Humor y familia: identificación de las metáforas cotidianas, en la audiencia ecuatoriana, con la serie Malcolm in the Middle

Abstract

This thesis analyzes how Ecuadorian audiences identify with family and humorous representations through everyday metaphors present in the series Malcolm in the Middle, with the aim of understanding the social and cultural factors involved in this identification. From a qualitative perspective, a content analysis of critical scenes from the program was conducted, along with a discourse analysis of interviews with communication students at the Technical University of Ambato. The idea was to capture everyday metaphors from both the audiovisual narrative and the subjects' experiences. It was found that the series brings together household disorder, maternal discipline, paternal overprotection, and poverty as central themes in its portrayal of family life through comedy. Thus, situations that are initially foreign to the Ecuadorian context are recognized by the audience as part of their own daily lives. Thus, the study demonstrates that television reception is not passive, but rather an interpretive process in which young people reinterpret messages in their sociocultural environment. In this way, the study highlights the value of humor and metaphor as mediators between television fiction and contemporary family experience.