up with the same television shows. It’s like we all have the same artificial memory implants. We remember almost none of our real childhoods, but we remember everything that happened to sitcom families. We have the same basic goals. We all have the same fears.” The lips say, ”The future is not bright.

Verbal abuse is the use of language to shame, scare or hurt another. Dysfunctional parents routinely use name-calling, sarcasm, and destructive criticism to overpower and control their children. Verbal abuse is as commonplace in the American family as homework and table manners. It is modeled as socially acceptable in almost every sitcom on television.

When we're onstage we're not literature, we're sitcom. You have to have catchphrases.

There are growing domestic social and economic problems, in fact, maybe catastrophes. Nobody in power has any intention of doing anything about them. If you look at the domestic programs of the administrations of the past ten years-I include here the Democratic opposition-there's really no serious proposal about what to do about the severe problems of health, education, homelessness, joblessness, crime, soaring criminal populations, jails, deterioration in the inner cities - the whole raft of problems... In such circumstances you've got to divert the bewildered herd, because if they start noticing this they may not like it, since they're the ones suffering from it. Just having them watch the Superbowl and the sitcoms may not be enough. You have to whip them up into fear of enemies. In the 1930s Hitler whipped them into fear of the Jews and gypsies. You had to crush them to defend yourselves. We have our ways, too. Over the last ten years, every year ot two, some major monster is constructed that we have to defend ourselves against.

She had always assumed that when she was old, she would have total confidence, finally. But look at her: still uncertain. In many ways she was more uncertain now than she had been as a girl. And often when she heard herself speaking she was appalled at how chirpy she sounded—how empty-headed and superficial, as if she’d somehow fallen into the Mom role in some shallow TV sitcom. What on earth had happened to her?

Yeah, but nowadays it's all you see anymore is cops, the tube is saturated with fucking cop shows, just being regular guys, only tryin to do their job, folks, no more threat to nobody's freedom than some dad in a sitcom. Right. Get the viewer population so cop-happy they're beginning to be run in. Good-bye Johnny Staccato, welcome and while you're at it please kick my door down, Steve McGarrett.

...Maybe it's low-wage work in general that has the effect of making feel like a pariah. When I watch TV over my dinner at night, I see a world in which almost everyone makes $15 an hour or more, and I'm not just thinking of the anchor folks. The sitcoms and dramas are about fashion designers or schoolteachers or lawyers, so it's easy for a fast-food worker or nurse's aide to conclude that she is an anomaly — the only one, or almost the only one, who hasn't been invited to the party. And in a sense she would be right: the poor have disappeared from the culture at large, from its political rhetoric and intellectual endeavors as well as from its daily entertainment. Even religion seems to have little to say about the plight of the poor, if that tent revival was a fair sample. The moneylenders have finally gotten Jesus out of the temple.

A book that requires nothing from you might offer the same diversion as that of a television sitcom, but it is unlikely to provide intellectual, aesthetic, or spiritual rewards long after the cover is closed.

Thanks for the apology, Caden, really. Anyway, isn’t it pretty normal for a straight girl to fall for a gay guy? All the sitcoms treat it like a rite of passage, something that all girls must go through. You’re pretty and kind and way too good to be true. At least I’ve ticked that box now.” “I …” I don’t exist to teach her a lesson, and it irks me that she thinks labeling me is okay now. Like, by liking guys, I automatically take on that role in her life. That I’m suddenly a supporting character in her story rather than the hero of my own.

Tyler, I'm grateful to you; for everything that you've done for me. But this is too much. I don't want this. What do you want? Wanna go back to the shit job, fuckin' condo world, watching sitcoms? Fuck you, I won't do it.

The Arboretum’s overgrown grass rustled. The branches of an apple tree shook as though an animal had jumped from one to the next. A wind slid up my thighs, in the night, under my short nightgown. Crickets and cicadas made a sound like distant laughing children, the laugh track to a sitcom that didn’t end. It was like the grass was full of tiny giggling babies. So beautiful, and creepy.

Our vision becomes so narrow that risk is trying a new brand of cereal, and adventure is watching a new sitcom. Over time I have elevated my opinion of nonconformity nearly to the level of an obligation. We should have a bias toward doing activities that we don’t normally do to keep loose the moorings of society.

