Multilingual Humour in Sitcoms

The need to communicate that different communities experience while inhabiting the same geographical area due to migration, travel or commerce results in ‘language contact’ (Brown et al. 2014: 147). In today’s globalised world, language contact has exponentially increased, and many societies nowadays include people that often speak two or more languages. !is phenomenon is generally described as bi- or multilingualism (Tucker 2001: 333). Like any phenomenon that is an inherent part of human life and history, multilingualism has often been portrayed in literary and non-literary texts.1 Shakespeare’s work may come to mind when thinking of literary texts that feature an extensive use of multilingualism for both comic and non-comic purposes (Delabastita 2002: 303). Other well-known examples are Anthony Burgess’s use of Russian in A Clockwork Orange or Umberto Eco’s !e Name of the Rose, where Latin is a key feature of the storyline (Grutman 2011: 183). Likewise, multilingualism has consistently been part of audiovisual productions. As Dwyer (2005: 295) points out, “!e exotic lure of the foreign, indicated through geographic, cultural and/or linguistic markers, in many ways represents the backbone of the cinema industry and […] has done so since its inception”. Besides, the rapid changes in the multifaceted twenty-first-century mediascape have certainly brought this phenomenon to the fore. Whether they work for traditional media (cinema and TV) or streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Video, and Hulu, scriptwriters and producers have been allowed to create new and complex audiovisual content that attempts to capture the present, heterogeneous linguistic reality (Dore 2019a: 227, 2019b: 53). Multilingualism has become a constant feature of much AV content, encompassing different genres, such as fantasy, science fiction, mystery, crime, and so on (Beseghi 2019: 149). Consequently, it has also sparked a good deal of interest in academia over the years (see, for instance, Hodson 2014). Considering all the above, the main focus of this chapter is multilingualism and how it is exploited as a rhetorical device for humorous purposes in situation comedies (henceforth, sitcoms). To do so, this chapter includes a discussion of the key concepts and terminology pertaining to multilingualism and sitcoms as an AV genre (Sect. 2). !is is followed by a critical review of the literature and related theories (Sect. 3) and an analysis of some case studies that help to elucidate the points set forth (Sect. 4). !e concluding summary (Sect. 5) offers suggestions for future lines of research on this intriguing phenomenon.