A Quick Trip Into Multicam Sitcoms
When Comedy and Tragedy (Almost) Collide in Kevin Can Fuck Himself
Tags: #KevinCanFuckHimself #TVShows #Series #AbusiveRelationships #GenderRoles
*Disclaimer: this blog post was written while partially delulu when suffering from a cold; you get what you get.*
Kevin Can Fuck Himself (AMC 2021-22) asks the audience a seemingly simple question: what happens when the laugh track cuts off and the characters move off screen in a sitcom? Do the jokes ever end? What would the reality behind the bright lights and canned laughter look like?
In traditional sitcom style, the show follows married couple Kevin and Alison, and their friends and family hanging around the couple’s house navigating everyday life events. While the sitcom lights are on, the scenes are framed in a typical fun-loving humorous way. Yet, once Alison leaves the scene, the mood changes and we enter the world of a dark TV drama, hit with the ‘reality’ that Kevin’s actions – like his sitcom predecessors – are problematic at best, and abusive at worst. What the show demonstrates is how sitcoms tend to normalise abusive behaviour under a false premise of humour and jokes. The differences between the bright sitcom and the grungy drama reflect how Kevin and Alison view the world, but also how the audience is meant to view their relationship and by extension harmful gender-dynamics that minimise violence against women.
Riddled with covert and overt sexism (Singh et al 2021), sitcoms communicate harmful patriarchal behavioral norms (Rhodes and Ellithorpe 2016; Walsh et al 2010). The nuclear family is constructed of women, particularly mothers, as ‘fun-killers’ and men as long-suffering, lovable jokesters (Simmons and Rich 2013). As the show unfolds, the audience encounters a wealth of TV tropes that romanticize harmful behaviors that have traditionally been disguised as ‘funny’. Yet, when Alison steps out of the scene, taking the other characters out of their sitcom setting, we are confronted with the reality of these actions and how they play out in the real world. As the show progresses, these snippets of sitcom become increasingly uncomfortable to watch, as the audience knows the gritty, dark reality of Alison’s world is coming, along with the consequences of Kevin’s goofball actions.
The easiest trope to spot in any sitcom is the contrast between the average, everyday, somewhat overweight husband and his fit, attractive wife. In line with other sitcoms, men are allowed to be ‘average’ looking and have diverse body types. Yet, women are expected to adhere to strict beauty standards. This norm perpetuates the idea that a woman's value is tied to her appearance while a man's worth is based on their personality like charm and humour. When sitcoms adhere to the trope, they diminish women’s complexity.
If the roles were reversed, Alison would not just be fat-shamed but the audience would also question how an ‘ugly’ woman could pull a conventionally attractive man. The problem here is not that anyone can be attracted to anyone else, regardless of how society would group those individuals. The reversal implicitly holds women to a higher standard and shames women by suggesting that a mismatch in attractiveness is only acceptable in one direction.
Additionally, women’s roles revolve around pleasing the men in their lives – the husbands, the fathers, the brothers, the male friends. Women’s jobs are seen as expendable, perpetuating the idea that her personal ambitions should take a backseat to his. Kevin even goes as far as to sabotage Alison’s career when it draws her attention away from serving his needs. He, as a result, undermined her agency and reinforces the idea that her purpose is to exist in his service, reducing her value to domestic servitude.
At the same time, even this role of housewife is not spared from criticism. To Kevin’s contempt, Alison is seen as constantly scolding or complaining about Kevin, especially whenever he indulges in irresponsible behavior. Her responses are framed as overreactions, rather than taking her concerns seriously. Her role becomes about upholding social norms, making sure bills are paid, the house is in order, food is on the table, while he gets to shed responsibility and still be the ‘fun’ partner. In most of the sitcom scenes, Alison is cooking or cleaning, bringing something to Kevin or picking up after him while Kevin is simultaneously blaming her for not being ‘fun’.
Alongside this, Kevin is weaponizing his incompetence for Alison to take responsibility for both of them. He pretends to be incapable of performing basic tasks, leaving her to pick up the slack. This is not simply about laziness; it is a deliberate and learned behaviour used to burden women. With Alison being his personal assistant, housekeeper, and chef, Kevin demonstrates his unwillingness to meaningfully contribute to their relationship. It is not that Kevin is incapable of doing these tasks; in one episode he joins a chili cook-off. However, the cooking is a competition with the male neighbors to reinforce his superiority amongst men; it is not for Alison.
Most strikingly, similar to other sitcom husbands, Kevin’s abusive behaviors towards Alison are treated as jokes for his father and male friends. While the behavior is addressed in Alison’s dramatic scenes, the other men in the sitcom never call Kevin on his mistreatment of his wife. Instead, instances of belittling or manipulating Alison are presented as comedic, leaving harmful behavior unchallenged. By turning abusive behavior into a ‘joke’, sitcoms trivialise violence against women, making it more difficult for people to recognise or address abusive dynamics.
In fact, Kevin is rarely held accountable for his actions in the first season and the men around him remain apathetic to Alison’s experiences. The consequences are usually left to Alison to clean up or set back in order. This reinforces the idea that men’s bad behavior is a normal part of relationships; men’s actions are above scrutiny while women must shoulder the burden of enduring. This narrative implies that victim-survivors’ experiences are not significant and do not warrant justice or a resolution, minimizing the harm and normalizing the abuse.
The premise of the show is brilliant, the execution does lack. While the sitcom and the drama are an intriguing narrative tool, they often do not interact enough to truly be a seamless story. There is Kevin’s sitcom world that occasionally infects Alison’s drama, but Alison rarely affects Kevin. The lack of a reciprocal influence diminishes Alison’s agency and makes her struggles feel disconnected from Kevin’s sitcom privilege. This weakens the show’s ability to fully critique the systems of power that protect Kevin and other men.
There was an opportunity that was missed to truly shed light on the pervasive issue of violence against women. A seamless back and forth between Alison’s and Kevin’s perspective, following narrative threads as they move across the two genres. The show could have had Kevin’s sitcom slowly unravel as Alison’s drama sequences ripple into his life. His laugh tracks could have faltered; his friends could have started to question his behavior; and the tone of his world could have darkened as her reality asserted itself. Yet, this did not happen. To be completely fair, we only watched season one; the cringe was too strong with the sitcom.
Sources
Rhodes, N., Ellithorpe, M.E. (2016). Laughing at Risk: Sitcom Laugh Tracks Communicate Norms for Behavior. Media Psychology, 19(3), 359-380.
Simmons, J., Rich, L.E. (2013). Feminism Ain’t Funny: Woman as “Fun-Killer,” Mother as Monster in the American Sitcom. Advances in Journalism and Communication, 1(1), 1-12.
Singh, S., Anand, T., Chowdhury, A.G., Waseem, Z. (2021). ”Hold on honey, men at work”: A semi-supervised approach to detecting sexism in sitcoms. Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Student Research Workshop, 180–185.
Walsh, K.R., Fursich, E., Jefferson, B.S. (2010). Beauty and the Patriarchal Beast: Gender Role Portrayals in Sitcoms Featuring Mismatched Couples. Journal of Popular Film and Television, 36(3), 123-132.
Image Credit
Kevin Can F Himself [@KevinCanFHimself] (2021). “Home sweet fucking home. #KevinCanFHimself” 26 May, https://www.instagram.com/p/CPWl0iMpkoQ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==