Dis-placing Laughter in 30 Rock. Beyond Corporate Comedy or Back to the Funny Fe-male’s Modern Roots
1The TV comedy show 30 Rock is currently celebrated for seizing positions of media establishment for the comedienne: Starred, written and produced by Tina Fey it features Liz Lemon as head writer of fictional TGS (= The Girly Show), modelled after Saturday Night Live (= SNL), an institution in American TV comedy, where Fey used to be head writer be-fore starting her own 30 Rock. That women have achieved celebrity status in the comic genre as both leading actresses and authors makes for the latest advancement in this area of popular culture. Old gender stereotypes aside, even beautiful ladies can be funny and in control. A story for Vanity Fair magazine investigates relations of power, beauty and comedic talent, displaying the “queens of comedy” (Stanley) on the cover: Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, draped as Greek goddesses with golden laurel wreaths.
230 Rock has invited a number of feminist readings, with some controversy about the main character Liz Lemon. Is she a toned down version of the “unruly woman” (Rowe) with her sharp tongue and love of food? “Unruly” sums up the disruptive qualities “too fat, too funny, too noisy, too old, too rebellious” (19) that allow women the power of visibility by “fashioning – as subject, as author, as artist – a spectacle of themselves” (11) Is Liz the third wave feminist as corporate girl or Tina Fey’s tongue-in-cheek comment on that type? The following appraisal does not take the character approach, instead the show’s internal differen-tiation of comic modes will be analysed. As it turns out, 30 Rock is structurally concerned with the gendered “genres of laughter” and their ties to a history of feminism and humour. To pursue this line of argument it will become necessary at some point to introduce a more theoretical understanding of comic communication in modern society, different both from the Bakhtinian carnivalesque and from postmodern fictional irony.
330 Rock consists of three distinct, yet overlapping comic settings: first and foremost, the workplace “inside NBC”; secondly TGS, a live sketch comedy show produced in those fictional NBC-studios; and finally a special kind of interaction between Liz Lemon and her boss Jack Donaghy. This non-romantic couple is not only at the spotlight of the program’s critical acclaim, with awards for both actors, it also marks crucial scenes, in which a dis-placement of laughter occurs that surprisingly takes the possibilities of female humour to the next historical level. Before this is studied and explored theoretically, the genres of NBC and TGS need to be described as well as subjected to gender criticism.
4The major part of 30 Rock’s comedy works satirically and is drawn from situations or characters inside the big broadcasting company, located at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Especially in the first two seasons many of the episode storylines are topical, dealing with media policies such as product placement (Season 1, Episode 5, “Jack-Tor”) as well as broader issues like homeland security (Season 2, Episode 6, “Somebody To Love”) or environmental initiatives (Season 2, Episode 5, “Greenzo”): Jack Donaghy, leading executive at NBC and subdivision manager of General Electrics, introduces a green superman character that is supposed to pro-mote GE products with “saving the earth”-messages, but starts to take his mission so seriously that, counter to Donaghy’s intentions, he is no longer “business-friendly”. However, any regu-lar viewer will note that Liz Lemon is equally involved in those politics, be it as head of writ-ing staff or privately when she suspects her neighbour Raheem of planning a terrorist attack when in fact he and his brother are practicing to take part in the TV competition “The Ameri-can Race” (= The Amazing Race), a pun on anti-Arabic racism. Generally, 30 Rock seems careful to balance workplace and private life scenes for each, Liz and Jack, so as not to simply reproduce gender tendencies for either home or business. Lemon’s boss has been going through more Sex and the City-like dating stories than his employee.
5Satire in 30 Rock explores the whole range of political correctness, feminism being only one of the sources. In “Believe in the Stars” (Season 3, Episode 2) TGS actors Tracy Jordan and Jenna Maroney cross-dress in their respective social roles to find out who suffers more from discrimination: black male or white female? Their mediator supplies the hybridis-ing third option by lamenting his own trouble: “Do you know how hard it is to be an over-weight transgender in this country?” Tracy and Jenna, over-the-top caricatures of gender and ethnic stereotypes, share the levelling trait of (almost) complete celebrity self-centredness. They take advantage of star-struck, overeager Kenneth, the page. This religiously fundamen-talist naïve from the South completes the line of topical characters.