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David Konstan

SOURCE: "The Premises of Comedy: Functions of Dramatic Space in an Ancient and Modern Art Form," in Journal of Popular Film and Television, Vol. 15, No. 4, Winter, 1988, pp. 180-90.

[In the following essay, Konstan focuses on such workplace situation comedies as Barney Miller and Archie Bunker's Place in a discussion of the function of place in classical Greek New Comedy and the television comedy series.]

In this paper, I shall examine the function of place, in the sense of the scene or site of dramatic action, in two comic traditions, one ancient, the other recent and still lively.¹ These traditions are the so-called New Comedy of the classical Greek dramatists and their Roman imitators or adapters and the contemporary situation comedies of television. Comparison of sitcoms with the classical form will help reveal the ways in which the settings of comedy, both ancient and modern, are specific to their respective cultures, and to the ideological problematics that they generate.

The contrast between the place where the comedies of Menander, Plautus, and Terence were located and the scene of TV comedy is extreme. Classical drama in general did not represent interior scenes. The action took place out-of-doors, and in New Comedy normally on a city street, whether in Athens or another Greek town, that ran before the façades of two or three houses. The houses were drawn on the wall, or skene, behind the stage, in which doors gave access to the dressing area. Characters entered and exited by means of the doors, if their business took them inside one of the houses, or else by the wings if there were downtown or country visits. Remote events, or whatever happened indoors, might be reported by characters, but they were not enacted directly on stage.²

Television sitcoms are dramas of interiors. There is usually a single indoor set in which all or most of the action occurs, either the parlor of a home, or else an office, eatery, or other situation where the characters primarily interact. (Gilligan 's Island, located on a desert island, is the kind of exception that proves the rule; it has an ancient analogue in Plautus' Rudens, situated on a barren seashore.) As many commentators have remarked, television as a medium is best suited to small, intimate scenes rather than to panoramic vistas.³ It is good at closeups, and the backdrop is generally sparse, schematic, and familiar, the kind of set that is characteristic of soap operas. Partly, this is a function of the small screen and low resolution of TV, as opposed to the cinema; partly too, of budgetary constraints, where weekly episodes must be filmed, though an inexpensive outdoor set of the antique kind is quite feasible, and is employed, interestingly, on the children's show Sesame Street.⁴ In addition, the interior scene corresponds to the circumstances of the viewer, who alone, or among a small, intimate group clustered in the living room, will find his or her own reflection in the settings of domestic comedies or in the family-like context of a local pub or the collegial environment of professional associates.

Correspondingly, the open-air theaters of the Greeks and Romans favored public scenes exposed to the gaze of the entire community gathered for the festival occasion of the drama. But I should like to argue further that the communal character of the Greek theater and the public locus of the dramatic action have to do also with the nature of Greek social life, or, more particularly, with the arena projected by Greek city-state ideology as the place where the tensions of that ideology were situated and dramatically explored.⁵ Greek ideology emphasized the interaction among the several households that comprised the city-state. In turn, it has been suggested that the private setting of TV drama, which is in many ways the heir of parlor plays of Chekhov and Ibsen, is a manifestation of the relative isolation of the family in modern capitalist society.⁶ The family or affiliated group is treated, or perhaps it is better to say fantasized, as the primary scene of personal identity and fulfillment.⁷

In what follows, I shall expand briefly upon the characteristics of Greek society and ideology that find their image and their problematic in the street setting of Greco-Roman New Comedy, then discuss how modern ideology and social arrangements find expression in the enclosed spaces of the TV sitcoms.⁸ After this general and more or less abstract preamble, I shall turn to specific plays or episodes, and indicate how the dramatic issue in each may be understood as a potential displacement, a breach in the confines of the privileged space where action and interaction occur, and, correspondingly, how the denouement serves to restabilize the public space in ancient comedy, the private space in modern, as the proper place for the narrative to occur. Finally, I shall consider how this restabilization is itself an ideological strategy by which the drama seeks to exclude or deny, though never with perfect success, the presence of another order of social relations that impinges upon and interferes with the communal vision of the ancient city-state, or, in the case of the sitcoms, with the ideal of a natural, familial association that is safe and secure from the competitive and impersonal relations of production and exchange in the outside world.

With respect to sitcoms, I shall concentrate particularly on the type that is located in what may be described as a place of business rather than in a family setting. The locales for such sitcoms may be, for example, a detectives' room, as in Barney Miller, or a tavern, as in Archie Bunker's Place. A hospital is the setting in House Calls; a radio station in WKRP in Cincinnati; there is the news-room in The Mary Tyler Moore Show; a fire station in the short-lived A Star in the Family; the dispatcher's headquarters in Taxi; law offices in The Associates, which had a run of a little over a month; a school in Welcome Back Kotier and The Facts of Life (if education counts as business); an unemployment office in Calluci's Dept. (another failure); restaurants or bars again in Alice and in Cheers; another police station in Carter Country; the New York Garment District in Pins and Needles; and, perhaps at the margins of the type, a prison (On the Rocks), a military detention camp (Hogan's Heroes), a submarine (Operation Petticoat), and, in general, the army, beginning way back with Sergeant Bilko and continuing strong with M*A*S*H and Private Benjamin—though it may be, as Horace Newcomb has suggested, that the military comedies constitute a subgenre of their own.⁹