What a very long time one had to be an adult, after rushing through childhood and adolescence. There should be several more distinctions: the idiocy of the young twenties, when one was suddenly expected to know how to do adult things; the panicked coupling of the mid- and late twenties, when marriages happened as quickly as a game of tag; the sitcom mom period, when you finally had enough food in your freezer to survive for a month if necessary; the school principal period, when you were no longer seen as a woman at all but just a nagging authority figure. If you were lucky, there was the late-in-life sexy Mrs. Robinson period, or an accomplished and powerful Meryl Streep period, followed, of course, by approximately two decades of old crone-hood, like the woman at the end of 'Titanic

La vie est une sitcom: une suite de scènes qui se déroulent toujours dans les mêmes décors, avec à peu près les mêmes personnages, et dont on attend les prochains épisodes avec une impatience teintée d'abrutissement.

Television creates loneliness. This is why sitcoms have added laughter tracks which try to cheat you out of your solitude. Television is a reflection of the world in which we live, designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It kills spontaneous imagination and destroys our ability to entertain ourselves, painfully erasing our patience and sensitivity to significant detail.

I can hardly bear to think of ourselves hugging and crying and making giggly phone calls, like we were in some inane sitcom. We actually discussed names. Names! I want to shout back through the years at myself, "Just because you're pregnant doesn't mean you get a baby, you idiots!

Take chances, make mistakes. That's how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage. You have to fail in order to practice being brave.” – Mary Tyler Moore

I'm like an asshole in a sitcom who learns the same fucking lesson every week and this is my life.

when I think of really living, living to the full — all my ideas are just the opening credits of sitcoms.

We were watching a sitcom, I don't remember which. There were many of them at the time that all could be lumped together under the title of Funny Minority and the White Guy.

We're like the couple on the sitcom that has good sparks but never get together for the sake of ratings.

I was in the fifth grade the first time I thought about turning thirty. My best friend Darcy and I came across a perpetual calendar in the back of the phone book, where you could look up any date in the future, and by using this little grid, determine what the day of the week would be. So we located our birthdays in the following year, mine in May and hers in September. I got Wednesday, a school night. She got a Friday. A small victory, but typical. Darcy was always the lucky one. Her skin tanned more quickly, her hair feathered more easily, and she didn't need braces. Her moonwalk was superior, as were her cart-wheels and her front handsprings (I couldn't handspring at all). She had a better sticker collection. More Michael Jackson pins. Forenze sweaters in turquoise, red, and peach (my mother allowed me none- said they were too trendy and expensive). And a pair of fifty-dollar Guess jeans with zippers at the ankles (ditto). Darcy had double-pierced ears and a sibling- even if it was just a brother, it was better than being an only child as I was. But at least I was a few months older and she would never quite catch up. That's when I decided to check out my thirtieth birthday- in a year so far away that it sounded like science fiction. It fell on a Sunday, which meant that my dashing husband and I would secure a responsible baby-sitter for our two (possibly three) children on that Saturday evening, dine at a fancy French restaurant with cloth napkins, and stay out past midnight, so technically we would be celebrating on my actual birthday. I would have just won a big case- somehow proven that an innocent man didn't do it. And my husband would toast me: "To Rachel, my beautiful wife, the mother of my chidren and the finest lawyer in Indy." I shared my fantasy with Darcy as we discovered that her thirtieth birthday fell on a Monday. Bummer for her. I watched her purse her lips as she processed this information. "You know, Rachel, who cares what day of the week we turn thirty?" she said, shrugging a smooth, olive shoulder. "We'll be old by then. Birthdays don't matter when you get that old." I thought of my parents, who were in their thirties, and their lackluster approach to their own birthdays. My dad had just given my mom a toaster for her birthday because ours broke the week before. The new one toasted four slices at a time instead of just two. It wasn't much of a gift. But my mom had seemed pleased enough with her new appliance; nowhere did I detect the disappointment that I felt when my Christmas stash didn't quite meet expectations. So Darcy was probably right. Fun stuff like birthdays wouldn't matter as much by the time we reached thirty. The next time I really thought about being thirty was our senior year in high school, when Darcy and I started watching ths show Thirty Something together. It wasn't our favorite- we preferred cheerful sit-coms like Who's the Boss? and Growing Pains- but we watched it anyway. My big problem with Thirty Something was the whiny characters and their depressing issues that they seemed to bring upon themselves. I remember thinking that they should grow up, suck it up. Stop pondering the meaning of life and start making grocery lists. That was back when I thought my teenage years were dragging and my twenties would surealy last forever. Then I reached my twenties. And the early twenties did seem to last forever. When I heard acquaintances a few years older lament the end of their youth, I felt smug, not yet in the danger zone myself. I had plenty of time..

