The Dad is the butt of the joke

NPO reports

Scharrer, et al studied 32 different sit-coms that aired from 1980 – 2017. They examined 4,711 episodes in which there was at least one father and one child. Those episodes included 578 scenes in which a father was shown interacting with his child. The results are striking.

For example, the proportion of scenes in which Dad is disparaged by being the “butt of the joke” increased almost 60% from 1984 to 2017. The mean number of scenes per episode in which a father is shown in healthy interaction with his child, while never high, decreased from 1984 to 2017 when it stood at precisely zero. As of 2017, none of the sit-coms viewed had a single scene of positive father-child interaction.

Up slightly over the same time is the mean number of scenes per episode depicting fathers behaving incompetently or foolishly when engaged in parenting behavior.

Okay, but why?

Obviously, this does not happen by accident. It is deliberate policy. I am guess that if the study had looked at the religion of the sitcom makers, it might have noticed that they are not representative of the larger population. And they have leftist feminist ideologies.

I could be wrong. Maybe the explanation is that the viewers are mostly female, and they have a poor sense of humor. I am waiting for another study to sort this out.