Partly, this restriction in the choice of sitcoms is a matter of convenience, but it is also motivated by two special considerations. First, comedies situated in a place of business, that is, a public locale, are a better analogue than strictly domestic comedy to the civic drama of antiquity. In the office or tavern, there is a wide variety of social relations including, but not limited to, conflict between generations and tensions within marriage. The second reason for focusing on sitcoms of the workplace goes beyond the specific scope of this paper. TV sitcoms are, I believe, the first comic genre to make the work-place the primary locus of the drama (there is a precedent of sorts in some of the cinema comedies of the 1930s, but the emphasis on the place of business was never so exclusive). It is one of the special contributions of TV sitcoms to the history of drama and has been pretty well ignored by critics, so far as I know. But it is, I think, of great importance. To take only a single aspect, everyone in the workplace is, by definition, self-supporting. Thus, whatever the conventional stereotyping of women's roles, for instance, as domestic or subordinate, there will always be at least the implicit suggestion that relations between the sexes are based on mutual economic independence. This is new, and it justifies special attention, even if I must reserve a full discussion of this aspect for a future occasion.

Of the hundreds and hundreds of comedies produced in Athens in the fourth and third centuries B.C., when New Comedy flourished, we possess only one in its entirety, the Dyscolus or Grouch of Menander, who was the best esteemed playwright in the genre. But we know from the testimony of Plutarch and Ovid, for example, that all of Menander's comedies—he wrote more than 100 of them—involved romantic passion, or er s.¹⁰ Now, love has perhaps a natural comic appeal, but its pervasiveness, not only in the work of Menander but in New Comedy generally, invites interpretation. Indeed, precisely because of its omnipresence in the genre, it seems, the function of passion has rarely been questioned or analyzed; most often, it is simply noted as a convention. What fascination was exercised by the numberless young lovers scheming to outwit stern fathers or bombastic rivals for the possession of their sweethearts?

To approach an answer to this question, we may consider the image of society in ancient literature and oratory, and more especially in Aristotle's Politics, which is a kind of dictionary of middle-class common sense views on the polis. Aristotle observes that "the first form of association . . . is . . . the family"¹¹; next comes the village; and, at the highest level, the city-state, which is also a natural entity, Aristotle says, "because it is the completion of associations existing by nature" (1.2.8). Aristotle adds that the polis is logically prior to the household in the same way that the body is logically prior to a foot or a hand (1.2.13). The household itself, or oikos, was understood to include, under the authority of its male head, his wife, children, slaves, and property—for ownership of property in the polis was, on the whole, both a right and a requirement of citizenship. The several households out of which the city was constituted as a natural association aspired to an ideal of economic autonomy or autarky, though they were related to one another by a certain elementary division of labor and exchange of goods, as well as by common responsibilities for the defense of their territory and the management of the state and its possessions abroad. Finally, the households were related by connubial exchange as the basis of social reproduction. Such, in broad outline, is the ancient society's own theory of itself. In Menander's time, and for the century and a half preceding, citizens might marry only citizens at Athens, and citizens were the offspring of citizen parents on both sides, mother's and father's. Athens was, then, a closed descent group. Marriage took place beyond the household but within the set of households that constituted the polis.

We may construe the marriage code as a set of bonds uniting the individual households out of which the ancient society seemed to be, and in part really was, made up. In a society of this sort, characterized by an elaborated ideology of kinship and by a relatively low level of the division of labor—in Durkheim's terminology, by mechanical rather than organic solidarity—that allowed at least the fiction or ideal of the household as a self-sufficient unit, marriage ties were an important expression of social cohesion. They identified the society as a community, excluding those who were outside the citizen body and binding into the social texture the potentially independent family estates. The interest in love and marriage, from this point of view, related not so much to the individual home as a locus of unity and security as to the production of links among the households, the creation or expression of a social space defined by their integration into a polis.

The impulse toward integration was, we may say, formulated as eros, the desire that drove beyond the bounds of the autonomous home and pressed for union with another. That the object of eros was commonly a woman ineligible as a partner in marriage, a slave or foreigner, for instance, means that the passionate basis of connubial association was perceived as a natural rather than as a social impulse: It was the task of comedy to reveal the social form that governs the natural impulse (itself, of course, a socially constructed category) by arranging the notorious recognition scenes and other coincidences by which the citizen credentials of the parties involved were confirmed. And the space in which the revelation of the socialized er s took place, the scene of the verification of the community of citizen households, was precisely the public street onto which the individual houses faced, which might seem to unite them physically, like a cord through beads, into the social structure characteristic of the polis and its ideology.

Modern urban society seems at the opposite extreme from the ancient city-state in respect to individual autarky. Households make no pretense of self-sufficiency, despite the vogue of suburban gardening. Their implication in the universal division of labor, where each unit is bound by relations of exchange to all others, is taken for granted. According to the ideal conception of the modern economy, the office or workplace is constituted simply as a nodal point in the system of production, where people are related as participants in a common enterprise based not on personal feelings, much less kinship, but on standards of performance. At work, people of different ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation cooperate and coexist for the sake of a service or a product, that is, for the job. At the same time, every enclosed space is treated as a nucleus of personal relations in the sitcoms, a refuge of the affections encapsulated or encysted within the impersonal order of economic life.

In modern society, the family is the model for every sort of unmediated solidarity (witness the formulas of sisterhood and brotherhood in feminist, labor, and religious movements), and the group at work or in the tavern is conceived of as a domestic unit. The representation of relations in the workplace as a kind of family is in part a reflex of the same impulse that inspires identification within ethnic groups, fraternal orders, and other forms of association based on likeness or essential solidarity, the collective sense of unity over and against the functional and provisional form of association based on performance and competition.¹² It is a response to the radical equality of the market whose essence, like that of the commodity, is to respect no qualities at all, an equality that reduces all personal attributes to time and competence on the job, which is to say, to labor power.