Brendan Harris loved everyone now because he loved Katie and Katie loved him. Brendan loved traffic and smog and the sound of jackhammers. He loved his worthless old man who hadn't sent him a single birthday or Christmas card since he'd walked out on Brendan and his mother when Brendan was six. He loved Monday mornings, sitcoms that couldn't make a retard laugh, and standing in line at the RMV. He even loved his job, though he wouldn't be going in ever again.

Romney sounds like he wants to be the nice uncle in a sitcom, Santorum sounds like he wants to be a twelfth-century archbishop, Gingrich sounds like he wants to go to outer space, and Paul sounds like he came from there.

Children are not cruel. Children are mirrors. They want to be "grownup," so they act how grown-ups act when we think they're not looking. They do not act how we tell them to act at school assemblies. They act how we really act. They believe what we believe. They say what we say. And we have taught them that gay people are not okay. That overweight people are not okay. That Muslim people are not okay. That they are not equal. That they are to be feared. And people hurt the things they fear. We know that. What they are doing in the schools, what we are doing in the media -- it's all the same. The only difference is that children bully in the hallways and the cafeterias while we bully from behind pulpits and legislative benches and sitcom one-liners.

Sitcom white folk, movie-of-the-week white folk were our coon show.

She’s cinematic and I’m a fucking sitcom.

The side-eye she gave him carried enough attitude to fuel a sitcom.

The accused rapist, Calvin Smith, had graduated from a small-town high school the previous June, where he'd distinguished himself as an athlete. Individuals who knew Smith have described him as "kind," "easygoing," and "goofy." But he had never had sex before meeting Kaitlynn Kelly, and a look at what he has posted on a social media site suggests that he was a frustrated, involuntary celibate. On January 11, 2011, Smith posted a line from the animated sitcom Family Guy on his Facebook page: "women are not people god just put them here for mans entertainment.

TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee.

Sometimes I think of my life as a sitcom. But in reality, life is more than a series of memorable events that bring out the Meg Ryan in us. Life happens in the gaps between scenes. We live in the fade-to-blacks.

We can elbow and push all we want for every packed lunch, picked-up towel, put-away pan, and scheduled doctor’s appointment, but until paternity leave is normalized, until schools call fathers about sick kids as often as they call mothers, until sons are given not just the same number of chores but the same types as daughters, until the helpless sitcom dad with a tool belt isn’t quite so loveable, I’m skeptical of how much ground we’re really gaining.

Today's television sitcoms...the father is typically depicted as a clumsy buffoon, an inane and even unnecessary appendage. In creating that caricature, producers and directors have done irreparable damage to the God-ordained image of what may be one of the most significant roles and offices in eternity - that of a father, that of a real man.

Margaret is the first person who understands that my dull universe is the place where self-loathing blends with sitcoms and dullness like vaseline coats everything I see. She's the first person I've ever really liked who wasn't me.

The kind of happy I was that day at the Vet when "Hawk" Dawson actually doffed his red "C" cap to me, and everyone cheered and practically convulsed into tears - you can't patent that. It was one shining moment of glory that was instantly gone. Whereas life, real life, is different and can't even be appraised as simply "happy", but only in terms of "Yes, I'll take it all, thanks" or "No, I believe I won't." Happy, as my poor father used to say, is a lot of hooey. Happy is a circus clown, a sitcom, a greeting card. Life, though, life's about something sterner. But also something better. A lot better. Believe me.

You know, I just... I just feel like it's unfair, that my whole life is unfair, like I was born into the wrong place and family. I never belong anywhere. My parents don't understand anything about me. And my sister is gone. Sometimes I watch those stupid TV shows, you know? The ones where mothers and daughters talk about feelings and fathers take their kids to play baseball or get ice cream or some shit like that, and I wish it were me. It's so stupid, I know, to want your life to be a sitcom.

Listen, I have been through Hell in the last few hours. I have been chased and clawed and bitten by vampires - twice! One of them being you! And my leg is torn and my mind is blown and I'm wearing somebody else's pants! I need to sleep, I need to eat, I need to wear my own damn clothes, and what I don't need is for some vampire to smile at me all amused like I'm the wife in a fifties sitcom!

If your film or television show doesn’t fall into line with their liberal bias, they’ll drum you right off the screen. It’s what happened to Tim Allen, a funny guy who dared write and star in a sitcom that said something a little different than what the establishment wanted him to say.

