SITCOM / SITUATIONAL COMEDY

Situational comedy or sitcom is an episode based performance delivered via radio or television. The basis of sitcom is that the main characters will maintain their situation from episode to episode. Often this will take the form of family life, the workplace or cover a group of friends.

The advent of radio facilitated the nurturing of a regular audience which would return to a program time after time. This allowed writers to develop characters more fully and return to them time after time in each episode so that listeners would become familiar with them. Sitcom humour is very usually event driven; often with a recurring theme throughout the series, and will sometimes see the inclusion of running gags throughout the lifetime of the show.

A normal situational comedy template will see the characters remains fairly static between episodes. Each episode will portray a series of events that will usually be resolved by the end of the show; rarely will a previous episode be referenced in the ongoing future. Some rarer sitcoms will develop a story arc to be played out over a longer period of time, and characters may evolve slowly with the it.

It is estimated that situational comedy is the single largest slice of the television industry outside that of current affairs and news. Certain sitcom shows have taken on cult followings and have been playing for several years. Some actors have spent their entire working lives playing a single character in a long running sitcom.