The private sphere of home or office—to the extent that the office is treated as a private sphere—stands against the world outside, while, in ancient drama, the interior domain was held within the social nexus by liaisons and contracts managed on public streets. In the modern sitcoms, rationalized forms of life press upon the personal and must be repeatedly expelled or controlled. In both genres alike, interior and exterior exist in a dynamic stasis, and the space of the drama is continually recorroborated through the narrative tactics of the plot. Space is not the passive locus of dramatic action; it is defined by the social relations it contains or excludes, challenged or defended as a symbol of social structure.

With this bare sketch of a theory of place in comedy ancient and modern, and the way in which it encodes social tensions that are enacted and resolved in the drama, I shall turn to the examination of a few specific comedies in which the defense of place is thematic. Clearly, my choices are not disinterested, and not every drama, I am sure, can be shown to operate in these terms. But through specific cases it is, I think, possible to see how the defense of the dramatic space is a strategy of comedy, more or less foregrounded or thematized as the complex of issues in the story demands, but always, or almost always, there in the deep structure of the narrative.

Plautus' Aulularia is about a man who has discovered a buried pot of gold in his house and, as a result, dotes on his hoard to the exclusion of all other concerns. From miserliness, he refuses to provide a dowry for his daughter, and thus removes himself simultaneously from both processes of exchange that constituted the ancient city-state, according to its own ideology: commerce and kinship. His wealth is stolen when he removes it from the temple of Good Faith, which he distrusts, to a wild precinct sacred to the woodland god Silvanus, beyond the city walls. As it happens, his daughter is pregnant as a result of rape (there is thus a double assault on the old man's substance); but the youth who violated her has a sudden change of heart and accepts the girl in marriage, at the same time restoring the stolen treasure, which he had recovered from his slave. The play ends with the marriage agreement, and no doubt the miser's gold, or part of it, made up the dowry (the last act of the Aulularia is mutilated).¹³

Let us consider the spatial dynamics of the play. It begins with the miser driving his much-abused maid out of the house, suspicious that she may be snooping out his treasure. He dashes inside again to check on his gold, and announces to the audience the wish that he might never leave his house at all. His reason for emerging now is that a public donation is to be distributed, and the miser fears that his absence may draw attention to himself and suggest that he is harboring a secret hoard. The ironies here are evident: The miser's obsession is such that entering public space even to increase his private wealth is odious, and his sole motive for doing so is to insure the inviolability of his cache. When he returns, he is reluctantly drawn into dialogue with a rich neighbor, who requests his daughter's hand in marriage. The miser interrupts the discourse twice by rushing into his house before he finally departs for the market to purchase provisions for the wedding feast. On his return, he discovers a cook at work inside his home, commissioned by the would-be groom next door, and he expels the cook violently.

The interior of the house, then, is represented as the locus of the miser's fixation and of his social isolation. By charging repeatedly into his house, he disrupts the marriage negotiations—albeit vain ones, since the young assailant rather than the rich neighbor is destined for the girl—and thus the bond between his household and another that can integrate him morally, economically, and by kinship into the civic community. The negotiations take place in the street, the area between the houses of the father and the suitor. The interior is thus presented as the potential negation of the solidarity of civic relations. Correspondingly, the miser's venture outside the city limits leaves him at the mercy of mere theft (itself an analogue of the rape that occurred, as often in New Comedy, during a ritual festival). Only in the civic spaces of the city, on its public ways, are the transactions that symbolize its communal identity carried out. Against the withdrawal of the miser into his private domain and his sally into the wilderness outside the city walls, the street that passes by the housefronts is reasserted as the proper place of citizen association.

In an episode of Archie Bunker's Place—the successor to All in the Family—one of the regular patrons of the tavern, a ne'er-do-well called Barney with a nincompoop's charm, enjoys a winning streak at the races, which, he believes, is due to an elaborate number system. As a result, Barney is addicted. In his initial flush of wealth, he enters the tavern sporting bright new clothes and affecting expensive and sophisticated tastes (e.g., for caviar) to the indignation of his old friends who express their resentment of his big-spender manner by ridiculing his pretensions. At the same time, Barney is asked to pay up arrears on his tab. This demand points, on the one hand, to Archie's distrust of his friend's unearned and chancy fortune: He wants the bill cleared before Barney's luck changes. On the other hand, Archie's demand is a kind of ostracism, a refusal to extend the credit that makes relations of good faith among the tavern crowd. The breach of solidarity represented by the gambler's new style, his racy, grand homme demeanor jars with the cautious morality of the tavern's proprietors and regular customers. The breach between Barney and the rest is both widened and symbolized when he roots for the outof-town team in a basketball game on the bar's TV. Barney has money on the opponents of the home team, and he is guided by interest, not by sentimental loyalties. The local favorites win, but Barney is treated as a traitor, and he takes refuge from his friends' scorn in a neighboring topless establishment where, as Barney puts it, the owner has class.

We can easily see what defines the social space of Archie Bunker's tavern. Its membership is bound by shared symbols, such as support for the home team and by commitment to a kind of moral economy, in E. P. Thompson's phrase, an economy that allows credit to temporarily hard-up patrons but draws the line at subsidizing high-risk speculation that seeks gain without reference to the symbols of group solidarity. With the mention of the topless bar, there is a suggestion of libertinism that fills out the picture of easy virtue, loose money, and the casual trade of old for new acquaintances that Barney has bought into.