It's not that racism doesn't exist. Lots of people in New York, and elsewhere, hate because of color and gender, religion and national origin. It's just that I rarely worry about those things because there's a real world underneath all that nonsense; a world that demands my attention almost every second of the day. Racism is a luxury in a world where resources are scarce, where economic competition is an armed sport, in a world where even the atmosphere is plotting against you. In an arena like that racism is more of a halftime entertainment, a favorite sitcom when the day is done.

..to put it in the modern parlance, this is a re-run. We have been here before. This is like watching TV in Bombay or Kingston or Dhaka, watching the same old British sitcoms spewed out to the old colonies in one tedious, eternal loop. Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - something to do with that experience of moving West to East or East to West or island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round.

One day the English language is going to perish. The easy spokenness of it will perish and go black and crumbly — maybe — and it will become a language like Latin that learned people learn. And scholars will write studies of Larry Sanders and Friends and Will & Grace and Ellen and Designing Women and Mary Tyler Moore, and everyone will see that the sitcom is the great American art form. American poetry will perish with the language; the sitcoms, on the other hand, are new to human evolution and therefore will be less perishable.

We’re roommates.” Immediately, he backpedals. “I-I mean, not just roommates, obviously…” “No, we’re much more than that,” Lyssa supplies, nodding at my son encouragingly. This is like watching a bad sitcom. They’re both terrible liars. “We’re like, all the things,” Mason says finally. Lyssa smiles brightly. “All of them!” And then they high five. Christ.

A lot of our outlawed terms were invented by black people and then picked up by whites, who held on to them way past their expiration date. 'My bad,' for example, and 'I've got your back' and 'You go, girlfriend.' They're the verbal equivalents of sitcom grandmothers high-fiving one another, and on hearing them, I wince and feel ashamed of my entire race.

I didn’t star on shitty sitcoms for a decade and not learn how to sell a line I don’t believe in.

I didn't have illusions about being one of the November Nine. We live in an age in which sitcoms outnumber miracles, and perhaps that is what we deserve.

Het enige wat overblijft is de wetenschap dat alles comedy is. Uiteindelijk zal de eerste sitcom over Auschwitz gemaakt worden. Alles is een kwestie van tijd

London is full of short stories, long stories, epics, farces, sit-coms, soaps and squibs, walking round hand in hand.

It’s so stupid, I know, to want your life to be a sitcom

The entrance to the natural EM senses is now guarded by artificially monstrous EM waves carrying every kind of pattern irrelevant to nature, from TV sitcoms to defense radar broadcasts. It is as though we have covered the whole surface of the globe with a slum of slovenly, impalpable constructions during the past eighty years or so since Marconi. They are literally skyscrapers in as much as they touch the ionosphere and are reflected from it. They are tenements full of the disorderly displays of sitcoms and the sterile reflections of military radar.

Let’s hope that, over time, we’ll develop a bias, when we have an extra free hour, toward shoveling snow from the elderly neighbor lady’s sidewalk over streaming another Netflix sitcom.

We’re so divided as a nation, we’re so divided as a world, but the one thing that brings us together always is love and smiles and comedy and an outside family that makes you feel a part of it.

In the sitcom Scruns, medicals interns used the supply closet as a hideout when they needed to have a panic attack or a good cry. If you seek private space, you are much more likely to find it.

You’d be surprised at the edge you can develop by applying yourself for an extra half hour on something—a goal, a skill, a job. Pick the time of day when you are most productive (early morning, after a jog, or in the quiet of a Sunday evening) and instead of watching a sitcom, devote yourself to whatever “it” might be. A half hour each day adds up to 180 hours of extra practice a year!

It is the story of two men whose sitcom—full of minute observations and despicable characters—snuck through the network system to become a hit that changed TV’s most cherished rules; from then on, antiheroes would rise to prominence, unique voices would invade the airwaves, and the creative forces behind shows would often gain as much power and fame as the faces in front of the cameras. Seinfeld

All these literary patriarchs paraded their woe like it was some main event. Hamlet brooded, Romeo beat his chest, Willy went mad. Why didn’t they dance like the Perez women? Were they so above the fray? No billboards or sitcoms had declared my Perez cousins queen, and I now saw freedom in this. No false thrones, just the shitstorm of life. Grab a shovel and sing a work song. Build a throne that’s real.

