| Summary: | Still largely absent from the French small screen, comic series built upon ethnic situations are, on the other hand, a constant in Great Britain since the 1970s, when the first ethnic sitcoms (black sitcoms) appeared: a term then used to describe situational comedies portraying the contact between British people from minority communities and representatives of the white “majority”. Ten to twenty years later, the arrival of a televisual multiculturalism contributes to the evolution of the audiovisual landscape; from the face to face of “Us” versus “Them” follow comic series that focus on a minority universe (all black sitcoms), Black British first, then Southeast Asian British. At the beginning of the 21st century, the directors, actors, and screenwriters tend however to leave the “situational comedy” genre behind for more flexible series formats. We see then an emergence of a large range of sketch shows, which present, successively or in parallel, fundamentally hybrid, “hyphenated” identities, but also more exclusively white ones. At a time when certain members of the “born and bred” “majority” feel sometimes “minority” because of multiculturalism, a wave of nostalgia seems to have taken hold of white British comedians and spectators, searching for their identity, which seems to find in comedy a means of going back to their roots. Adopting a diachronical approach, the present article will observe the transformations in the comical series of British television in their approach to the ethnic question, in the large sense of the term, in order to see how, between shifts, hybridization, and oscillation, they have been able to reflect a long-standing, complex, and still largely relevant questioning on racial relations.
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