Outside Archie's place is a network of vice in love and finance, against which Archie and his friends endorse the traditional wisdom of business, to be sure, but a less aggressive sort of business that leaves room for solidarity based on personal rapport, the petit-bourgeois nostalgia for a natural community of values. In the sitcom model, where the interior space represents an enclave within the free-for-all competition of the market place, rather than, as in the ancient comedy, a withdrawal from the public arena of civic reciprocity, the hoarder of the latter form is restyled as a gambler. Rather than secreting his wealth in a private location, he risks it constantly in the mysterious, foreign, and shady world of big gains and sudden losses. Whereas the miser feared to leave his house, the bettor's transactions draw him outside, until the tavern becomes merely a base, and his new style and aspirations make of him a stranger. It may be worth noting that halfway between the miser and the gambler, in the history of the fetishization of money, is the usurer, and in Molière's L'Avare, based in large part on the Aulularia, Harpagon guards his money-chest indoors, but negotiates his loans—as it happens, with his own son—on a public street; correspondingly, marriage for the usurer is conceived as a means of making a profit.

In the episode of Archie Bunker's Place, as in Plautus' Aulularia, greed is humbled through loss, which prepares the outcast for his reintegration into the community. Barney's winning streak comes to an end, and he is left penniless and heavily in debt to loan sharks. In his pride he refuses charity, and goes into hiding when the mob comes to collect. Archie feigns unconcern, in part through that stubborn selfishness that lends the character his charm, but finally as a lesson by intimidation on the wages of gambling. Archie finds Barney at home, sharing a last can of food with his dog before hanging himself.¹⁴ Barney, in his desperation, at last begs for help; Archie treats himself to a beer from Barney's refrigerator, signifying the restoration of solidarity by the publican's version of communion, and offers to make good on Barney's debt just as the gangsters enter with a hearty "buona sera." The leader offers a wry sermon on how the underworld exists to instruct mankind on the advantages of sober self-control.

There is a peculiar and disturbing symmetry between the morality of Archie's tavern society and that of the stylized mafiosi. The cohesion of Archie's world is guaranteed by the danger of transactions outside. At the same time, Archie and his partner, who also helps to bail out Barney by insuring payment of the loans, implicitly sanction the idea that the fault for falling into debt lies with the borrower and not with the conditions of the loan. This is the same lesson, though more brutal, that is taught when Archie demands payment of Barney's bill at the bar. There is a continuity between the principles of commerce inside and outside the tavern, despite the show of mutuality among friends. Moreover, the ethnic stereotyping of the gangsters gives to their association the same appearance of natural loyalty that the community of friends in the tavern enjoys, albeit the latter is a product of sentiment rather than of national affiliation. The image of the mafiosi imports into the drama a hint of the dangers associated with a purely essentialist mode of solidarity, a mode that is represented by Archie's prejudices as well (when Barney, still ahead, contemplates retiring on his new riches to Florida, Archie quips that he will probably start betting on how many Cubans will make it swimming to the United States' shores; earlier, Barney's display of wealth evokes for Archie the image of an Arab sheikh). But despite a certain blurring of the lines between the inner and outer domains, an overall opposition subsists between the personal society of companions and the harsh transactions of the greater world. Against the cold greed and inexorable reprisals of the game of cash and credit, the space of the tavern is defended as the locus of natural fellowship. Even when the gangsters come into Archie's place in search of Barney, they do not step forward from the threshold, as though acknowledging the perimeter of a sanctuary.

Although Cubans and Arabs, and perhaps Italians as well, signify the presence or penetration within the society of foreign populations, remote lands—the territories beyond the boundaries of the nation state—are not figured in our episode of Archie Bunker's Place as the scene of lawlessness or presocial behavior. The very category of nationality presupposes social entities beyond the borders, as opposed to the grove of Silvanus in Plautus' play, where the combination of wilderness and sacred space suggests an antithesis with civil society as such. The streets themselves, in the sitcom, are the arena in which theft, or at least extortion, prevails; as does sexual violation too, intimidated here in the reference to the topless bar with its suggestion of commercial sex, a suggestion that is further developed in the sitcom we shall consider presently. It is not that the city streets in Archie Bunker's Place are precisely analogous to the territory beyond the city walls in the Aulularia, for extortion and the gambling practices upon which it is parasitical are systematic and quasi-social structures. This is, on one level, the meaning of their incorporation into the society, as this is represented by the public order (or disorder) of the neighborhood outside. There is a difference, that is, between plunder and racketeering; the latter is contained within the perimeters of the community. The prominent place of gangsterism in the sitcom is, I am suggesting, part of the implicit social vision of the episode (and of the series as well) in which the space outside the tavern represents in a socially determinate form one pole of the opposition between solidarity and aggression. It is precisely at the moment when accumulation seems violent and unproductive, and yet at the same time systematic, that the world outside one's private space—a world at once alien and yet one's own—will be a place of threat and danger.¹⁵

There is a hint, as we have seen, in the episode from Archie Bunker's Place of a different locale, also private but diminished: the home of Barney, which he shares with his dog. It serves in this instance more as a symbol of Barney's isolation from the society of the tavern than as a place of refuge, or as a symbolic space in its own right, but the possibility of a ternary spatial structure is, of course, available to comic drama. I shall discuss two examples, one from antiquity, the other from TV, in order to show that also in the case of such structures, space functions as a sign of ideological processes that are conditioned by the character of social formations.