Another word I’ve added to “the list” is “conversation,” as in “We need to have a national conversation about_________.” This is employed by the left to mean “You need to listen to me use the word ‘diversity’ for an hour.” The right employs obnoxious terms as well—“libtard,” “snowflake,” etc.—but because they can be applied to me personally it seems babyish to ban them. I’ve outlawed “meds,” “bestie,” “bucket list,” “dysfunctional,” “expat,” “cab-sav,” and the verb “do” when used in a restaurant, as in “I’ll do the snails on cinnamon toast.” “Ugh,” Ronnie agrees. “Do!—that’s the worst.” “My new thing,” I told her, “is to look at the menu and say, ‘I’d like to purchase the veal chop.’” A lot of our outlawed terms were invented by black people and then picked up by whites, who held on to them way past their expiration date. “My bad,” for example, and “I’ve got your back” and “You go, girlfriend.” They’re the verbal equivalents of sitcom grandmothers high-fiving one another, and on hearing them, I wince and feel ashamed of my entire race.

Blonde movie stars in the 1950s seem to have been pretty much divided between breathy bombshells (Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield) and slim, elegant swans (Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint). Producers didn’t really know what to do with Judy Holliday, a brilliant, versatile actress who simply didn’t fit into any easy category. Though she left behind a handful of delightful films, one can’t help feeling a sense of waste that her gifts were not better handled by Hollywood (or, for that matter, by Broadway). Perhaps, like Lucille Ball, Judy Holliday would have blossomed with a really good sitcom; but, unlike Lucy, she never got one.

There is a monotony to time in the air. Consistent air quality and temperature, limited collection of sounds, circumscribed range of motion for the passengers. Some people thrive within these restrictions and relax in the sky in a way they rarely do at home. They have powered down their phones and packed their computers in their luggage; they delight in being unreachable, and read novels, or giggle at sitcoms on the in-seat monitor.

Democracy is popular because of the illusion of choice and participation it provides, but when you live in a society in which most people’s knowledge of the world extends as far as sports, sitcoms, reality shows, and celebrity gossip, democracy becomes a very dangerous idea. Until people are properly educated and informed, instead of indoctrinated to be ignorant mindless consumers, democracy is nothing more than a clever tool used by the ruling class to subjugate the rest of us.

Normally, the newsfeeds didn’t interrupt everyone’s interactive sitcoms and soap operas unless something really major had happened. Like the outbreak of some new killer virus, or another major city vanishing in a mushroom cloud. Big stuff like that.

the terrible irony is that when our current job turns out to provide neither much money nor much fun, we think we can solve the problem by getting a better job. So it goes on: an endless cycle, a miserable set-up, as satirized brilliantly in the UK sitcom The Office.

The creators took each of us out for lunch, too, to get to know us, so they could incorporate some aspects of our real personalities into the show. At my lunch I said two things: one, that even though I considered myself not unattractive, I had terrible luck with women and that my relationships tended toward the disastrous; and two, that I was not comfortable in any silence at all—I have to break any such moment with a joke. And this became a built-in excuse for Chandler Bing to be funny—perfect for a sitcom—and Chandler wasn’t much good with women, either (as he shouts at Janice as she leaves his apartment, “I’ve scared ya; I’ve said too much; I’m awkward and hopeless and desperate for love!”). But think of a better character for a sitcom: someone who is uncomfortable in silence and has to break the silence with a joke.

After watching Donald Trump on C-Span the other day, one can see it being easy to be convinced that what the public sees, at least from the press coverage, is just a bit of “reality television” spilling over into real life. His performance at the gathering was reminiscent of what may have happened had Archie Bunker walked out of the cartoon world of the television sitcom and went to speak at posh affair filled with the wax museum of Washington politicos and the buzzard-esque scowls of the press. All eyes fixed on the performer giving yet another exhibition of theatrical prowess.

Thus is the defining characteristic of gay millennials: we straddle the pre-Glee and post-Glee worlds. We went to high school when faggot wasn’t even considered an F-word, when being a lesbian meant boys just didn’t want you, when being nonbinary wasn’t even a remote option. We grew up without queer characters in our cartoons or Nickelodeon or Disney or TGIF sitcoms. We were raised in homophobia, came of age as the world changed around us, and are raising children in an age where it’s never been easier to be same-sex parents. We’re both lucky and jealous. As the state of gay evolved culturally and politically, we were old enough to see it and process it and not take it for granted–old enough to know what the world was like without it. Despite the success of Drag Race, the existence of lesbian Christmas rom-coms, and openly transgender Oscar nominees, we haven’t moved on from the trauma of growing up in a culture that hates us. We don’t move on from trauma, really. We can’t really leave it in the past. It becomes a part of us, and we move forward with it. For LGBTQ+ millennials, our pride is couched in painful memories of a culture repulsed and frightened by queerness. That makes us skittish. It makes us loud. It makes us fear that all this progress, all this tolerance , all of Billy Porter's red carpet looks can vanish as quickly as it all appeared.

