Multilingual Humour in Sitcoms

This chapter provides an overview of multilingualism and how this feature can be used as a rhetorical device and exploited for humorous purposes in situation comedies, or sitcoms. Before discussing relevant examples taken from the most successful sitcoms of the last three decades, certain key concepts and terminology pertaining to multilingualism are explained and debated. This is followed by a critical review of the literature and theories relating to language variation and its many functions within multimodal products. The sitcom as a genre is also explained and questioned in light of the continuous changes and developments in audiovisual content. It is, therefore, proposed that a larger set of text types should probably be defined as sitcoms. Finally, future lines of research on multilingual humour on screen are offered.