In an episode from Barney Miller, a man in ecclesiastical habit enters the police station to report that a novice, who was being escorted with a group of boys to a rural monastery, is missing. The cleric belongs to a monastic order; he is not a priest, and responds irritably when addressed as Father rather than as Brother. The cause of his defensiveness is a barely disguised sense of inferiority, which is exposed by the tactless remark of a detective: Not everyone can make it as a priest. His anxiety for the boy betrays a streak of authoritarianism, which compensates for his sense of injury. The theme of oppressive paternalism emerges also among the detectives. When Officer Wojo, who is taking the monk's testimony, is interrupted, Captain Barney Miller intervenes, and is admonished for his officiousness. Wojo asserts that the men will never grow up and become good detectives if Barney intrudes upon their responsibilities. Abashed, Barney retreats to his office—the only private space in the squad room.

There is a symmetry between the structure of the monastic order and that of the detective force: both are fraternal associations, exclusively male, presided over by a paternal authority figure. The monastic life, however, is presented as escapist and repressive, escapist in its idyllic tranquility and detachment, a veritable golden age in the part wistful, part ironic description of Officer Harris, and repressive for the strain of moral coercion that is conspicuous in the monk's reaction to the runaway novice Joseph. Joseph, during his brief parole, fell in with a prostitute for whose attentions he was prepared to pay with a credit card lifted from the monk himself. At the end of the episode, Wojo, on his own initiative, grants Joseph, who has been rounded up along with the hooker, a day's reprieve from the monastic life by rigorously applying paperwork rules that delay his release, Barney Miller disapproves, but refrains from interfering.

Thus the monastery is represented as a realm from which desire is banished, holy but more than human in its rigors. The boy's own desire is at the mercy of a world where commerce rules all transactions, even those of the heart. Between is the society of the policemen, who acknowledge desire but enforce its restriction to contexts and practices that are deemed legitimate. At one point the prostitute draws the lines neatly: "I break laws, not commandments."

The prostitute, released without charges, is expelled to the streets. The monk departs for his retreat with his boys in tow, save Joseph, who remains with the detectives. Between the carnal attractions of the city outside and the spirituality of the religious order, the police station appears as a locus of humane association that is appropriate to its mission of containing illegal and exploitative commerce without aspiring to enforce subjective moral sanctity. To a certain extent, this mediate structure is modelled on the family, with Barney Miller as father and the other detectives as sons, like the monastic structure, as we have seen. But it is different from the monastic order in its functionality, which is reflected, for example, in the conditions of membership in the group. In fact, there is a novice of a kind among the detectives as well, in this case Officer Leavitt who serves as a part-time detective when need arises, but is otherwise assigned downstairs among the uniformed policemen. Leavitt's desire to be fully part of the detectives' group is the reverse of Joseph's reluctance. But Leavitt's eagerness and commitment are not sufficient; he must also demonstrate competence, and there must be an open position on the squad. Promotion on the force is not simply a reflex of the state of one's soul. It is determined by social constraints.

The authoritarian aspect of the hierarchy of the detectives' squad is modified further by the role of the old inspector whose lugubrious anticipations of his own death, combined with a paternal if slightly macabre display of affection for Barney Miller, reduce the captain to helpless confusion. The inspector's control over Barney is as much a personal matter as the privilege of rank. This mixing of the personal and the official, which, as we have seen, informs Barney's relationship to his men as well, defines the interior space of the sitcom. The workplace is both business-like and familial, marked off from the cold transactions of the streets and from the segregated communion of monastic withdrawal. It has about it the quality of a club—a men's club, more precisely—yet it is a public institution charged with enforcement of laws. The enclosed space of the detectives' room contains and asserts this complex of relations.

Such a structuring of relations, with one form privileged as the locus of mediation, shapes the narrative in certain plays of ancient New Comedy as well, with the difference that the scene of mediation is a public rather than a private space. A common pattern involves a hetaera, loosely an independent call girl. Her house has some of the moral irregularity that attaches to the streetwalker's occupation in the Barney Miller episode, allowing, of course, for the considerable difference between the ancient Greek and our own, post-Victorian attitudes to such a calling. The chief danger in the association with a hetaera, in comedy, at least, was financial, and a father feared more for his purse than for propriety when his son showed signs of passion for a woman of that sort. Whereas in marriage alliances wealth was put in social circulation, with meretricious love it was imagined that the resources of the ancestral estate poured endlessly into the lady's coffers like rivers into the ocean. In the city-state ideology, paying money to a hetaera removed wealth from the domain of social exchange just like buried treasure (or like donations to a temple, where, however, the consecration of wealth to a divinity gave special sanction to the sequestering).¹⁶

At the same time, the undifferentiated sensuality of the whorehouse could be valorized as a form of carnival communion, an ecstatic moment of union not entirely unconnected with rituals of collective identification in cult and festival. In Plautus' Bacchides, two women named Bacchis—the association with the rites of Dionysus is underscored by explicit puns and allusion-seduce into their establishment not only a pair of youths, but, in the finale, their fathers as well. The brothel thus has witty overtones of a ritual orgy, and is a symbol of all-round reconciliation (like the wedding feast at the end of the Dyscolus, which takes place inside a grotto sacred to Pan and the Nymphs). We may compare the drawing of a bedroom shade at the end of a movie, or, in the sitcom mode, a couple exiting from office or tavern with a significant glance backwards through the open door. The sexual intimacy of the house of the Bacchis twins mocks social and public norms, but it is also a symbol of solidarity, just as the spiritual monastic community of the Barney Miller episode serves in part as a metaphor for the familial solidarity of the detectives. Such unity may be valorized, but only as a temporary or special state. The primary scene of social relations remains the place on stage.

