On Friday nights in the 1990s, the American family came under attack. Intruders penetrated the home: they stole food, lured children into moral decay, and made a mess of the place. But they weren’t the phantasms imagined by the contemporaneous or current-day right, “superpredators” or “critical race theory” or “groomers.” No, these intruders had names—names like Kimmy Gibbler.
Kimmy (Andrea Barber), a secondary character in ABC’s Full House, occupies a sitcom niche rarely seen in today’s television: she is the intrusive friend, the character who doesn’t quite belong to the main cast but who always seems to be showing up. Kimmy was just one among many in the 90s sitcom: Sister, Sister had nerdy sex-pest Roger Evans (Marques Houston); The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air had faux-suave sunglass-bespectacled Jazz (DJ Jazzy Jeff); Blossom had motormouth pal Six (Jenna von Oÿ); and, of course, Family Matters had the intruding neighbor to rule them all, pop culture icon Steve Urkel (Jaleel White).
Despite their apparent marginal status, these characters serve as comedic foils to the family itself: by strolling in and out of sitcom homes at their leisure, they reveal and test the boundaries between the enclosed family and the otherness beyond it. In this way, they tell us something about the cultural psyche that created them—particularly about the anxious social boundaries it attempted to keep and yet desired to expand. And in turn, their disappearance from modern TV screens reflects something about the current state of exclusion, and the violence behind it.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, amidst the fabled End of History, the family was in flux. Nuclear families seemed to be on the decline: households were increasingly comprised of single-parent families, blended stepfamilies, and families with live-in grandparents. While evidence was mixed on whether the nuclear family was genuinely facing its end, the fear of its end was quite real. As sociologist Melinda Cooper has argued, the moral panics of the 80s and 90s unfurled from longstanding neoliberal and conservative insistence on the Fordist family as the bedrock of both social and economic life. After annihilating New Deal and Great Society welfare programs for single-parent families, neoliberals and conservatives established policies that enshrined the moral virtue of legally affirmed nuclear marriages–and punished those falling outside these boundaries. There crystallized, in this sense, a simultaneous thirst for the nuclear family’s prelapsarian past and an anxiety about its fallen present.
The anxiety is well emblemized by a 1991 comment by Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, who opened a hearing for the Subcommittee on Children, Family, Drugs and Alcoholism with the comment that “profound changes in family structure” meant the erosion of “the traditional ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ family.”
Dodd’s phrase, a reference to the quintessential 50s–60s white-bread family sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, is telling: as the family changed, so did its television imaginary. Although few sitcoms were ever naïve exultations of hyper-traditional families (Ozzie and Harriet was actually an outlier in this way, even though it was immensely popular), the 80s–90s’ anxieties meant that it was difficult to imagine a white-bread Fordist family, in quite the same way. Instead, sitcoms needed to metabolize the ideals of the traditional family into a new shape—so they cranked the Brady Bunch lever to the max.
In Fresh Prince, Cousin Will (Will Smith) crosses the country to join the affluent Banks family; in Blossom, recovering drug addict Tony Russo (Michael Stoyanov) moves in with single-parent Nick (Ted Wass), brother Joey (Joey Lawrence), ever-present grandfather Buzz (Barnard Hughes), and titular sister Blossom (Mayim Bialik); in Sister, Sister, separated-at-birth twin-sisters Tia Landry (Tia Mowry) and Tamera Campbell (Tamera Mowry) smash together their respective adoptive-single-parent households; and in Full House, the Tanner family loses a mother to a drunk driver but gains two uncles and later an aunt and twin cousins.
Despite pushing the boundaries of the family’s appearance, however, these sitcoms still sought to shore up tender, traditional values. Danny Tanner (Bob Saget), living in a proto-polycule though he may be, is a pitch-perfect father to his impressionable daughters; as they struggle with temptations toward alcohol, sex, and general misbehavior, he’s always there to offer paternal wisdom and a dry joke. Danny’s presence reflects that Full House isn’t a story of the family’s dissolution. Despite the strange shape of the outside world, the show wants the family unit to be a bastion of stability.
