As the cast of Friends reunite, Donatien Grau wonders what the once-glorified genre can teach us about life versus fiction, and how it might be best to embrace both.

Artwork by Francesco Vezzoli

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Definition is the first problem when one is to comment on sitcoms. What is a sitcom? Where do the boundaries lie? If we are to say that&nbsp;<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108778/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Friends</a>&nbsp;is the absolute sitcom, one is left to wonder whether it constitutes a genre of its own.

The etymology of the word may explain its meaning. Sitcom is short for &ldquo;situation comedy.&rdquo; Therefore, a comic system related to a situation. The word &ldquo;situation&rdquo; is a difficult one to explain: it may be described as a display of things and people within a location. As such, the sitcom would be the comic display of things and people within a specific location. The term &ldquo;location&rdquo; also offers its challenges: is the location a specific set, one that never changes&mdash;as was the case in the early, original situation comedies of the 1950s and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficiel.co.uk/Fashion/fashion-trends-spring-summer-mini-skirt-brigitte-bardot" rel="noopener" target="_blank">&lsquo;60s</a>? Or is the location a city, for example, as in the more modern, genre-bending&nbsp;<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098749/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Beverly Hills 90210</a>? What happens if the location is central, but the action of the program happens in many other places&mdash; as occurs on the recent hit French&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficielmonaco.com/woman/bridgerton-star-phoebe-dynevor-is-breaking-through" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Netflix</a>&nbsp;show&nbsp;Call my Agent!

Another difficulty in identifying what a sitcom might mean lies in the birth of the genre: sitcoms are considered an American cultural juggernaut. By the &lsquo;80s, everybody was watching American comedies around the world. Matthew Perry and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/pop-culture/jennifer-aniston-new-instagram-friends-throwback" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Jennifer Aniston</a><a href="https://www.lofficiel.co.uk/Fashion/jennifer-aniston-brad-pitt-movies-instagram-best-style-look">&nbsp;</a>were our friends. Those of us pre-<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/gen-z-y2k-millennial-90s-fashion-nostalgia" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Generation Z</a><a href="https://www.lofficiel.co.uk/Fashion/oversize-look-pants-style-fashion-generation-z-tik-tok">&nbsp;</a>got to know them as contemporaries, and now the younger generation streams them. One could even say that the deep knowledge of sitcoms separates those in the old world&mdash;of one American exported culture, in which a few series dominated the globe&mdash;and the inhabitants of the new world, who see&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/skinny-jeans-out-gen-z-millennials-tiktok" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Millennials</a><a href="https://www.lofficiel.co.uk/pop-culture/tiktok-stars-gen-z-fashion">&nbsp;</a>as already too old, and who don&rsquo;t need to experience sitcoms as a door into a life&mdash;because for them, life itself is a sitcom.&nbsp;

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<img src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/39109/1620942864-1sitcomsrachel.jpg?auto=format%2Ccompress" />

&ldquo;The Reunion (Rachel on Tinder),&rdquo; 2021, #francescovezzoli

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What made a sitcom such was the appearance of regular characters in a location that became as familiar to us as the one in which we live. The apartments in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/film-tv/friends-reunion-trailer-release" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Friends</a>&nbsp;became as much a refuge to us as our own homes, whether we lived in New York, Paris,&nbsp;Tokyo, Delhi, Lagos, or Los Angeles At a time in which we ceased to have a home base&mdash;traveling around the world for the most privileged of us, discovering worlds on the Internet for all of us&mdash;there was a reassuring sense of residence in the sitcoms. These people had a home. They had a life. They lived, they loved, they were friends. The Americanness of this utopia&mdash;the utopia of social felicity&mdash;spread beyond the globalization of culture, and entered its localization: Brazil, India, France, Italy, Spain, and Latin American all began to create their own versions of these fictional friends. We wanted to be part of the utopia of having a home, having friends, loving, living, and being young forever. These friends were the family we wanted for ourselves.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/pop-culture/brooklyn-beckham-family-moments-victoria-david-girlfriend" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Family</a><a href="https://www.lofficiel.co.uk/Fashion/mother-daughter-fashion-house-to-know">&nbsp;</a>is something that is given to us and that we give ourselves. It defines us, and we define it. It is the center of our lives. Sitcoms offered us the opportunity to create a new, fictional family of our own choosing.