Plautus' Bacchides is based on two misunderstandings, the first accidental, the second contrived by an intriguing slave. In the first half of the play, a young man, infatuated with Bacchis, is jealous of his friend's attention to her, until he discovers that the object of his friend's passion is another lady of the same name. The confusion is dispelled and friendship between the youths restored: Nowhere in New Comedy is there a real and permanent rivalry between friends and fellow-citizens, and even the suggestion of such competition is rare. Thus, in the Bacchides, the association between citizen households is represented not through marriage ties but through the more diffuse bond of comradeship, the value of which was discussed extensively by Plato, Aristotle, and in literature generally.

Friendship is reasserted against the potentially divisive force of natural passions, or eros. The friendship between the two young men seems analogous to the idea of fraternity in sit-coms of the workplace. Just as the collegial association among the detectives in Barney Miller mediates between religious community and the commercial relations of the outside world, so the bond of friendship in the Bacchides stands between the formal conventions of exchange that are constitutive of the polis and the immediacy of ritual communion, here comically encoded as the experience of the brothel. Friendship, then, is to the public mode of the classical comedy what the familial model of the workplace is to the modem sitcom, the personalized aspect of formal social relations.

In the second half of the Bacchides, the youths inveigle money from one of the fathers, persuading the old man (on the advice of a clever slave) that his son has been caught with the wife of a mercenary soldier, and that his life is in danger unless he pays compensation. Fearful for his son, the father promptly surrenders the money. The sentimental solidarity of the father with his son, like the friendship between the two youths, personalizes the conventional and legal authority of the head of the house-hold. At the same time, it asserts the bond among respectable citizen families against the threat of the professional soldier, whose ties with the city-state community were relatively weak. Seduction of a married woman was not normally done in New Comedy; that it might be brought in even hypothetically, as here, in the case of a soldier suggests his distance from the code that obtains among the citizen body (compare also the trick played upon the mercenary in the Miles Gloriosas; in the Amphitryo, the seducer is a god, which is another matter).

We may sharpen the contrast between the values of public and private space in the two works under consideration, and also disclose more clearly the structuring function of social forms of exchange, by attending more specifically to the place of the women in each. We have seen that the prostitute in the Barney Miller episode is relegated to the streets, while the hetaerae in the Bacchides work out of a house, into which they draw their customers. In both situations, to be sure, the women make their bodies available for money; in both, the cash transaction is covered by at least the illusion of infatuation on the part of the buyers. Moreover, the commodification of sexual passion is equally a theme in each; and in each, again, the cash expended upon women is acquired by theft or trickery: It must be set loose from the normal process of economic circulation by a violation of the code of commerce. But the precise nature of the commerce, and consequently of its counter-image in the parallel market of prostitution, differs in the two contexts. That the novice Joseph uses a stolen credit card exposes the penetration of the modern credit system into both the brotherhood of the religious order, where by a comic anachronism it serves also to enable the monk to function without needing to handle ordinary lucre, and into the sublegal world of streetwalkers. The profession of prostitution is thereby assimilated to the fluid motion of value that is characteristic of modern capitalist exchange. However much the individual hooker may act as a private entrepreneur, she is part of a system, in much the way the loan sharks in the episode of Archie Bunker's Place function both as renegade profiteers and emblems of the risks of high finance.

There is a subordinate theme in the Barney Miller episode that I have so far neglected to discuss and that reveals further the ambiguous characterization of the urban street as the place of violence and desire. One officer, Dietrich by name, has drawn duty as a decoy. This entails walking the streets dressed as a woman, to trap would-be muggers and rapists. In this moment of life on the outside, sex is intimately attached to violence. The streets are the locus of arbitrary force or appropriation, like the wilderness or the sea in ancient (or renaissance) comic imagery. But Dietrich, who is eager to succeed at the assignment, cannot, despite his primping, present himself as a passably attractive female. His wish to do so, together with his failure, produce a brief burlesque on gender roles, but also intimate the detective's transgressive desire to operate in the arena of illicit passion. Because Dietrich is cast in the show as a kind of intellectual, with an encyclopedic knowledge of odd facts and an air of superiority, it is comically appropriate that he be the vehicle of a disguised urge to go slumming. More generally, however, the closed world of the police precinct is shown to be permeable by the lusty, if illicit, spirit of the city outside. In this respect, Dietrich's vulnerability, manifested in his preening transvestism, is not unlike the suceptibility of the two fathers in the Bacchides to the lures of the hetaerae. But, in Plautus' play, the attraction is open and aboveboard; in Barney Miller it is manifested in a displaced or repressed fashion.

For the detectives, the streets are the place where the lawless violence of the presocial world intersects with shady practices that image, and are tangential to, the commodified exchange of the market. This is the space against which the squad room is defined as lawful and communal simultaneously. In the ancient city-state, hetaerae too were in principle foreign: most commonly, in Athens, resident aliens or metics, who had special rights and privileges within the polis, but were excluded from citizenship. They are, thus, partially integrated into the city-state community. But, in the Bacchides, their mediate status is figured not by their association with the streets but rather with the removed space of the house. They represent not the universalization of commodity relations of modern capitalism but luxury items imported into the home. The eroticized dimension of Greek cultic life, as opposed to the delibidinized character of Christian monasticism, allows the interior space of the brothel to do service as a carnival domain: It is limited and contained, a place for special occasions. But their off-the-street position indicates as well, I would argue, that the hetaerae are not a metaphor for the real relations of the city-state, which are grounded in kinship, at least in the imagery of classical New Comedy. Once again, the topography of the comedies, ancient and modern, appears as socially constructed.