Except, of course, the dread interloper. Abrasive neighbor Kimmy Gibbler struts uninvited into the Tanner household, beaming in funky neon green tights and wearing a sky-high ponytail that seems suspended by steel cables. Kimmy is the best friend to elder daughter D.J. (Candace Cameron), but the other Tanners have nothing but unfamilial loathing for her: middle daughter Stephanie (Jodi Sweetin) wryly pokes at Kimmy’s stupidity; Uncles Jesse (John Stamos) and Joey (Dave Coulier) snarkily joke that Kimmy’s parents seem to want her around even less than the Tanners do; and even wise, benevolent Danny, with a gentle smile that flashes forth the warmth of eternal fatherhood, tells Kimmy to go home as soon as she walks in. With Kimmy in the picture, the family home suddenly looks a lot more hostile than the show’s over-the-top sentimentality would have us believe. We see that there are exceptions, stimuli that can turn a family from a domesticated lovefest to a tribalized pod guarding the border between inside and outside.
Annoying sitcom oddballs aren’t rare (Mary Tyler Moore had Ted Baxter (Ted Knight), Andy Griffith had Barney Fife (Don Knotts), Dick Van Dyke had Buddy Sorrell (Morey Amsterdam) and Sally Rogers (Rose Marie)), but Kimmy and company are different. It isn’t just that she adds a few extra punchlines. No, she is more serious: by breaching the house doors, she pops the delicate membrane enclosing the Tanners from the non-familial world. The family’s response, like white blood cells to strange matter, is to eject her—and we’re asked to laugh while they do it.
If the Tanners’ reaction seems extreme, it’s only in keeping with the cultural function of the family itself. At the same time that Fresh Prince, Full House, and company occupied TV screens, the intellectual cause célèbre was culture war, the perceived instability of twentieth-century institutions writ large—articulated in works like Benjamin Barber’s Jihad vs. McWorld, Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, and Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree. These texts fixated on the idea that, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the new global conflicts would be waged between neoliberal corporatism, multicultural pluralism, and traditional values. The family was, and remains, a node of these culture wars. As Raymond Williams remarks, the family has served in post-war America as the sole representation of “immediate positive attachments in a large-scale and complex wage-earning society.” In other words, the family is the form of social life that first trains us to understand belonging and unbelonging, who belongs where and what the line between them is—an especially salient issue in the 1990s, given the simultaneous push towards porous national borders and traditionalist national culture.
The opening lyrics of Full House’s theme song suggest as much: “Whatever happened to predictability? / The milkman, the paperboy, evening T.V.? / How did I get to living here? / Somebody tell me please, / This old world’s confusing me.” The show wants to suggest that the salve for this new world, with its lost signifiers and uncertain sense of physical place, is the Tanner family itself. Although it cannot recapture the supposed social harmony of the Fordist family, it can still imagine a kind of belonging that meshes with supposed old-time values.
Considered this way, the intruding neighbor is far more than a goofy side character: it elucidates the tension of who belongs and what happens when they don’t. Kimmy and her ilk—Jazz, Urkel, Roger, and the rest—expose the limits to the 90s family’s rehabilitated family values. These intrusive neighbors stride into the stable family home as if they own the place; they stay, make a few jokes, move this way and that in the space, rib the homeowners with overly familiar jests; then, they’re ejected.
Kimmy is typically forced out by either plot contrivance or sufficient insults; Roger’s sexual advances cause Tia and Tamera to yell “Go home, Roger!” in sisterly synchronicity; after Jazz makes one too many jokes about Uncle Phil’s (James Avery) weight or one too many come-ons to daughter Hilary (Karyn Parsons), he is routinely, literally, flung out the front door of the Banks estate. In many cases, dismissal becomes a recurring comedic routine. Roger is told to go home something over 30 times over the course of Sister, Sister’s run, while Jazz is hurled from the Banks’ front door with such frequency—always homaging or literally reusing the same shot from the first time he was thrown out—that he begins to strategize around it. In one case, when he doesn’t feel like walking to the door to leave, he saves himself a trip by provoking Uncle Phil into launching him across the porch.
In each case, a strange operation becomes clear, an anxious border-keeping that the 90s family enforces almost unconsciously. Although the expansion of the 90s family meant metabolizing some familial difference, this new tolerance is not universal. We’re reminded at the end of each Fresh Prince episode that the affluent Bankses truly do love streetwise Will, but intruders like Jazz enjoy no such welcome. If Will proves how open the Banks family can be, Jazz confirms how closed it remains.
