“Kids, you may be wondering how many of these stories I’m telling you are true. It’s a fair question.” – The birth of humour through the rebirth of the narrative in How I Met

Abstract

How I Met your Mother (CBS, 2005-2014) is an American sitcom in which Future Ted (the Ted Mosby of 2030) retrospectively tells his two children the story of how he met their mother. It has been described as an innovative sitcom that relies on sophisticated, inventive narrative techniques, both on the audio and the visual channels. The complexity of the narration arises from the unreliability of the narrator as well as time manipulation, among other elements. This paper focuses on the link between the use of innovative techniques to narrate the story – more specifically the repetition of a narrative by an unreliable narrator – and the creation of humour. Particular attention is given to two episodes in which the same story is repeated and reborn each time: The Mermaid Theory (HIMYM 6x11), in which future Ted cannot recall events properly and retells the same story again and again, trying to get it right, and The Ashtray (HIMYM 8x17), in which Future Ted provides embedded narratives, which turn out to be the same story told from three different points of view.