Even for those who were young and had friends and a happy family, this still felt like a better version of life than what they had. It may be that there would be princes in Bel-Air, and though the character in the show was loosely based on Will Smith&#39;s own experiences, no one really has a lifelike&nbsp;<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098800/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">The Fresh Prince</a>. The condensation, serialization, and transformation of daily life made it a dream for all of us.&nbsp;

We wanted to be part of the utopia of having a home, having friends, loving, living, and being young forever.

In that regard, sitcoms led to the birth of a certain kind of reality show. The<a href="https://www.lofficiel.co.uk/Fashion/kardashians-style-evolution-kendall-jenner-kim-kylie" rel="noopener" target="_blank">&nbsp;Kardashians</a>&nbsp;truly became sitcom characters, but the show was also supposedly a chronicling of their &ldquo;real life.&rdquo; The gesture of having one&rsquo;s life filmed for others was Duchampian in its core: it made life into a ready-made. Of course, the life that was put on a pedestal was not random, in the same way as the ready-made was not. It was deliberately designed to present a form of meaning to the public.

As in reality TV&nbsp;characters in sitcoms do not have a psychology. They have passions, yes, and strong feelings take them over, but then life carries on. In the sitcom version of existence, there can be no hard feelings. Over the course of many seasons, hatred goes, and so does love. Sometimes these feelings return. But these characters never build on their emotional constitutions&mdash; they are in a permanent state of reaction to the moment.&nbsp;

I remember when, at a dinner at Azzedine Alaïa&rsquo;s, of whom I was a close friend and collaborator, I explained to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/pop-culture/kim-kardashian-kanye-west-getting-divorced-lawyers-settlement" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Kim Kardashian</a><a href="https://www.lofficiel.co.uk/pop-culture/kim-kardashian-kanye-west-love-story-timeline">&nbsp;</a>the motives of Pierre Guyotat as he wrote&nbsp;Coma. He writes about trying to clear himself, about knowing that you are a stage, a field. And so Kardashian concurred: that was exactly what she was doing and how she lived her life. Making herself into a stage for things to happen, refusing the modern separation between the internal and the external. Life was all one, and it was in flux. In the case of both Kardashian&nbsp;and Guyotat&mdash; with obvious differences&mdash; these are existential choices, heroic choices. Letting oneself be open as a maker of image and textuality, one that is both yourself and not, identifiable and empty for others to project themselves onto. In&nbsp;Ion, Plato speaks of &ldquo;enthusiasm,&rdquo; or being inhabited by a god who lends poetry to your voice. In order to be inhabited, you need to be empty. You cannot have complex, layered, conflicting feelings. Instead, they go through you, and you are the vessel that allows them to go one way or the other.

This way of thinking beyond psychology expanded across culture through sitcoms: since they were not merely defined by their characters, but by the situation, it was not about them. It was about the site that could be exploited, moved, shaken. It wasn&rsquo;t personal, and that is why it could be relational. Sitcoms are all about&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/pop-culture/kylie-jenner-travis-scott-dating-timeline-back-together" rel="noopener" target="_blank">relationships</a><a href="https://www.lofficiel.co.uk/pop-culture/kim-kardashian-kanye-west-love-story-timeline">:</a> between families, friends, and friends who become families. For so many of us, the people on our screens were our friends and families as well. One might wonder whether&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficiel.co.uk/Fashion/Steal-this-gossip-girl-looks-in-2021-serena-van-der-woodsen-blair-waldorf" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Gossip Girl&nbsp;</a>qualifies as a sitcom. I remember, while spending time in New York, going to Sant Ambroeus on Madison Avenue. There, sitting in the shop in front of the pastry window, was Kelly Rutherford, who played the Upper East Side socialite&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/best-gossip-girl-fashion-moments-blair-waldorf-serena-van-der-woodsen" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Lily van der Woodsen</a>. I remember seeing the depth in her eyes, looking at something no one else could see&mdash;the living, breathing image of melancholy. She really looked like Lily. I wondered whether she was acting or preparing to act, or whether she was Kelly, actually living her life.&nbsp;

There is the actual, conservative definition of a sitcom, which is anchored on a set that never changes. Another combines that set with a specific era&mdash;haven&rsquo;t we moved past the time of sitcoms? Or we can expand on it, and that is what I&rsquo;d rather do. Because then sitcoms become a fascinating metaphor for how we have come to live: calling people who our predecessors would have considered strangers our friends not separating between fact and fiction, and&nbsp;romanticizing our own lives. It may be that sitcoms were once an escape, that they gave us the life we would have loved to be granted or felt we were owed. Are you a Carrie? Are you a Miranda or a Samantha? A popular question to ask in the &lsquo;90s.

