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Tax in Sitcoms: A Very Special Episode

Posted on July 7, 2020

Watch Lawrence A. Zelenak, the Pamela B. Gann Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law, share his findings from watching dozens of hours of tax-related sitcom episodes.

Here are a few highlights . . .

On tax issues in American sitcoms

Lawrence Zelenak: Sitcoms emerged on radio in the very late 1930s. Within a few years, we had the income tax emerging as a mass tax and sitcoms emerging at almost exactly the same time. We have a perfect chronological match between these two phenomena and it's made for some really interesting sitcom episodes.

[One way to] categorize the shows is [by] the substantive tax issue. One [issue] is income inclusions, and there are sort of substantive issues about whether windfalls are taxable that come up—whether in-kind income is taxable. There's also what you might call cheating issues, whether something is reported to the IRS by the third-party payer, and whether or not you should report it on your return if you think the IRS doesn't know about it.

[There are] a lot of deduction issues. Pretty much every deduction that would occur to you as a widespread deduction comes up in the sitcoms. So there are shows involving the alimony deduction, shows involving the charitable deduction, shows involving business expense deduction, and so on. Another thing that comes up a lot is illegitimate refund. Given that a lot of people's main direct interaction with the IRS is not paying taxes because those are withheld automatically, but rather the IRS sends you a check—not surprisingly, there are a lot of episodes where people are trying to take advantage of that to get bigger checks from the government than they should.

On the evolving depiction of tax in sitcoms

Lawrence Zelenak: I think the biggest change over time [was] in the 1940s and 1950s . . . [when] fiscal citizenship was a really big deal. That is, the shows talked a lot about how Justice Holmes famously said: “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.” . . . That came out in a lot of the 1940s and 1950s sitcom episodes.

There's a Honeymooners episode, a Jackie Gleason sitcom from the early 1950s, where he complains as he is filling out his tax return because of how complicated it is . . . but at the end of the show, he says . . . “We should be happy to pay taxes. We're living in the greatest country in the world.” There's really a lot of that in the 50s, going up to the early 1960s.

[There is] one from the late 1950s called Hey, Jeannie involving a Scottish immigrant. And then another, from the early 1960s, the Bill Dana Show involving a Mexican immigrant, both of whom decided that their income tax liability is too small given how great a privilege it is to be able to live in this wonderful country . . . and they both decide that they need to send in more than their actual tax liability as a tip to the federal government because they appreciate the privilege of living in the United States so much.

And then there's an episode of All in the Family called “Archie's Fraud” from the early 1970s, where Archie is exposed in front of his family as having driven a taxi on the weekends for $700 or $800 worth of tips that he didn't report. And although Archie cheats . . . the rest of the family . . . is the moral compass of the show [and] is so scandalized by this that everybody persuades Archie that he needs to go down to the IRS office and basically confess.

Coming up finally to a Roseanne episode from 1990 called “April Fool's Day,” . . . where it's not even up for discussion of whether or not you cheat. Obviously you cheat if you think you can get away with it . . . So you could cite honest and dishonest taxpayers in every period. Nevertheless, I think if you watched all 100 episodes in chronological order, which would be a great way to spend a day or two, I think you would come away with the impression that overall people are a lot more willing to cheat than they used to be. And people are a lot less impressed by the benefits of government or notions of fiscal citizenship than they used to be.

On the representation of the tax profession in sitcoms

Lawrence Zelenak: One of the things that's striking about the later episodes is IRS employees are only rarely depicted in seriously negative lights. For the most part, I would say the taxpayers come off a lot worse in these episodes than the IRS.

What's really striking is [that tax lawyers and accountants] basically don't exist. Just this morning, I was going back over my summaries of the 100 episodes or so looking for anything where a tax lawyer or an accountant or return preparer showed up, and there are almost none. I think maybe that that's partly a function of the fact that you get more interesting sitcom situations when taxpayers prepare their own returns and aren't represented by lawyers at audit. But for whatever reason, they're basically missing in action. That has started to change for some reason, just in the last decade.

The best one, which I just love, is a short bit from Portlandia from about seven or eight years ago where Carrie, one of the two lead characters, is dating a tax lawyer. And she said, “I think it's great to be dating a tax lawyer. I actually think tax lawyers are really sexy.” And then it turns out that what he really wants to be is a guitarist in a rock band and she finds that not attractive at all. They stage an intervention where several people, including two actual music stars, tell him the world has enough rock musicians. What the world really needs is good tax lawyers, and he's convinced. And then the last part of that episode is him doing a one-man show where there's a marquee in front of a theater . . . and they show him just talking on the phone with a client while he's talking about tax issues and the audience is applauding wildly.

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