Spoiler Alert
How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) is hands down my favorite television show. It recently just ended its nine season run and still contains relevant subjects while telling a story through comedy and drama. The show itself demonstrates values of close friendships, expressing yourself, and the struggles of being a responsible adult.
The episode of HIMYM being analyzed is titled “Spoiler Alert” and focuses on individual perceptions of others as well as relationship tensions through different communication and rhetorical principles. In this episode, the main character Ted introduces his new girlfriend, Cathy, to his friends over dinner. At the end of the dinner Ted is pleased with how everything went, oblivious to the fact that Cathy never stops talking and hogging the conversation. As the episode progresses, Ted still doesn’t realize how annoying Cathy is and finally, Ted’s friends break it to him. Once Ted starts to pay attention to how much Cathy actually talks, his opinion of her begins to change and since his perspective is no longer clouded by his attraction to her, he doesn’t like her as much.
Given all of these communication issues between Ted and Cathy, as well as Ted and his friends, this episode provides a lot of examples of human communication and behavior concepts applicable to our everyday lives that were discussed over the course of the semester.
Below are six theories/principles, three focused on communication and three focused on rhetoric, that I used to analyze this cultural artifact:
- Communication Principles:
- Listening
- Friendships Styles
- Perception & The Johari Window
- Rhetorical Principles:
- Ethos, Pathos, and Logos
- Rhetorical Situation
- Narrative
Word Count: 263
Communication Principle : Hearing vs. Listening
As people, we spend more time listening than any other form of communication. But, sometimes we tend to hear people more than actually listen to them. Listening is a communicative, active process, which one researcher, Elizabeth Bernstein (2015), described as “the way you listen when you are an engaged presence in the conversation, fully in the moment with the other person, not just sitting there, half paying attention”. In this episode of HIMYM, Ted fails to be an active listener to Cathy.
Ted engages in the bad habit of selective listening during the dinner that occurs with his girlfriend and his friends. He fails to listen to everything she is saying and instead selects only certain phrases and words, making him oblivious to the amount that she is actually talking. I would also argue that Ted is facing the barrier of psychological noise during this moment. To expand on this, because Ted is falling in love with his new girlfriend he is distracted by the good qualities he sees in her, blinding him from her annoying quality.
Ted’s friends point out that in this situation, Ted is not processing how much his date is talking, responding to her, or remembering anything she says, therefore he is not even listening to her. They also point out that at dinner Cathy had been stagehogging, meaning she kept turning the conversation back to herself.
These listening mistakes all accounted for the tensions and misunderstandings between Ted, his girlfriend, and his friends.
Word count: 248
Communication Principle : Friendship Styles
One of the main values of the entire show of HIMYM is the importance of friendship. The main group of friends is comprised of Ted, Barney, Marshall, Robin, and Lily. Although they are all different from one another, they all share the friendship style of being acquisitive. They all stick together as a core group of long term friends but throughout the series pick up new friends and partners.
While throughout the season all of these friends provide different types of social support to one another, in this specific episode the gang is most responsible for providing information support. In Ted’s case, information support fits the Theory of Optimal Matching, that was mentioned in lecture, because in his current situation, this form best fits the one that meets his needs. Information support is defined as the useful or needed information to help make a decision(Gent, 2017). In this exact scenario, Ted is unaware of his girlfriend’s annoying habits, but after his friends point out how much she talks and controls the conversation, Ted makes the decision to break up with her.
As the Hall and Baym (2011) article quotes, “ When friends seek support, company, advice, and inclusion from one another, friendships become more integrated, which serves the fundamental desire to be needed and to need others.”
Word Count: 217
Communication Principle : Perception & The Johari Window
According to lecture, perception is “the ability to make sense of the world around us” (Gent, 2017) and because we are all unique, individual people, it is never the same as someone else’s. When thinking about perception, there is the concept of self-perception and the way we perceive those around us. In this television episode, the focus is on how others perceive Ted’s girlfriend vs. how Ted perceives her. This comparison is relevant to the concept of the Johari Window. The Johari Window focuses on information sharing with others and has four components: shared, blind, hidden, and unknown. During the dinner scene of this episode when Ted is partaking in selective listening and is unaware of how much his date is actually speaking, he is in the “blind” category because the information about his girlfriend is known to everybody else at the table except to Ted himself. Later when his friends reveal more information about her, he moves from “blind” to “shared” because all parties then know the facts.
Another important concept of perception relevant to this episode is impression formation. Ted’s initial gestalt impression of Cathy, meaning instantaneous, is positive because it is clouded by his attraction to her. But, his algebraic impression changes to where he becomes annoyed with her because new information is coming in as the episode progresses.
Perception is a key factor in this episode because it demonstrates how certain aspects of our lives and our personalities influence how we perceive others around us and how this may play out in our personal lives.
Word Count: 259
Rhetorical Principle : Ethos, Pathos, and Logos
One of the main challenges in this episode of HIMYM is the struggle for Ted’s friends to decide to reveal to him an annoying trait of Cathy’s. The way they go about this is to rhetorically appeal to Ted, making him the audience in this case. When looking at rhetorical appeals, there are three aspects: ethos, pathos, and logos that derive from Aristotle’s theory of persuasion. In this episode, ethos is an important factor as the people intending to inform Ted are his close friends and therefore Ted perceives them as a credible source. His friends use logos, instead of pathos, to tell Ted how annoying Cathy is by recalling the past dinner event and relying on logical facts instead of emotions to show Ted.
