MAGNIFYING THE ORDINARY: GENRE MIXTURE AND HUMOUR IN THE TV SERIES CHUCK

Sažetak

Chuck is an American television series about a “normal” guy who works at the Buy More. His life changes dramatically when he becomes the most important person for the USA intelligence. This gives rise to a conflict between civilian and spy life. The analysis involves a multimodal account (cf. Lorenzo-Dus 2009) of the aesthetics (Cardwell 2005) of the second season that illustrates how the series establishes a parallelism between Chuck’s life as a spy and that of his colleagues at the Buy More. By combining elements from different genres (Altman 1988) it portrays a rather “different from what may be the expected-representation” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001:10) of the routine at the workplace (Armstrong 2005), thus depicting a rare humorous magnification of the ordinary life of a group of ordinary citizens with an ordinary job (cf. Beeden and Bruin 2011).