The Office had the idea that the comedy was behavioral. The stories weren’t joke driven. The comedy focused on human behavior.

once the couple gets together there isn’t a lot of obvious story material. It is harder to find stories between a couple once they’ve had the resolution of coming together like that.

If TV sitcoms idealized the American suburbs of the 1960s, the works of the artistic elite disparaged them ceaselessly, then and now. The songs of Pete Seeger, novels like Revolutionary Road, the stories of John Cheever, movies like Pleasantville and American Beauty, television series like Mad Men: in all of them, that long-ago land of lawns and houses is depicted as a country of stultifying conformity and cultural emptiness, sexual hypocrisy, alcoholism, and spiritual despair. Privilege murders the senses there, the creatives tell us. Gender roles strangle freedom. Family life turns the heart of adventure to ashes. There’s bigotry and gossip and dangerous liaisons behind every closed door. Oh, the soul, the human soul! In the suburbs of fiction, she is forever dying. But

As she hung up on her end, she actually fanned herself with her hand, something she’d assumed people only did in TV commercials and bad sitcoms. And then she couldn’t hold it in. Bursting up from her workstation, she ran around her house like a crazy person, making a bizarre kind of eeeee noise as she completed the circuit back to her desk. At which point there might have been some pirouetting.

It's not like anyone said anything that's memorable, or wise, or acute; it's more a mood thing. For the first time in my life I felt as though I'm in an episode of thirtysomethibng rather than an episode of... of... of some sitcom that hasn't been made yet about three guys who work in a record shop and talk about sandwich fillings an sax solos all day, and I love it. And I know thirtysomethibng is soppy and cliche'd and American and naff, I can see that. But when you're sitting in a one-bedroom flat in Crouch End and your business is going down the toilet and your girlfriend's gone off with the guy from the flat upstairs, a starring role in a real-life episode of thirtysomethibng, with all the kids and marriages and jobs and barbecues and k.d. lang CDs that this implies, seems more than one could possibly ask of life.

To Evelyn our relationship is yellow and blue, but to me it’s a gray place, most of it blacked out, bombed, footage from the film in my head is endless shots of stone and any language heard is utterly foreign, the sound flickering away over new images: blood pouring from automated tellers, women giving birth through their assholes, embryos frozen or scrambled (which is it?), nuclear warheads, billions of dollars, the total destruction of the world, someone gets beaten up, someone else dies, sometimes bloodlessly, more often mostly by rifle shot, assassinations, comas, life played out as a sitcom, a blank canvas that reconfigures itself into a soap opera. It’s an isolation ward that serves only to expose my own severely impaired capacity to feel. I am at its center, out of season, and no one ever asks me for any identification.

billionaire’s death. After all, the people of Planet Earth had other concerns. The ongoing energy crisis. Catastrophic climate change. Widespread famine, poverty, and disease. Half a dozen wars. You know: “dogs and cats living together … mass hysteria!” Normally, the newsfeeds didn’t interrupt everyone’s interactive sitcoms and soap operas unless something really major had happened. Like the outbreak of some new killer virus, or another major

During slavery they made us hate ourselves for being black as if it was a “Curse” because of the “Curse of Canaan” story.  So as we got older it was the norm to love our slavemasters children.  We watched our children get sold into slavery and we watched them starve.  We nursed their babies while our babies died.  We took care of the master’s house chores and the master’s family while our family was in turmoil.  We watched their children go off to school while our children died in the streets.  We learned to love the image of a “White Saviour” because we were taught that black skin was “ugly” and a “curse”.   We went from watching cartoons with white princesses and princes to watching T.V. sitcoms where whites dominated the cast.  As a result we wanted our hair to look “straight” like the Princesses we saw on T.V. or the girl that was liked by all the boys.  This mental brainwashing was “key” in the process of erasing our “true identity”.

