Fourth Persona of Swarley

How I Met Your Mother is often compared to other sitcoms that have been on television. Because of this, it has been accused of being an "unoriginal" sitcom by some viewers. Some of the shows people compare it to are shows like: Friends, Arrested Development, Seinfeld, Cheers, and even Lost. Using the fourth persona, we will analyze the episode "Swarley" (S2E7) to see how the use of textual winks addressed these accusations.

According to Morris, the fourth personal is "a collusive audience constituted by the textual wink (Morris, 2002, 230). Other terms that might be important to note throughout the analysis are dupes and clairvoyants. Dupes are those who are not understanding the implied message and clairvoyants are those who do. And lastly, the thing that we will be looking at closest throughout this post is the textual wink. A textual wink is the hidden message in the text, or as Morris put it: "passing rhetoric must imply two idealogical positions simultaneously, one that mirrors the dupes and another that implies, via the wink, and ideology of difference" (Morris, 2002, 231).

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There are two winks in this episode that address these comparisons. The first of these is the opening scene. Barney, Ted, and Marshall are all sitting drinking coffee in a coffee shop. This is a wink to Friends. Friends is the show that is most often referred to when talking about How I Met Your Mother being unoriginal. This is because they are both set in similar places, with similar banal spaces, along with having similar characters. Many even refer to How I Met Your Mother as the millennial's Friends. The clairvoyants in this wink will understand the situation that is being referred to and see how the scene is trying to play up the similarities. The dupes also miss out on another wink made to Friends when Barney makes the blatant quote: "Hanging out in a coffee place, not nearly as much fun as handing out in a bar." This is not only winking to the fact that they know that the shows are similar, but they are making a claim that their show is better because bars/alcohol are more fun.


The second wink is the closing scene. When Barney walks into MacClaren's Pub everyone yells "Swarley!" just like everyone yelled "Norm!" on Cheers. They also play the Cheers theme song ("Where Everybody Knows Your Name" by Gary Portnoy)(On top of all of this, in "Tailgate" (S7E13) when Barney and Ted create their own bar called Puzzles they call on the same theme samme theme song for inspiration). During this scene, the camera angle shifts to show the same bar setup that is seen in Cheers. To top off the references, the end credits are done in the same font and color as is done on the original Cheers as well as having the executive producer credits overplayed on the final scheme instead of on the black for the only time in How I Met Your Mother's History. The clairvoyants and the dupes on this wink are more separated by the generational gap. I did not fully understand the wink until I looked up the song that was playing in the background because it sounded familiar. The clairvoyants are those who grew up with this show and are the ones that understand the reference to Barney's new nickname being yelled at the bar. The dupes, do not get the reference to the 1980's sitcom.

There is always a reason that people are included or left out of the textual winks. In this instance those that are included are there to get the joke and understand that the author understands that How I Met Your Mother  is a very traditional sitcom with some of the same components that many other sitcoms have had. But, these clairvoyants also understand that they are making an allusion to the fact that though the shows are similar, there are specific pieces that set them apart and that make How I Met Your Mother a different kind of sitcom all together.

Though How I Met Your Mother was compared to other shows, these textual winks show a unique quality within the sitcom: the ability for it to laugh at itself. The author knows that this show is not the first of its kind, nor will it be the last. But you can bet that it will try its hardest to be the funniest one you will ever see.

References

 Morris, C. E. (2002). Pink herring & the fourth persona: J. Edgar Hoover's sex crime panic. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88(2), 228-244. doi:10.1080/00335630209384372 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P3tpDIqN9A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-mi0r0LpXo