I shall conclude with one more illustration from a sitcom, in which the street is the scene of theft and the reversal of gender roles. It is a simple case, but is useful for the clarity with which the interior and exterior spaces are initially defined, then compromised by the action of the narrative, and finally reaffirmed, though not with complete success. An episode of the sitcom Alice opens with an attack upon Mel, the owner of the diner that is the location for the series. The mugger is an elderly woman who blackjacks Mel from behind. Mel pretends, in his embarrassment, that his attackers are several toughs, and is humiliated when the true villain is brought into the restaurant by a policeman. As Alice, a waitress for whom the show is named, comforts Mel, Vera, another waitress, has her purse stolen outside the restaurant. Mel comforts Vera by assuring her that money is not important, but when he discovers that her purse contained the restaurant's receipts for the previous two days he is furious. Jostled by a customer—not one of the regulars—on his way out, Mel feels for his wallet and finds it missing. Together with Vera and Alice, he assaults the fellow outside, recovers the wallet—or what he thinks is his wallet, until it is revealed that Mel had put his own wallet in the office safe. General consternation: The policeman returns with the battered customer; explanations are accepted, and all follow the poor man outside to press apologies upon him, along with hearty denunciations of the spirit of suspicion that led them to violence. A welldressed, elderly man inside, left alone at his table, locks the rest out, and proceeds to empty the till as Mel and the waitresses stare helplessly through the glass door.

The spatial structure is obvious. Inside is safe territory, opposed to theft and violence on the street outside. But public disorder affects the interior domain, and the victims become violent in turn. Their assault also occurs in the street in front of the restaurant. Only in the final scene are the valences of inside and outside reversed: The thief is secure within while the proprietor and his staff are locked out. The small-time personal establishment of the diner is permeable to the corruption of the outer world, but it seeks to retain the sense of trust that marks it as a haven of traditional values. This communal character is in part achieved by implicating Vera and Alice in robbing the innocent customer. Although the narrative makes it clear that the proceeds of the restaurant are Mel's alone, and that he cares more for his cash than his employees' welfare, their identification with him reasserts the bonding of the diner people against the perfidy of the outside world.

To point up the contrast between sitcoms and ancient New Comedy, we may compare the scene in Terence's Brothers in which a passionate young man, having abducted a slave-girl from a brothel, threatens the brothelkeeper on the threshold of his own establishment. It is a particularly violent scene for the genre, and one that has been introduced into the Menandrian model for the Brothers by Terence himself, according to the practice known anciently as contamination. The keeper is intimidated and withdraws, but not without threatening legal action for violence against a citizen. Save for its contribution to the characterization of the youth, the scene has no consequences in the drama. But the young man, who has stolen the girl not for his own sake but for his brother's, is later disclosed to have formed an irregular liaison with a citizen woman next door, who has borne his child. The play ends with the union of the two households through a double wedding—the youth's father is shamed into accepting the young lady's mother in marriage as well—arranged and consented to on stage. The offense against the brothel-keeper, which drives him out of the public space and back into his off-stage domain, is compensated for, in a sublimated way, by the regularization of citizen relations in the civic arena.

In A Grammar of Motives, Kenneth Burke cites "a tiny drama enacted in real life" to illustrate the way in which the scene may be shaped to an action.

The occasion: a committee-meeting. The setting: a group of committee members bunched about a desk in an office, after hours. Not far from the desk was a railing; but despite the crowding, ail the members were bunched about the chairman at the desk, inside the railing. . . . [A]s the discussion continued, one member quietly arose, and opened the gate in the railing. She picked up her coat, laid it across her arm, and stood waiting. A few minutes later, when there was a pause in the discussion, she asked for the floor. After being recognized by the chairman, she very haltingly, in embarrassment, announced with regret that she would have to resign from the committee.

Burke concludes: "She had strategically modified the arrangement of the scene in such a way that it implicitly (ambiguously) contained the quality of her act."¹⁷

This anecdote follows upon Burke's brilliant analysis of the spaces in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, the finale of O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, and other moments in drama. In and of itself, the little real-life episode is too bare of context to yield much more to further speculation. Were there other women on the committee? one is tempted to ask; is the barrier significant with respect to gender? Why is the woman so halting and embarrassed, when her action seems rhetorically so forceful? There is no way to tell. But in well-formed literary genres, which encode social patterns in their conventions, including conventions of scene or space, the relation between interior and exterior is not simply an abstract metaphor for belonging or exclusion, a sign of psychological isolation or community. Space is structured according to ideological commitments characteristic of an age or social formation: commitments that are informed by radical tensions, to be sure, or they would not be the stuff of drama, but which, all the same, have a certain stability. Comedy, in the tradition inaugurated by Greek New Comedy, is especially interesting to examine for the social structuring of its spatial and other elements, because it is the single most conservative literary form in the western tradition. Devices of plot and wit are remarkably consistent, and the formal connection between TV sitcoms and the plays of Menander has no parallel in, say, the history of tragedy, lyric, or the novel. The genre is, accordingly, a kind of laboratory model for revealing the way in which a social content inheres in apparently neutral structural relations.

