The Merry Men of TV Action -
Levity Utterances in Knight Rider and the Six Million Dollar Man
Pop Mystic offers a means of combining quantitative and qualitative popular media data in pursuit of insight into film and media theory.
Let’s use Pop Mystic, the TV and movie quote database, to determine which retro TV action hero had a better sense of humor, Steve Austin of The Six Million Dollar Man or Michael Knight of Knight Rider.
Compiling every permutation of [laugh], [chuckle], and [giggle] that occurs in the transcripts of every episode of the 90 episodes of Knight Rider that aired from 1982–1986, we can chart the frequency and pacing of laughter utterances over the course of an average episode. With timecode minute ranges on the x-axis, and series-wide quantity of laughter utterances on the y-axis, we can get a sense of how likely a character was to laugh at a given point in an episode.
In figure 1, we see that characters were more likely by far to express laughter between the beginning and the 20 minute mark in the average episode of Knight Rider. They were half as likely to do so between the 30 and 40 minute mark, and episodes often ended on a lighthearted note, with much laughing and chuckling in the final 10 minutes.
In addition to the pacing of levity, the quantity of these expressions is significant as well. A total of 371 times, over the course of the 90 episodes that comprise the Knight Rider series, one of its characters uttered some form of amusement (that is registered as such in the transcript.)
These two observations, frequency/pacing and total utterances, are striking when compared to another television show from 10 years earlier that featured similar thematic elements, The Six Million Dollar Man. In both shows, men of action use technological augmentation, Michael Knight’s artificially intelligent Trans-Am and Steve Austin’s bionic body parts, to solve mysteries, help innocents in distress, fight communism, etc.
Comparing their respective rates and quantity of humor though, we find that The Six Million Dollar Man series contains 127 laughter utterances over its 99 episodes, excluding TV movies. Besides containing only 34% of the number of laughter utterances as Knight Rider, The Six Million Dollar Man made use of those utterances in a significantly different way.
Figure 2 shows us that, like Knight Rider, laughter utterances were most likely to occur between the beginning and the 20 minute mark. In the second half of the average episode, however, the pattern of laughter utterances in The Six Million Dollar Man is the opposite that of Knight Rider. Steve Austin was less likely, in other words, to end his adventure with a chuckle than Michael Knight was.
Why the change in laughter expressions? Perhaps during the ten year interval between the shows, producers identified a desire on the part of audiences for more levity to break up tension in action adventure shows. Perhaps The Six Million Dollar Man had a writing team that came from the Sam Spade school of stoic private detective fiction. Perhaps Knight Rider ending episodes on an up-note was more in keeping with the Reagan-era “Morning in America” zeitgeist, as opposed to the economic depression and malaise of the 1970s. It is surprising, though, that The Six Million Dollar Man, a show that featured a fist fight between the hero and a robotic Bigfoot, wasn’t a bit more inclined to laugh.
It is worth noting as well that a small number of the laughter utterances in both shows were uttered by antagonist characters (maniacal laughter as the villain activates a weather control machine, for example) and so not all laughter utterances were necessarily a marker for traditional tension-relieving levity in the narrative.
More qualitative research would be required to draw definite conclusions about the significance of this data, but we now know that the quantitative data exists and we have at least one way to express it.
Consider an approach like this to your own research. You can combine qualitative and quantitative data from Pop Mystic to make much larger points about the media you choose to research and its place in history.
Citations
The Six Million Dollar Man. Created by Harve Bennett, Universal Television, 1973–1978.
Knight Rider. Created by Glen A. Larson, NBC, 1982–1986.
