GE Big Boys Appliances: Towards a Multimodal Discourse Analysis of the SNL Fake Commercial

Nowadays, comedy shows like Saturday Night Live (SNL) have become popular and entertain many people around the world. For this study, a fake commercial for GE Big Boys Appliances, aired on YouTube in 2018 is analyzed to explore how discourse is used to represent gender roles and stereotypes. To conduct this multimodal discourse analysis, some elements of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) proposed by Halliday (1978), some notions of critical discourse analysis, and some features of the Machin's (2010) visual semiotic framework are employed. The findings portray that the sketch shows a change concerning gender roles through time, but it still promotes the transmission of some classical gender stereotypes. Therefore, it is valuable to study comedy sketches to understand how traditional gender roles and stereotypes are still transmitted in social media.