Breaking the Fourth Wall: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Meta-Comedy Strategies in British and American Sitcoms

Meta-comedy scholarship is disproportionately oriented toward postmodern texts, lacking a systematic exploration of the reflexive practices of Western classical sitcoms and their cross-cultural differences.The present paper examines how Fawlty Towers (1975-1979) and Friends (1994-2004) achieve different modes of audience engagement by implementing divergent fourth wallbreaking strategies.Three-tier coding (performance, narrative, and reception) was conducted on the complete series of Fawlty Towers and the first 30 stratified episodes of Friends followed rigorous textual analysis procedures that involved intercoder consistency checking (Krippendorff's Alpha >0.80).Results showed that Fawlty Towers primarily employed performance-based meta-comedy strategies (64.2% of coded instances), utilizing Brechtian alienation techniques that elicited predominantly cognitive engagement (70% of audience responses) from viewers.In contrast, Friends emphasized narrative-based strategies (50.9% of coded instances), generating primarily affective engagement (60% of audience responses) from its audience.A chi-square test revealed significant distributional differences between the two series in performance strategies (χ²=42.16,p