Comic Interventions: passion and the men's movement in the situation comedy, Home Improvement

Abstract

In the 1990s, the media has taken an important role in the interrogations and negotiations of masculinity that constitute a politics of masculinity. To this end, individual products may be seen in terms of discourses constitutive of the politics of masculinity interrogating themselves in ways which reveal inherent tensions and contradictions. At the same time they also reveal much about cultural attributes of masculinity which seem to resist redefinition and renegotiation. The American situation comedy, Home Improvement, is taken as an example of these media political processes, the reflexive potential of its comic form being directed at the 'spiritualist' strand of the men's movement in the late twentieth century. The paper shows that by re-locating the discourse in the world of work, about which the 'spiritualists' have little to say, and then using comedy to interrogate the subject positioning and discursively constructed relations of the discourse, the sitcom raises problematic areas of authenticity and male passion, areas which also link the concerns of the 'spiritualists' to other cultural constructions of masculinity and other discourses and areas in the politics of masculinity.