I have attempted to reveal the content of the place of action in ancient comedy and modern sitcoms. Clearly, this content is not uniform in either genre. It is subject to various constructions and emphases; it may be set off against a single complementary domain or situated in a complex of alternative social spaces. But the location of ancient comedy in the public street, as against the interior scene of the sitcoms, seems a significant fact and not merely a matter of convention or a reflection of the difference between life in a Mediterranean town on the one hand and in a northern climate on the other. For all their staying power, conventions are generated and sustained by a relation to social life. Where public space was in antiquity perceived as a primary arena of social life, it has, in the comedies of television, come to seem impersonal and dangerous, the place where worship of money and the commodification of everything else reigns supreme. In such a world, the spaces that are cherished are havens of personal and sympathetic relations, even if they simultaneously serve the needs of the wider economy. In modern as in ancient comedy, talented writers constantly expand the range of meanings and symbols. But comparison of the two genres, despite the many signs of their continuity, suggests that history has transformed their premises.

NOTES

¹ The present paper is a much expanded version of a talk presented to the conference on Themes in Drama, on the topic "The Theatrical Space," held at the University of California at Riverside, 16-18 February 1985. On the popularity of situation comedies or sitcoms in the 1970s, it is enough to observe that they held twelve out of the top twenty places in the Nielsen ratings in 1978-79; Alex McNeil, Total Television: A Comprehensive Guide to Programming from 1948 to 1980 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980). After a brief slump in the early 1980s, it is clear that sitcoms again dominate TV programming.

² On ancient stage conventions, see Peter D. Arnott, The Ancient Greek and Roman Theatre (New York: Random House, 1971); Harold C. Baldry, "Theatre and Society in Greek and Roman Antiquity," in Drama and Society [Themes in Drama 1] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 1-21.

³ See, for example, Martin Esslin, "The Art of Television Drama," Boston Review, 9, No. 4 (August 1984), 12-14.

⁴ It is significant that this show represents poor, urban children at play; compare also the early sitcom The Goldbergs, with its characteristic scene of conversation through open windows, and the current British show Good Neighbors.

⁵ For a sensitive and scholarly analysis of the role of public space in ancient Greek life and the tendency to veil the private domain from view, see Paul A. Rahe, "The Primacy of Politics in Classical Greece," American Historical Review, 89 (1984), 265-293. Rahe's approach is indebted to that of Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), and differs substantially from my own in its frankly positive assessment of the Greek ideology. See also Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Neuwied: H. Luchterhand, 1962 [Politica, Vol. 4] and the discussion in Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (London: Verso, 1984), pp. 115-124. On setting as a social signifier, see Anne Ubersfeld, Lire le Théâtre (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1978), pp. 169-170, 188-189. That the semantic function of the setting is not usually invoked through explicit, figured oppositions is a feature of the realistic mode of New Comedy and the situation comedies, but it is no less effective for that; see Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), Ch. I, "Discourse, Figure," pp. 1-28.

⁶ See Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken, 1974), p. 27.

⁷ See Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977).

⁸ For a penetrating social analysis of a single sitcom series, see Robert Goldman, "Hegemony and Managed Critique in Prime-Time Television: A Critical Reading of 'Mork and Mindy,"' Theory and Society, 11 (1982), 363-388.

⁹ See Horace Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art (Garden City: Doubleday, 1974), pp. 1-52, for a discussion of TV genres.

¹⁰ Plutarch, fr. 134 Sandbach (Loeb Library); Ovid Amores 1.15.17-18. Ovid emphasizes the structural roles of the passionate youth, deceived father, and clever slave (cf. Ars Amatoria 3.332); contrast the rectangle described by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie for courtship in eighteenth-century southern France, in Love, Death and Money in the Pays d'Or, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: George Braziller, 1982).

¹¹Politics 1.2.5; the translation is that of Ernest Barker, The Politics of Aristotle (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1958).

¹² On the tension between the values of "home" and "work" in modern capitalist ideology, see Steve Barnett and Martin G. Silverman, Ideology and Everyday Life: Anthropology, Neomarxist Thought, and the Problem of Ideology and the Social Whole (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979), pp. 41-81. It is worth noting that the popular series such as Dallas, Falconcrest, and Dynasty represent an alternative tension of business and family values, here situated in the home (more often, mansion), where the corrosive effects of a competitive or performance-based ethos is exhibited. (I am indebted for this observation to my friend, Jonathan Haynes of Benington College.)

¹³ I have discussed the Aulularia in Roman Comedy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 33-46.

¹⁴ Focus on the society of pub or workplace often entails a corresponding reduction in the quality of home life; so too, in the new format, Archie's wife of All in the Family is deceased. In the 1970s, domestic sitcoms increasingly, indeed almost exclusively, featured families that were broken or irregular.

¹⁵ In an article on corporate crime entitled "White-Collar Crime Is Big Business," Mark Green and John F. Berry observe: "The criminologists downplay it. In the introduction to his influential book Thinking about Crime, James Q. Wilson writes that the public is correct in fearing crime in the streets more than crime in the suites because 'economic violators don't make difficult or impossible the maintenance of basic human communities'" (my emphasis). They go on to quote from an editorial in The Wall Street Journal: "It isn't very helpful to suggest that white-collar crime is a more serious threat. . . than predatory street crime, which inspires fear right across the board" The Nation, 240, No. 22, 8 June 1985, pp. 689, 704). Corporate crime, in these descriptions, occupies an unstable and ambiguous position between lawlessness, characterized by violence, and social behavior; in sitcoms, the streets are the site of this ambiguity. See also the poll reported in The New York Times, 9 June 1985, section 3, p. 1, indicating that 55 percent of those interviewed believed that American corporate executives are not honest.

¹⁶ See Laurence Kahn, Hermès passe ou les ambiguïtés de la communication (Paris: Maspero, 1978), pp. 70-71, on temple donations vs. the circulation of wealth.

¹⁷ Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969, orig. 1945), p. 11.