Then there’s Urkel, the Platonic ideal of intrusive neighborliness. In early episodes of Family Matters, Urkel’s intrusions are benign, merely pestering the Winslow family with gadfly nerdiness. But over the show’s duration, Urkel violates the household with increasing intensity. He destroys bedrooms and garages, superglues himself to Winslow daughter Laura (Kellie Shanygne Williams), shrinks patriarch Carl (Reginald VelJohnson) to inches-tall heights, damages the time-space continuum by sending himself and Carl back to a decades-earlier version of the Winslow home, builds a robot that terrorizes the entire Winslow clan, and more (yes, all of that really happened). If Kimmy’s crime is blithe rudeness and Roger’s is wannabe playboyism and Jazz’s is cross-class familiarity, Urkel’s is pure destruction—never clearer than in a shot from the title sequence of the latter six seasons of Family Matters, in which the Winslow family attempts to bar the door from Urkel like horror film victims before an encroaching monstrosity.
But despite the joke of rejecting Urkel, the Winslows could never exile him permanently. He makes passes at Laura and pesters Carl with dweeby antics—but he also saves Carl’s life, joins the family on their Disney World vacation (part of the corporate foreplay anticipating Disney’s acquisition of ABC), defies his offscreen scientist parents to confess the Christian faith with Winslow mother Harriet (Jo Marie Payton) and eventually marries Laura after returning from a daring outer space mission (all that really happened, too). The joke is his status as an outsider, and yet the arc of the show sees Urkel over and over again enter into, defile, be ejected from, and reconcile with the family. Indeed, his persistence radiated beyond the boundaries of the screen: Urkel became a pop culture phenomenon unto himself, moving from the sitcom fringe to lunch boxes, dolls, award shows, and even other sitcoms (decades later, Key and Peele would lampoon Family Matters’ Urkelogenic transformation from “blue-collar Cosbys”to “Quantum Leap”). He was the perfect nuisance: annoying enough to never be welcome, and therefore just endearing enough to always be let back in.
This is the secret, the angst below the angst in the reconfiguring TV family. This cycle is, as Grace Lavery has recently suggested in Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom, at the heart of sitcom psychopolitics: “the family sitcom dwells in the present continuous, where family is always on the verge of disintegrating and always in the process of being repaired or re-constituted.” To entertain its audience, the sitcom must seek for dynamism outside the domestic sphere, but to preserve the family, it must force “closures, plural” on these x-factors. The sitcom wanted the intruder to be there, even as it refused to grant them familial status.
To be sure, the 90s sitcom neighbor existed on a spectrum. At one end is the most inoffensive, Home Improvement’s Wilson (Earl Hindman), who remains just over Tim Taylor’s (Tim Allen)’s fence, the lower half of his face always out of view as he dispenses sage wisdom. At the other end is the intruder in excelsis: Seinfeld’s Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards), whose famous barge-ins make a regular mockery of Jerry’s (Jerry Seinfeld’s) careful boundaries. Yet the underlying joke of Seinfeld is that everyone is a neurotic, self-absorbed maniac—Jerry’s barriers are an illusion, and Kramer’s intrusions don’t burst his bubble but assert that in the cosmos of Seinfeldian New York City, there is no domestic boundary to begin with.
But between those extremes, the inclusion-and-ejection cycle of the annoying neighbor allowed the family sitcom to channel, and then neutralize, troublesome specters. One of most scandalous: sexuality. At the height of the AIDS crisis, the threat of embodied sexuality collided with an increasing social frankness about sex. On the other hand, the sitcom desired sexuality. It’s easy to misremember the family sitcom as puritanical (certainly there were numerous Very Special Episode paeans to sexual purity), but sex did happen, so long as it was between committed adults, under dim lights, soundtracked by saucy Oooohs from the live studio audience, and punctuated by a catchphrase like Uncle Jesse’s “Have mercy!” How, then, to manage the boundary between the approved adult sexuality and the dangerous plague-steeped sexuality?
The answer: the neighbor. Sex pest male neighbors, like Roger, Urkel, and Jazz, could embody an improper sexuality, a sexuality that was too lascivious and too close, but that could be repelled when necessary. Although Hilary Banks is sexually promiscuous, Jazz’s come-ons prove that even she has standards, enforceable by threat of porch-flinging. Urkel’s horniness for Laura is defused by his own faux-Casanova dweebiness (their relationship is only sanctioned when they marry in the final season). On the other hand, female intruders like Kimmy could make improper female sexuality appear while also making it so repulsive as to be easily rejected. Despite Kimmy’s adolescent interest in sex, the idea of her as a sexual being is a joke: her overfamiliarity with Danny, her frequent proffering of her feet for massages, even her eventual relationship with monosyllabic blockhead/Shakespeare savant Duane, are all played for laughs. Most telling (and bizarre) of all: when Jesse has a nightmare that his music career fails and his wife and children leave him, he sees himself—a balding proprietor of an auto shop—giving a gruesome foot massage to his new fiancee, Kimmy. Kimmy in this sense shows off that even if sexual libertinism makes it into the front door, it can be neutered by a joke.