There certainly is an escapism to it. But more importantly, sitcoms gave us the possibility of bringing magic into our lives. They gave us the friends who didn&rsquo;t want to be friends with us. One of the fundamentals of the sitcom is the existence of a company of sorts, a group of actors, and we dream they are friends. They had to be, in order to be ours. Sitcoms presented us with the idea that life could be novel, an epic, a series&mdash;and that concept is continued via reality TV and social media.

Sitcoms are a fascinating metaphor for how we have come to live: calling…strangers our friends, not separating between fact and fiction, and romanticizing our own lives.

<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/beauty/self-love-influencers-instagram" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Instagram</a>, Facebook, all social media is a sitcom. It&rsquo;s a situation comedy in which everybody is participating. In the words of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/kristen-stewart-yara-shahidi-juliet-pirelli-calendar-2020" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Shakespeare</a>, &ldquo;All the world&rsquo;s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.&rdquo; But what if we collectively agreed that we do not need escapism? That we do not need those fictional friends? Our lives can become a sitcom, and we can be the heroes of our own story. We love each other, we don&rsquo;t love each other; we are friends, we&rsquo;re not; we speak to one another, we don&rsquo;t. We share our lives.&nbsp;

Let us think about the consequences of such an idea: we agree to make our life experimental again, to make it fluid again, to allow miracles to happen. That&rsquo;s what&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/pop%20culture/dystopian-books-novels-pandemic-social-distancing-quarantine-coronavirus" rel="noopener" target="_blank">fiction</a>&nbsp;makes possible. Of course, we have to pay taxes, we have to work to make a living. We aren&rsquo;t all princes of Bel-Air. What if we agree that our lives shouldn&rsquo;t be limited and that we should have a cause that would take it all to the beauties and perfections of fiction. That we should be able to let ourselves be unburdened, in order to make our life into a scene.&nbsp;

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<img src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/39109/1620943109-3sitcomsphoebe.jpg?auto=format%2Ccompress" />

&ldquo;The Reunion (Phoebe on Tinder),&rdquo; 2021, #francescovezzoli

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My friend Emanuele Coccia just sent me the manuscript of his brilliant new book,&nbsp;Philosophy of the Home, which I read when thinking about writing this essay. He comments that a home only exists after you move in&mdash;therefore that identity only exists through transformation. This feels like quite a potent thought when considering a situation, something that is&nbsp;situated. I began this piece by underlining that the location of the situation can change, that it does not have to stay in one place as long as its display, its&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/film-tv/bridgerton-new-cast-members-season-2-netflix" rel="noopener" target="_blank">characters</a>, its relationships are moved. There may be a&nbsp;genius loci,&nbsp;but relationships hopefully are stronger than places.

Over the last year, many of us have found ourselves stuck at home, alone or with a significant other, a family, or a pet. Not exactly the setting of a multi-character sitcom. Could there be a sitcom of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/film-tv/shira-haas-unorthodox-interview" rel="noopener" target="_blank">lockdown</a>? In fact, people all over the world have tried to do it, filming themselves, creating threads of life through a time in which the notion of community had merely been broken. Their attempts highlighted the two gaps that limited them: one was the narrative, which is the thing that is most missing in our lives right now.&nbsp;What to do? What&rsquo;s next?&nbsp;These have been very difficult questions to answer. The second is the community: the family, the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/beauty/the-feelist-most-wanted-cbd-face-oil-shea-marie" rel="noopener" target="_blank">face-to-face</a>&nbsp;interaction between groups, the theatricality of it all. There is hardly any theatricality alone or with just one other person; it may very well risk looking fake.

That situation has given us a clue as to what our life as a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/film-tv/harry-styles-spotted-on-set-my-policeman-new-movie-emma-corrin" rel="noopener" target="_blank">sitcom</a>&nbsp;may look like in the future. The only way for it to exist is to highlight the relationships, the interaction, the fact that we are all together, that our groups of friends are better when they can come and go, meet and then part again, and that once we agree to these miraculous conditions, we are ready to create miracles every day, any day. In our life as a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/film-tv/game-of-thrones-prequel-house-of-the-dragon-hbo-first-photos" rel="noopener" target="_blank">sitcom</a>, we will accept that there can be fun, that there can be anger, that you can be in one place and in many others, and that your friends and your family are relationships you build and nurture. And maybe, one day, your life will end up in a sitcom of its own. A Duchampian overturn.

Life As a Sitcom

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