Breaking the Fourth Wall: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Meta-Comedy Strategies in British and American Sitcoms

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-541-6_75How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Fourth Wall; Meta-Comedy; Sitcom; Audience Engagement; Cross-Cultural Comparison

Abstract

Meta-comedy scholarship is disproportionately oriented toward postmodern texts, lacking a systematic exploration of the reflexive practices of Western classical sitcoms and their cross-cultural differences. The present paper examines how Fawlty Towers (1975-1979) and Friends (1994-2004) achieve different modes of audience engagement by implementing divergent fourth wall-breaking strategies. Three-tier coding (performance, narrative, and reception) was conducted on the complete series of Fawlty Towers and the first 30 stratified episodes of Friends followed rigorous textual analysis procedures that involved intercoder consistency checking (Krippendorff’s Alpha >0.80). Results showed that Fawlty Towers primarily employed performance-based meta-comedy strategies (64.2% of coded instances), utilizing Brechtian alienation techniques that elicited predominantly cognitive engagement (70% of audience responses) from viewers. In contrast, Friends emphasized narrative-based strategies (50.9% of coded instances), generating primarily affective engagement (60% of audience responses) from its audience. A chi-square test revealed significant distributional differences between the two series in performance strategies (χ²=42.16, p 0.01) and narrative strategies (χ²=31.84, p<0.01). The current study develops replicable meta-comedy analytical frameworks and advances Brechtian theory in the field of television studies.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Kai Wang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/02/26
TI  - Breaking the Fourth Wall: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Meta-Comedy Strategies in British and American Sitcoms
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 5th International Conference on Culture, Design and Social Development (CDSD 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 683
EP  - 692
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-541-6_75
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-541-6_75
ID  - Wang2026
ER  -