The Myth of "Relatable" Comedy: Why Truth Matters More Than Realism

(Prefer to listen than scroll, here is the audio version of the post. Read by Jacquie Sarah, so expect warmth, humour, and maybe some mispronunciation)

The Myth of "Relatable" Comedy: Why Truth Matters More Than Realism “Relatable” has become one of those words people throw around as if it means something precise.

It usually does not.

A comedy gets praised for being relatable as though that is the highest compliment it can receive. The gold standard. The magic ingredient. The thing all writers should be chasing like exhausted greyhounds in a content mill.

But I do not think relatability is the holy grail of comedy. In fact, I think the word is often used as a shortcut for something else entirely.

Because if relatability simply means, “This character is just like me,” then a lot of the greatest comedies ever made should not work at all.

I have never hosted a radio show in Seattle. I have never run a paper company in Slough. I have never been part of a wildly dysfunctional fashion-adjacent family while drinking champagne at noon. I have never lived in a giant New York flat on a salary that appears to be based on vibes. Yet somehow I still manage to watch television.

That is because most comedy is not relatable in the literal sense. The characters are often too glamorous, too heightened, too odd, too chaotic, too rich, too self-absorbed, too articulate, or just too much. Sometimes that is the whole point. Nobody wants a comedy made entirely of people sensibly responding to emails and putting the washing on.

What people usually mean when they say a comedy is relatable is not that they have lived that exact life. They mean it recognises something true.

And that is a much more useful standard.

The best comedies do not need us to see ourselves in the details. They need us to recognise the emotion underneath them. The shame. The longing. The awkwardness. The insecurity. The desperate need to be liked. The fear that everyone else got a manual for life, and ours got lost in the post.

That is why Fleabag works, even if your own life has not involved quite so much guilt, chaos, lust, grief, or staring directly down the lens as if the audience is your unpaid therapist. Most people are not literally Fleabag. Thank God. But a lot of people know what it feels like to be cut off from family, trapped in a version of yourself you no longer trust, or using humour as a sort of emotional smoke bomb.

That is relatability at its most useful. Not biography. Not surface detail. Recognition.

We do this with comedy all the time, even when we pretend we do not.

Take Frasier. On paper, there is almost nothing especially relatable about it. Two brothers who speak like private schools made flesh. Opera. sherry. impossible levels of self-importance. A lifestyle so polished it looks like the sofa has opinions. Yet Frasier works because beneath all that polish is something painfully familiar. Status anxiety. Sibling rivalry. Romantic humiliation. The gap between who we think we are and how we actually behave under pressure. You may not relate to Frasier Crane’s wine rack, but you may well relate to the experience of trying very hard to seem impressive and making an absolute fool of yourself.

That is what comedy understands better than most forms. Human beings are ridiculous, but usually for recognisable reasons.

The same goes for The Office. I do not find David Brent relatable in the sense that I see myself in him. I certainly hope not. If I ever start doing impromptu dancing for approval in a workplace, someone is authorised to quietly turn off the music and escort me outside. But the feeling underneath him is deeply recognisable. The need to be liked. The panic of not being respected. The performance of confidence covering a sinkhole of insecurity. Most people have either been that person for a brief awful moment or met them by the photocopier and prayed for a fire drill.

That is why the obsession with relatability can be so limiting, especially in comedy.

It encourages the idea that characters must be immediately identifiable, digestible, and somehow “like us” in order to earn our attention. But comedy has never really worked like that. Many of the funniest characters are people we would avoid in real life. Some of them would ruin a dinner party within nine minutes. Some would ruin society. But on screen, they are fascinating because they reveal something about vanity, delusion, need, loneliness, ambition, or fear.

Absolutely Fabulous is a perfect example. Very few viewers are actually living the Edina and Patsy lifestyle. Most people are not rampaging through life in a cloud of ego, fashion panic, bad decisions, and ambient alcohol. But the emotional material is still completely legible. Fear of ageing. Fear of irrelevance. The performance of coolness. The way mothers and daughters can love each other deeply while also wanting to scream into a cushion. It is exaggerated, yes. Wildly. That is why it is funny. But exaggeration does not cancel truth. Often, it makes it easier to see.

That is the bit people miss.

Comedy does not become less truthful because it is heightened. It often becomes more truthful because the feelings are sharpened. Distilled. Put under pressure until they become visible.

Think about Derry Girls. Most viewers did not grow up in 1990s Derry, amid political tension and Catholic schoolgirl chaos. Yet the comedy travels because the emotional experience is wider than the setting. Teenage embarrassment. Friendship politics. Family members who seem to have been sent to test your character. The constant sense that life is happening to you at speed and without proper instructions. The specifics are particular. The feelings are not.

And this is where I think the word “relatable” can actually flatten good writing.

Because once that becomes the benchmark, there is a temptation to make everything smaller, safer, plainer. Characters become overly familiar in the most boring sense. Their flaws are softened. Their edges are sanded down. Their lives are arranged so neatly around audience recognition that they stop being surprising. You do not end up with deeper truth. You end up with beige.

And beige is not funny.

Or rather, beige can be funny, but only if the comedy knows it is beige and is willing to commit to the horror of it.

The point is, being relatable is not the same as being interesting, specific, or funny. In fact, some of the most forgettable comedies are perfectly relatable on paper. Every day people. Every day problems. Every day dialogue. Lovely. And yet nothing lands because nobody has done the harder job of making it sharp, distinctive, or emotionally precise.

Even Ted Bovis knew this. As he kept saying in Hi-de-Hi!, “the first rule of comedy, you must have reality”.

Comedy needs truth, but truth is not the same as realism.

That sounds like the sort of sentence someone says in a seminar before everyone goes quiet and checks the biscuit plate, but it is true. Literal realism is only one route to emotional truth. Comedy often gets there another way. Through exaggeration. Farce. Satire. absurdity. heightened behaviour. Big personalities. Terrible decisions. Sometimes the thing that makes a character feel real is precisely the fact that they are allowed to be unreal in all the ways real people secretly are in private.

We are not tidy. We are not consistent. We are not always sensible. We overreact. We spiral. We dress things up. We play to the room. We say we are fine in tones that should legally count as a cry for help.

Comedy knows this. Better than almost anything.

Which is why I get twitchy when “relatable” is used as the ultimate measure of quality. It is too vague, for a start. But worse than that, it quietly suggests that the audience can only connect with what mirrors them directly. And that is selling audiences short.

People can connect across age, class, geography, culture, and circumstance if the emotional writing is strong enough. They do it all the time. Nobody needs to have lived Fleabag’s life to understand loneliness. Nobody needs Frasier’s apartment to understand pretension. Nobody needs to be Erin Quinn to understand the feeling of being young, dramatic, overconfident, and completely unequipped for what is happening next.

We do not need exact replication. We need recognition.

That, to me, is the difference.

The best comedies are not saying, “Look, this is literally your life.” They are saying, “Look, you know this feeling. You know this flaw. You know this fear. You know this ridiculous human impulse, even if you would prefer not to admit it in public.”

That is a much better trick.

And frankly, a much more interesting one.

So no, I do not think relatability is the holy grail of comedy. I think it is often a lazy word for something far more complex. What matters is not whether the characters resemble us in surface terms. What matters is whether the writing recognises something human and makes us laugh at it before we have time to hide.

Because the truth is, a comedy does not need to be relatable to work.

It just needs to be true where it counts.

Agree? What do you think about 'relatable' comedy? Let me know by clicking here.

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