In order to rhetorically appeal to an audience, ethos is a key factor because it is what makes the audience trust the rhetor(s) or not. As stated in the Leff and Utley article Instrumental and Constitutive Rhetoric in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” (2004), “ traditional conceptions of ethos treat character exclusively as an instrument of persuasion”. This quote expands on the concept that the character of the rhetor(s), in this case Ted’s friends, plays a huge part in influencing Ted and his decisions based on how well he trusts these people.
This relationship between rhetor and audience is what inevitably ends up making the rhetorical appeal either effective or not and therefore there is of a lot of value.
Word Count: 250
Rhetorical Principle : Rhetorical Situation
Mentioned in Swift’s (2007) article was the idea of a rhetorical situation, created by Bitzer, which “is comprised of three tenets: exigence, audience, and constraints”. The situation present in this episode demonstrates all three of these characteristics, therefore making it a rhetorical situation.
The exigence, which is defined as “an imperfection marked by urgency”(Swift, 2007), is that Ted’s girlfriend, Cathy, talks a lot and is so obnoxious that Ted’s friend group can’t stand to be around her, creating tension between Ted and his friends. In lecture, we described the audience as having to be “capable of being influenced by discourse and being mediators of change”(Gent, 2017). Ted plays the role of the audience as he is influenced by what his friends tell him. Finally, the constraints, which are “the physical, theoretical, and emotional limitations of the situation and the audience”(Swift, 2007), play a key role in how Ted’s friends react to this situation. The most obvious constraint is that by telling Ted about Cathy’s habit, his perfect illusion of happiness with her will be shattered, which may emotionally be hard for him. Ted’s friends don’t want to make him unhappy but also don’t want the situation to continue.
Given these factors, this episode proves to be an example of a rhetorical situation that invited discourse in order to be solved.
Word Count: 223
Rhetorical Principle : Narrative
Stories and news are viewed and told from someone’s specific perspective making their reliability sometimes questionable. The article A Finder’s Guide to Facts, written by Steve Inskeep (2016), makes the valid point that “facts have always been hard to separate from falsehoods”, especially when there is bias present in whoever is speaking about the subject. The idea of narration in general involves a couple of key factors in order to be considered good, reliable storytelling: narrative coherence and fidelity.
Looking at narration in this episode, when Ted and his friends look back on the dinner they all attended together it is clear that there were two completely different narratives of how the dinner went. When his friends explain the dinner from their points of view, Ted is exposed to a completely different narrative. The first question that Ted must ask himself when hearing this new narrative is about narrative coherence: does this story make sense? Ted must think back to all the examples they give and compare and evaluate these aspects to what he remembers. He then must consider the fidelity, meaning if he believes in the truths behind it and how relevant it is to him now.
Reflecting on these factors is how we determine whether a story is legit or not. To Ted, this story his friends tell rings true and he realizes that his narrative was the one that actually contained more falsehoods than facts.
Word Count: 238
Conclusion
Lack of communication is what ultimately began this issue in this episode as Ted failed to accurately communicate and listen to Cathy. Luckily Ted’s friends expressed healthy communication and used tactics of friendship and information sharing in order to inform Ted of the details that he was blind to. By using intelligent discourse that appealed directly to Ted and was based on fact, his friends were able to accomplish their goal of making Ted see the truth.
Throughout this episode there were many more communication and rhetorical principles used other than the ones mentioned but these ones stuck out as being the most important and having the biggest impact on the relationships involved.
Overall, these common challenges and theories present in the show share a lot of similarities in the lives of most young adults and therefore, understanding how and why people react to these situations, even in media, plays a key role in how we may react in the future, in reality.
Word Count: 163
References
Bernstein, E. (2015, January 12). How ‘Active Listening’ Makes Both Participants in a Conversation Feel Better; Use Body Language and Verbal Cues to Encourage the Person Talking and Prevent Listener Burnout [PDF]. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from https://canvas.wisc.edu/courses/51707/files/folder/Course%20Readings?preview=1825098
Gent, W. (Presenter). (2017, September 25). Perception. Lecture presented in University of Wisconsin — Madison, Madison, WI.
Gent, W. (Presenter). (2017, October 2). Friendships & Dialectics. Lecture presented in University of Wisconsin — Madison, Madison, WI.
Gent, W. (Presenter). (2017, November 13). Rhetorical Situation. Lecture presented in University of Wisconsin — Madison, Madison, WI.
Hall, J. A., & Baym, N. K. (2011). Calling and texting (too much): Mobile maintenance expectations, overdependence, entrapment, and friendship satisfaction [PDF]. Sage. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444811415047
Inskeep, S. (2016, December 11). A Finder’s Guide to Facts [PDF]. NPR. Retrieved from https://canvas.wisc.edu/courses/51707/files/folder/Course%20Readings?preview=1827743
Leff, M., & Utley, E. A. (2004). Instrumental and Constitutive Rhetoric in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” [PDF]. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 7(1), 37–52. Retrieved from https://canvas.wisc.edu/courses/51707/files/folder/Course%20Readings?preview=1827736
Lloyd, S. (Writer), & Fryman, P. (Director). (2007, November 12). Spolier Alert [Television episode]. In C. Bays (Producer), How I Met Your Mother. Columbia Broadcasting System.
Swift, C. L. (2007). “I had an Abortion.”: The Rhetorical Situation of a Planned Parenthood T-shirt [PDF]. Qualitative Research Reports in Communication, 8(1), 57–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/17459430701617929