In the thesis, I explore what kind of humor prevails in the sitcom series 3rd Rock from the Sun. I first dive into the theories of humor and comedy and define the sitcoms series. Even though the humor is subjective, I find that humor theories exist. The three key ones are superiority theory, incongruity theory, and relief theory. I also find that certain conditions are necessary for the existence of comedy and there are rules for comedy to work. To analyze a random episode of the aforementioned series, I then choose the typology of Jucketal, Bellman, and Varan, who created their own for analyzing sitcoms from the typologies of Berger and Buijzen and Valkenburg. They define four categories (language, identity, logic and action) and a total of 22 techniques. Based on this, I analyze each joke in all the scenes and come to the conclusion that none of the categories stand out. The language category is a bit more outstanding, which is logical, since a large part of the sitcom series are based on dialogue and the exchange of replicas. The least used techniques are from the identity category, which is character-based. That is perhaps a surprising fact, as characters are a very large and visible part of the sitcom series.
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