Kimmy Schmidt? I hardly know her!

In “This Is Awkward” Plakias mentions that the possible scenarios for awkwardness to arise is near endless, but one interesting scenario is the plot of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. After being held captive in a bunker for fifteen years, the titular Kimmy moves to New York to begin her adult life, in doing so winds up with some quirky friends that engage in bizarre antics. Kimmy herself tends not to feel embarrassed; the awkwardness lies in other’s uncertainty about how to interact with her. Kimmy is blindly confident and usually believes herself to be correctly following norms. this goes back to her stunted development, maintaining a childlike image that can result in superiority laughter. She’s not at a loss for what to do next, but everyone else is at a loss for what she is going to do next.

One key claim that Plakias makes that I disagree with is that there is no such thing as an awkward person, suggesting that awkwardness is a property of a social interaction and not a person. I would say instead that it is a property of a person’s behaviour, and with behaviour being an element of a person’s ontology it thus becomes a property of a person. This is how Kimmy Schmidt is able to be awkward. She may not feel awkward about her behaviour, maintaining the belief that it is normal based on her understanding of the world when she was a child. The audience also may not feel awkward or uncomfortable because of this light-hearted acceptance (not to mention fictionality). And yet, we can still acknowledge an inherent awkwardness about her breaking the social script, no matter how amusing it may be. In this way the awkwardness is not about how anybody feels, but in the actions themselves. Yes, scripts may be dependent on locations and religious ideals etc., but in a given situation they are undeniably inherent. Kimmy Schmidt lives in New York, and New York has social norms/scripts that tend to be followed, just like anywhere else on the planet. Her lack of awareness and unscripted behaviour, as Plakias says herself in the chapter, is unavoidably awkward whether anybody feels awkward about it or not.

The editing of the show contributes heavily to the lack of felt awkwardness; the pauses and silences that we normally associate with awkwardness and that Plakias discusses in her chapter are not present, and yet, the awkwardness remains. The show presents us with awkward situations but takes away the chance to feel uncomfortable about it by replacing a subsequent silence with another outlandish interaction. Comparing it to The Office, for example, when a character says something that goes against social norms, the camera tends to show us the other characters’ silently shocked expressions, forcing us to sit in the awkwardness. Whereas is Kimmy Schmidt, after a character says something wacky, the camera cuts to another character saying or doing something equally or possibly wackier. As a result, the audience is encouraged not to cringe, but to enjoy the childish carefree spirit of the characters without inhibition, to see them being awkward and breaking norms and for that to be okay.