“I Was Just Doing a Little Joke There”: Irony and the Paradoxes of the Sitcom in The Office [Note 1. I would be remiss if I did not thank ...]

A BOUT HALFWAY THROUGH THE SECOND-SEASON FINALE OF THE defunct Fox sitcom Arrested Development, the viewer is confronted with the following situation: teenager George Michael Bluth is attempting to break up with his girlfriend, Ann. As he tries to do so, however, Ann—a blossoming member of the Religious Right —invites him to come along to protest the premiere of a racy film: “I want to get the whole gang from church together: we’re going to picket those bastards” (“Righteous Brothers”). Upon hearing Ann swear, George Michael enters a brief flashback, which the viewer is guided through by the show’s narrator, Ron Howard: “George Michael had only heard Ann swear once before: when he joined some of her youth group to protest the home of Marc Cherry, executive producer of the hit show Desperate Housewives.” The youth group is shown standing outside Cherry’s house, holding signs with such slogans as “God doesn’t care about ratings” and chanting, “There’s nothing funny about fornication!” As the scene unfolds, Cherry appears in the window and stares perplexedly at the protesters. After a moment’s pause, he opens the window and shouts, “It’s a satire!” An exasperated Cherry then disappears back inside, an emotionally charged Ann plants a kiss on George Michael, and the flashback ends. Although Arrested Development is not the central text at hand here, this scene gets at the layers of narrative and irony present in postmillennial sitcoms—layers central to this article’s investigation. In “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” David Foster