Between the end of the 1940s and the end of the millennium, hundreds of comedies have been released in North American prime time. This critical history of television comedy explores the changing forms of its production influenced by technological, economic, industrial, and aesthetic transformations.
Live television, produced in New York, the series made on film, the irresistible rise of the brief moral tale of benign comedy, which we know as sitcom, the normalization of canned laughter and the recording system with three cameras and live audiences, the satirical countercultural comedy of the British label, the social comedy of the seventies or the current boom in cartoons, represent significant stages in this path. After a tour of the great moments of television comedy that created a school, the author also explores what will be the alternatives for the future in a horizon saturated with specialized channels, digitized and torn apart by audiences and economic resources.