Riding Conflict with the Breath        •  Bring yourself to a place of restful awareness.        •  Let every thought float by like a dream, mirage, or an old and cancelled sitcom.        •  Inhale all of the negativity and stress of the difficulty at hand—whatever the current source of conflict, anger, fear, and tribulation.        •  Breathe deep, inhale, and hoover it up like you’re vacuuming dark clouds. Take it in and then let it dissolve in the inner luminosity of your infinite, radiant, empty nature of mind.        •  Exhale fully. Breathe out love, forgiveness, understanding, loving-kindness, empathic compassion, and life-giving healing energy.        •  Direct this positive breath specifically to perceived obstacle-creators and troublemakers. Poor humans . . . generating their own bad karma and sorrow, seeking happiness and fulfillment in all the wrong places!        •  Simply breathe in and out. Let the natural flow wash away and re-harmonize all obscurations on the windshield of your inner “iye.

Their management and regulation of our lives spans the total spectrum of American experience, from their obtuse Imperial Measurement System, to their irregularity-strangled English language. From their lobbyist-ruled government bureaucracy, to their consumer-oriented religious holidays like Christmas. From their brainless professional sports jocks cast as heroes, to their anorexic supermodels warping the concept of beauty. These are the people who made sugary colas more important that water; fast food more important than health; television sitcoms more important than reading literature. They made smoking a joint in your home a crime; going out in public without your hair tinted an embarrassment; and accidentally carrying a half-filled bottle of baby formula on an airplane a terrorist act. Do you realize 85 percent of Americans still say 'God bless you' after someone sneezes? And that 'In God We Trust' is on every single dollar in circulation? Or that 'One nation under God' is recited everyday in the Pledge of Allegiance by millions of impressionable kids?

In lots of ways, television purveys and enables dreams, and most of these dreams involve some sort of transcendence of average daily life. The modes of presentation that work best for TV—stuff like “action,” with shoot-outs and car wrecks, or the rapid-fire “collage” of commercials, news, and music videos, or the “hysteria” of prime-time soap and sitcom with broad gestures, high voices, too much laughter—are unsubtle in their whispers that, somewhere, life is quicker, denser, more interesting, more… well, lively than contemporary life as Joe Briefcase knows it.

The doctrinal system, which produces what we call “propaganda” when discussing enemies, has two distinct targets. One target is what’s sometimes called the “political class,” the roughly 20% of the population that’s relatively educated, more or less articulate, playing some role in decision-making. Their acceptance of doctrine is crucial, because they’re in a position to design and implement policy. Then there’s the other 80% or so of the population. These are Lippmann’s “spectators of action,” whom he referred to as the “bewildered herd.” They are supposed to follow orders and keep out of the way of the important people. They’re the target of the real mass media: the tabloids, the sitcoms, the Super Bowl and so on. These sectors of the doctrinal system serve to divert the unwashed masses and reinforce the basic social values: passivity, submissiveness to authority, the overriding virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or imagined enemies, etc. The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It’s unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what’s happening in the world. In fact, it’s undesirable—if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it.

Is it wrong to bring my new convictions to the set?” I asked myself. “Should I keep them wrapped up inside, letting business be business? After all, TV isn’t real. A sitcom is just a story. And the stories aren’t real. The characters aren’t real, either.” Now I sounded like a crazy person, talking to myself in my dressing room. I knew Mike Seaver wasn’t me and I wasn’t him, but viewers didn’t seem to know the difference. To them, the Seavers existed. If Mike took drugs, kids would assume it was okay to take drugs—all because Mike was cool and someone to follow. I didn’t want to blow it. That would be my nightmare. I desperately wanted to do the right thing in a no-win situation.

Lexi Leffer, the lion king of the group, went first. Little Beckett Hayes, whom Toby had known since she was four, named two TV stars. Lexi chose the obvious one, the star of a teen sitcom with the swoop of hair that fell over his eyes. Toby was disappointed but not surprised. He could have told you that Lexi Leffer’s soul was made of plastic. It was Hannah’s turn next. He knew he should walk away and give her privacy, but he couldn’t move. Lexi had to ask her. It was between two boys whose names weren’t familiar to Toby. When Lexi said them, Beckett said, “Ooooooh!” and Hannah screeched, “That’s impossible!” “You have to answer, upon penalty of…” “Of what?” Hannah asked. “On penalty of…” She thought. “…having to call each boy and ask him how his day was.

I can see myself acquiring bad habits from living here. My little house is equipped with a TV, and I've watched a lot this week. At home I seldom switch on before 'The Nine O'Clock News', and usually it's later than that, for an arts documentary or a film. This week I've been watching TV while eating my solitary dinner, and leaving it on afterwards because when I switched it off the silence seemed so deathly, and I can't stand listening to music on my tinny transistor radio. I've seen all kinds of programmes I never normally watch, soaps and sitcoms and police series, consuming them steadily and indiscriminately like a child eating its way through a bag of mixed sweets. For simple mindless distraction you can't beat early evening television. No scene lasts more than thirty seconds, and the stories jump from character so fast that you hardly notice how cardboard-thin they are.

