Film Quarterly’s webinar series showcasing the best in recent film and media studies publications continued on June 22nd with a conversation between Page Views editor Bruno Guaraná and Philip Scepanski (Marist College) about his new book Tragedy Plus Time: National Trauma and Television Comedy (University of Texas Press, 2021), introduced by FQ editor-in-chief B. Ruby Rich.
Season 8 of Friends (NBC, 1994–2004) included an episode in which Monica and Chandler, en route to their honeymoon, are detained by TSA agents after Chandler mocks a TSA sign forbidding jokes about bombs. By the time the episode aired on October 11, 2001, however, the scene had been excised, its humor nullified in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The scene’s later resurrection as bonus material for a DVD box set—and, inevitably, on video and social-media platforms—reflects the sort of time-sensitive relationship between comedy and context that Philip Scepanski explores in Tragedy Plus Time: National Trauma and Television Comedy.