AN ANALYSIS OF REQUESTS: A CASE STUDY OF SKETCH COMEDY FROM STUDIO C

Abstract

This article is about the authors’ study on the request speech act found in the sketch comedy of Studio C. The authors gathered the data through the transcript of the sketch comedy episode of Studio C. The authors used Blum-Kulka’s (1984) theory on the three part of request speech act which are the address term, head act, and adjunct to analyze if the utterances found in the transcript of the sketch comedy episode is a request utterance or not. After reading through the whole transcript that the authors have, there were 62 episodes selected that contain request speech act in the transcript. Afterward, the authors analyzed the request strategies of the request utterance using a combination between two request strategy categories between Blum-Kulka’s (1987) CCSARP and Kim & Wilson (1994) request strategies category. On the study of request speech act in the Studio C sketch comedy, the authors found that most of the request strategies found were mostly used in informal settings since most of the episodes that were analyzed were on informal settings. On this study, the authors found the usage of the request speech act in the sketch comedy. The authors found that the request speech act can be used to deliver the comedy content in the sketch comedy through any of the three parts of request speech act. The authors also found that some certain request strategies can be used to create a plot for some sketch comedy episodes. There were two episodes found that the plot is revolve around the request speech act caused by the request strategy of the request that cause a problem among the characters that became the plot of the episode. Therefore, this study showed that request speech acts are also involved in sketch comedy to deliver the comedy content and also to create plot of the episode.