Nonconformity is an affront to those in the mainstream. Our impulse is to dismiss this lifestyle, create reasons why it can’t work, why it doesn’t even warrant consideration. Why not? Living outdoors is cheap and can be afforded by a half year of marginal employment. They can’t buy things that most of us have, but what they lose in possessions, they gain in freedom. In Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, lead character Larry returns from the First World War and declares that he would like to “loaf.”23 The term “loafing” inadequately describes the life he would spend traveling, studying, searching for meaning, and even laboring. Larry meets with the disapproval of peers and would-be mentors: “Common sense assured…that if you wanted to get on in this world, you must accept its conventions, and not to do what everybody else did clearly pointed to instability.” Larry had an inheritance that enabled him to live modestly and pursue his dreams. Larry’s acquaintances didn’t fear the consequences of his failure; they feared his failure to conform. I’m no maverick. Upon leaving college I dove into the workforce, eager to have my own stuff and a job to pay for it. Parents approved, bosses gave raises, and my friends could relate. The approval, the comforts, the commitments wound themselves around me like invisible threads. When my life stayed the course, I wouldn’t even feel them binding. Then I would waiver enough to sense the growing entrapment, the taming of my life in which I had been complicit. Working a nine-to-five job took more energy than I had expected, leaving less time to pursue diverse interests. I grew to detest the statement “I am a…” with the sentence completed by an occupational title. Self-help books emphasize “defining priorities” and “staying focused,” euphemisms for specialization and stifling spontaneity. Our vision becomes so narrow that risk is trying a new brand of cereal, and adventure is watching a new sitcom. Over time I have elevated my opinion of nonconformity nearly to the level of an obligation. We should have a bias toward doing activities that we don’t normally do to keep loose the moorings of society. Hiking the AT is “pointless.” What life is not “pointless”? Is it not pointless to work paycheck to paycheck just to conform? Hiking the AT before joining the workforce was an opportunity not taken. Doing it in retirement would be sensible; doing it at this time in my life is abnormal, and therein lay the appeal. I want to make my life less ordinary.

Well, I think people should be able to live in a society where they can exercise these kinds of internal drives and develop their capacities freely instead of being forced into the narrow range of options that are available to most people in the world now. And by that, I mean not only options that are objectively available, but also options that are subjectively available―like, how are people allowed to think, how are they able to think? Remember, there are all kinds of ways of thinking that are cut off from us in our society―not because we're incapable of them, but because various blockages have been developed and imposed to prevent people from thinking in those ways. That's what indoctrination is about in the first place, in fact―and I don't mean somebody giving you lectures: sitcoms on television, sports that you watch, every aspect of the culture implicitly involves an expression of what a "proper" life and a "proper" set of values are, and that's all indoctrination. So I think what has to happen is, other options have to be opened up to people―both subjectively, and in fact concretely: meaning you can do something about them without great suffering. And that's one of the main purposes of socialism, I think: to reach a point where people have the opportunity to decide freely for themselves what their needs are, and not just have the "choices" forced on them by some arbitrary system of power.

Another can do the activity for you; even enjoyment itself can be outsourced. The common example given by Žižek is the laugh track that occurs in most comedic sit-coms (now, sadly a dying form of entertainment with streaming services superseding network television), but the idea is that the television show is fully equipped with a canned laughter which then laughs at the point in the show when the actors make a funny remark. The point is not that the audience laughs along with the canned laughter, but that after a long day at work when you are tired, the canned laughter does the laughing for you. You are relieved of the need to act, and you imagine that there is a real person somewhere laughing at the joke in your place. Ideology functions in this gap, because the reality is that canned laughter is just a machine recording of laughter and there are no real people who are actually laughing. Žižek’s thesis is that this creates a “subject supposed to believe'' that there is someone out there doing the work that we are not doing. In instances when we give to charities we want to believe that the money is going to a good cause and that the problem of say, hunger in Africa, is being resolved by our donation. Not by the person donating the money, but by someone else who will allegedly act on our behalf and put in the work necessary for consumerism to continue unabated. Consumers can remain docile, or even active in their own hedonistic desires. Interpassivity implies that a decentered subject has emerged, where even the innermost desires of the subject can be externalized.