Type: Journal article
Status: Forthcoming (in press)
Publication: New Review of Film & Television Studies 23, no. 2 (2025)
Abstract: Scholars of early television comedy in the United States have noted the prevalence of self-reflexivity among the sitcoms and variety programs of the period, typically understood as a set of formal and presentational techniques that call attention to the apparatus and artifice of broadcast transmission. But one characteristic of early television sitcom that warrants further consideration as distinct from other forms of self-reflexivity is the use of parafiction, a narrative mode that blurs the distinction of reality and fiction by depicting performers playing versions of themselves. The program that made the most extensive and effective use of parafiction in early television is The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1950–1958), a sitcom depicting the fictionalised domestic lives of real-life comedy and life partners George Burns and Gracie Allen. The show borrows heavily from Burns and Allen’s real lives, makes frequent reference to their careers in vaudeville and radio comedy, and further calls attention to its own self-reflexivity through a narrative device in which Burns’s character literally steps out of the studio set and addresses the home audience directly. Both within and beyond the diegesis of the show Burns and Allen maintained elaborate parafictional personas that largely defined their public images for the entirety of their careers, and which continue to influence their popular conception even now, decades after their deaths. This article examines Burns and Allen’s self-presentations on stage and screen, as well as traces of their “real” lives as found in memoirs, biographies, and interviews, to demystify their complex personas and argue that they represent perhaps the earliest and most significant example of parafictional persona in American screen comedy.