Ambivalent intruders like Urkel, Kimmy, and Jazz help reveal the push-and-pull at the heart of the 80s and 90s’ familial imaginings. If the 80s–90s family sitcom wanted to rehabilitate the new family, it needed to extend family values beyond immediate blood relation—but if it did that, it also needed, as if compulsively, to think about who might still be trying to get in the door, who remained unincluded even as they sought entry.
As the family has metastasized as a node of the culture wars, new permutations of family anxiety have produced a new kind of family sitcom—one without the intrusive neighbor. While contemporary sitcoms lean into even more eclectic, even more blended, even more fraught families, exclusion and its potential social violence have been effaced. ABC’s comedy crown jewel Modern Family is premised on the power of familial expansiveness, but not openness: while the fulcrum of the show’s comedy is the eclectic blend of age, sexuality, and ethnicity in the Pritchett-Dunphy-Tucker mega-family, tension is only temporary and always internal. No outsiders seek to challenge the boundary. Other sitcoms tackle family angst head-on, but still make exclusion invisible. CBS’s Mom centers around a mother (Allison Janney) and daughter (Anna Faris) in the same Alcoholics Anonymous group; ABC’s The Connors revisits the working-class family from Roseanne, which must recompose itself in the wake of matriarch Roseanne’s (Roseanne Barr) fatal opioid overdose (and real-life Roseanne Barr’s obscene xenophobia); and CBS’s Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage, the sequel to the mega-popular Young Sheldon, itself a prequel to The Big Bang Theory, attends to the psychic tensions in the East Texas working class Cooper family. In all these shows, outsiders occasionally swirl around the family, but anybody who seeks entry receives it—there is no character who is humorously ejected. Instability is such a given fact that there is never an annoying neighbor to reject in the first place; it’s difficult to imagine Steve Urkel bringing a homemade robot into a home bereaved by opioid overdose.
Indeed, the intrusive neighbor has even disappeared from its own erstwhile home. In the Full House sequel Fuller House, Kimmy has seeped through the domestic membrane to become a fully-fledged member of the new Tanner household. The prestige drama Fresh Prince reboot Bel-Air (2021-present) goes even further, morphing Jazz (Jordan L. Jones) from bit-part outsider into a serious, well-developed character who contends for Hilary’s (Coco Jones’) affections. This Jazz voices serious meditations on race and class politics, as though it would be improper to laugh at the Banks family closing ranks against the outsider. And yet precisely because he’s so serious, he’s less insidious: he doesn’t seek to enter the Banks family, only critique it.
The erasure (or hyper-naturalization) of exclusion becomes important when we consider the domestic tensions of the contemporary U.S., in which the Far Right has placed an imagined White nuclear family at the heart of its project to shore up the (so-called) Western traditional values, even as it pushes policies that harm real families. The very threat of queer and racial otherness infecting the family is enough to propel politicians like Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin to victory at the ballot box and to mobilize brazen right-wing violence in the public. Members of the pronatalist movement, which preaches that declining White birth rates will bring on global catastrophe, insist that the collapse of “Western civilization” can only be averted by breeding bigger, whiter, more patriarchally loyal, more genetically optimized families—everyone outside these doomsday bio-cults can die out. The family, in all these cases remains a locus for the violence of unbelonging, an imaginary image from which to eject (read: inflict violence against) outsiders. Exclusion is treated as a natural fact and a moral imperative.
And so the “crisis” of the family reflects now, as in the 1990s, an anxiety about social belonging—who belongs with whom, which spaces are open to which people, and how those boundaries might be enforced. The implicit possibility in all these questions is rejection: there will be someone trying to enter the circle of belonging who must be repulsed.
In the 90s psychic milieu, the annoying neighbor legislated these issues through comedy. The archetype made exclusion obvious, but it also revealed that the desire for exclusion entails the need for openness. We laugh not just when Kimmy and Urkel and Jazz are ejected, but also when they enter, because in truth we want them there. In jettisoning these characters entirely, the contemporary sitcom has quietly naturalized and neutralized the issue of exclusion; we’re so busy attending to the angst within a family that we don’t need to think about (or laugh about, or desire for) those who we might be excluding from it.
These psychic movements are precisely what fascistic nationalism thrives on, aiming to normalize the idea that it’s natural to reject the stranger. There is neither the glee of ejection nor the thirst for expansion, just complete enclosure.