Humour and repetition are in an interesting relationship. Humour depends on that moment when an unexpected incongruous thought surprises us – repetition depends on presenting again what has already been brought forward. Yet jokes often have repetitive structures and catchphrases occur again and again. The apparent tension between the new and the repeated are nowhere better explored than in the American sitcom with a laugh track, a genre of television comedy that is both full of humour and full of repetition. Although both elements are integral to this type of Telecinematic Discourse, the role repetition plays for humour in sitcoms has not previously been fully explored.

In this book, a random sample of such US sitcom episodes with a laugh track – the first and second episodes of Anger Management, Better with you, The McCarthys, Retired at 35, Romantically Challenged, See Dad Run, Sullivan & Son and Undateable – are explored for the repetitive patterns their humour follows. From the microscopic analysis of the individual word that appears twice, to the composition of individual instances of humour, to scenes and to the structure of the narrative of the entire episode, this study discusses repetitive phenomena on different levels of language, taking into account the multimodal and layered context of television viewing as a communicative setting, and in so doing explores the four C’s of sitcom humour: Constitutive, Cohesive, Constructional and Communicative repetition. These functions of repetition are approached based on an incongruity-resolution approach to sitcom humour and informed by the detailed discourse analytic study and discussion of many examples from the data.