Media Initiation Assignment

The sitcom ‘People Just Do Nothing’ is based around a lower class group of people living in rural London. The show sets out to be a comedy, using stereotypes as the main butt of their jokes, revolving around their every day life and trying to show the humour in it. The episode I watched (S2 Ep1, Angel’s Christening) is based around ‘Grindah’ and Michelle’s daughter – Angel – being christened.

All of the main characters we meet in the show are rather unemployed, or self employed in unsuccessful businesses – this is used to try and show the viewers that these people are the lower class that we generally stereotype to be ‘lazy’ and less educated, trying to make it easier for us to laugh at them. The show makes constant reference to their lower education, one of the recurring jokes being that the character ‘Beats’ calls the christening a ‘christianing’, and nobody corrects him; this is trying to infer that the group do not know how to actually pronounce the word properly, and gives us another reason to laugh at their ‘idiocy’.

The character ‘Chabuddy’ is one of the only employed characters in the sitcom, and he is seen as the stereotypical Muslim man that owns a business; we see that he is constantly changing his business, in this episode now printing shirts for the first time (as seen by the fact that he is just now advertising it on his car) – Chabuddy is unsuccessful with this too though, as we see him not only print a bad design onto the shirts, but also knock over the printing machine. This shows us that although he is trying, he is still failing at everything he does, giving us a reason to laugh at his misfortunes. Chabuddy also lets slip at one point that he got into England on his brother’s passport, reinforcing the stereotype of him being an illegal immigrant in England; stereotypically, English people are seen to complain about illegal immigrants constantly, and the fact that this stereotype is shown to be true through the character of Chabuddy reinforces the thoughts that some people have, and as they see him fail, gives them more reason to laugh. When we look at what Chabuddy is doing though, it is clear that he is just trying to earn money to live – he even goes as far as to buy shirts from another printing shop and sells them to make a profit, this shows that he is not representing his social class particularly well.

We also see a social stereotype in the character of ‘Steves’, who is characterised as a drug addict, and nothing else is shown about him. We first see him in the church, after the priest says that he has been sleeping there – we can see that Steves therefore rather has nowhere to stay, or simply doesn’t care enough to go home at night. This shows that as a person he doesn’t care about himself, as anything could have happened by just sleeping in a church, this also infers to us that he hasn’t washed in a while, reinforcing this ‘lazy’ stereotype yet again. The main humour we see from Steves is the fact that he is ‘coming down’ from a high, and his actions towards some things seem funny; for instance, he turns the statue of Jesus away when sat in the church, as he is paranoid that he is being watched, and this is seen as funny as it is just a statue. The fact that his friends view this behaviour from his as ‘normal’ also tells us a lot about them as a whole – they do not care that Steves is damaging his body through drugs, and even partake in the drug taking just a few rooms away from Angel, the little girl.

Overall this sitcom tries to take its humour from the type of people that most of us dislike, reinforcing stereotypes that aren’t 100% true, and bringing humour from them as we can laugh at their ‘stupidity’. We can see that these are not likeable people – some are unemployed, some are illegal immigrants, and some are just ‘stupid’.