Comedy as Correction: Humor as Perspective by Incongruity on Will & Grace and Queer as Folk

This essay examines the television programs Will & Grace and Queer as Folk through the lens of a comic frame to argue for each show’s potential to change our social culture. Because television culture is oriented to heterosexual and Christian perfection (i.e. heterosexuality and Christianity as normative identities), gays, lesbians and Jews are rendered Other and thereby tragically framed. By reading Queer as Folk and Will & Grace together and employing the Burkean notion of perspective by incongruity, this article argues that neither show’s characters exist within the tragic binary of victim/villain. Rather, the use of humor offers the necessary perspective by incongruity to comically correct the tragic frame of heterosexual and Christian perfection.