"What if you take your important stuff and hide it in some[thing] juicy (?)?" - Postmodern Sitcoms: Searching for Meaning and Agency.

This thesis aims to answer the research question on how do 21st-century British and American sitcoms explore agency and the search for meaning in postmodern societies by conducting a qualitative, thematic content analysis of three programmes: 1) season three of "Community", created by Dan Harmon in 2011; 2) season four of "BoJack Horseman", created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg in 2017; and 3) "Fleabag", created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge in 2016. The research is grounded in theories by Lyotard (1979) and Veit (2018) on postmodernity and its characterization of senses of meaninglessness, utilizing Royce's (1959), Thompson and Janigian's (1988), Schnell's (2012), and Längle's (2004) definitions of meaning and the search for it. Moreover, it is informed as well by notions of Fitzhugh and Leckie (2001), Gubrium and Holstein (1995), Hitlin and Elder (2007), and (most importantly) Bandura (2001) on the concept of human agency as well as its position within postmodern societies. This paper, furthermore, combines these approaches with Mills' (2005) Sociology of Humor, marrying it to the medium of television by utilizing papers by Juckel et al. (2016), Detweiler (2012), and McRobbie (1994), as well as being grounded in many other theories. The analyzed portrayal of building human agency and searching for life's meaning was concluded to be showcased within the studied sitcoms with found subthemes of: characters' construction of identities, their relationships and resolving conflicts, existential nihilism and losing, searching, and assigning newly found meaning of life, all embedded and grounded in three main types of humor: absurdity, irony, and parody.