Is The Bear Actually a Comedy?

When The Bear practically swept last year’s television awards season as a comedy, many cast doubt on this classification. However, recently, the discourse surrounding The Bear’s comedic status has started to swing in the opposing direction. So, is The Bear really a comedy?

The Bear’s Runtime Qualifies It as an Emmy Comedy

Those staunchly defending The Bear’s credentials as a comedy seemingly have their thesis etched in Emmy gold. However, something that often gets lost in both sides of the argument regarding The Bear’s award season success is that its wins at the 2024 Emmy ceremony were earned for its first season. Though season one’s finale features an emotionally poignant seven-minute monologue about addiction, grief, and suicide, those arguing the show’s status as a drama will most often namedrop the memorable Season 2 episode “Fishes,” while those on team comedy will cite scenes like Sydney accidentally rear-ending Richie with a knife in Season 1. While Sydney’s misplaced kitchen tool is arguably funnier than anything that ever happened on Amazon Prime’s Transparent, The Bear’s first season was positioned to sweep the Emmys for the same reason as the latter program – its half-hour runtime.

In 2014, Orange Is the New Black helped put Netflix on the award season map when it curiously scored twelve Emmy nominations as a comedy and one Golden Globe nomination as a drama – demonstrating just how complicated genre distinction has become in a modern television landscape. Though Orange Is the New Black by no means swept the 2014 ceremony, its presence in the comedy category gave rise to a new statute. Moving forward, the Television Academy would recognize half-hour programs as comedies and hour-long programs as dramas. Having shored up their definition of comedy and drama, the Emmys welcomed Orange Is the New Black back in the drama category in subsequent years, whereas the Golden Globes would go on to categorize the prison series as a comedy for the remainder of its run, to avoid any accusation that a consensus had been reached.

Orange Is the New Black went from twelve Emmy nominations in 2014 to just four in 2015 when it had to compete against titans like Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Better Call Saul, and its fellow Netflix original House of Cards. Unsurprisingly, Orange Is the New Black longed to be reincluded in a category where dramedies like Fleabag and Master of None performed particularly well, petitioning the Television Academy to reinstate its comedy status. This newfound petition system allowed for exceptions to the Emmy’s runtime rules, with hour-long series like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel maintaining a comedy status through this appeal process.

Even those who vehemently define The Bear as a pure drama would concede that this runtime policy grants the series a more advantageous chance at Emmy gold, especially considering that the 2023 drama race would have pitted its freshman season against Succession’s final bow. Though some may decry category fraud to the tune of The Martian’s 2016 Golden Globe comedy win, there’s a clear-cut rationale as to why The Bear wouldn’t have attempted to petition itself out of comedy contention.

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The Best Dramas Have a Touch of Comedy (And Vice Versa)

Though the Television Academy is often touted as more of an authority than other awards ceremonies, it is worth noting that The Bear‘s comedy domination has not been limited to the Emmy Awards. In fact, the aforementioned “Fishes” has already taken home a Directors Guild of America Award for outstanding comedy direction. Wins of this nature certainly recollect The Martian debacle at the 2016 Golden Globes, one which provoked the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to issue the statement that going forward: “dramas with comedic overtones should be entered as dramas” (per The Hollywood Reporter). Though this HFPA decree concerns film entries and still leaves plenty of wiggle room, it provides a lens under which to examine the current discourse surrounding The Bear‘s status as a comedy.

Television fans seemed in near unanimous agreement that The Bear, while an indisputably award-worthy show, took advantage of genre loopholes during this past award season. However, a contrarian faction began to rise out of this conversation’s ashes, highlighting some of The Bear‘s funniest moments and characters as evidence that the series was correctly classified as a comedy. Neither nitpicking Matty Matheson’s slapstick highlight reel nor Carmy delivering bleak dialogue like “I Googled ‘fun’ the other day” are necessarily strong foundations for arguing the show’s genre in either direction. If someone got asked to categorize How I Met Your Mother, having only been shown the Season 6 scene where Lily tells Marshall that his father died, they might falsely presume that the laugh-track network sitcom was a drama. The Bear cannot be diagnosed as a comedy from a handful of curated screencaps, just as it can’t be deemed a romance based on the sheer magnitude of SydCarmy fancams in circulation – its genre can only be properly analyzed as the sum of its parts.

While The Bear may first appear neighbors with genre-bending dramedies like Fleabag and Reservation Dogs due to its shared themes of grief, the kitchen series has much more in common with classic television dramas than its peers. Many describe their experiences with the latter two programs as cathartic and bittersweet, whereas “stressful” is the word most heavily associated with The Bear‘s viewing experience. A sense of stress and drama cannot be maintained at a breakneck pace; moments of comedic relief must be incorporated to amplify this sensation.

Some of the most indelible moments in television history have arisen when dramas have given their audiences comedic reprieve, with iconic examples including Don Draper’s dry “I don’t think about you at all,” Walter White’s pizza throwing fit, Tony Soprano’s consensus on the optimal pulp content orange juice, and Shiv Roy’s tumble down the stairs. These moments from Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and Succession aren’t funny despite their existence within drama programs – they represent some of the most memorable comedic moments in television history, regardless of genre. The Bear‘s comedic breaks are much more aligned with these scenes than dramedies like Fleabag and Reservation Dogs, where joke writing still remains central to the show’s conceit rather than a means to dissipate mounting dramatic tensions.

While the HFPA’s definition of “dramas with comedic overtones” certainly applies to The Bear, the series remained in comedy consideration at The Golden Globes this past nomination season. Despite how awards season politics and dissenting voices will forever shape some to perceive The Bear as a comedy, the majority of audiences have come to embrace the series’ as not only a drama but one of the greatest television dramas of the Peak TV era.

The Bear is streaming now on Hulu.