“And That’s Why You Always Leave a Note!”: Music as Comedic Element in the First Season of the Television Show Arrested Development

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the underexamined role of music in the American situation comedy Arrested Development. Encompassing the entire first season, analysis concentrates on musical tropes contributing meaning to visual or dialogic elements to create a comedic whole. Music, whether newly composed or pre-existing, has a number of specific comedic functions in the show. It can portray funny characters, Orientalize places and concepts, lampoon serious situations, comment on action like a Greek chorus, allude to cultural phenomena, and even reach outside a scene to remark meta-comically. Discussion of cues is thus divided into six categories of musical humor: rendering characters’ musical personalities, comic Othering, comic seriousness, snarky commentary with pop-song lyrics, hidden cultural references, and ambiguity between diegetic and nondiegetic music. Categories presented here are not meant to seem exhaustive or mutually exclusive; another author would opt for a different taxonomy. Nevertheless, any other taxonomy would have to reflect multiple concrete comic functions beyond merely setting moods or providing scene transitions. The complexity of visual and textual humor is matched by an equally rich and textured musical world. The fact that this is a recorded television comedy that can be played over and over again allows for incredible subtlety and multivalence in the humor. As quirky, unpredictable, and fresh as the other modalities of humor, David Schwartz’s musical impulses, from the subliminal to the ridiculing, are essential to the totality of comedy in Arrested Development and its overall feel. Mitchell Hurwitz’s show would be inconceivable without Schwartz’s idiosyncratic work.