Goffman’s theory of Face-work somehow always seems evident in featured segments on Jimmy Kimmel Live, perhaps unintentional but intriguing nonetheless. He intentionally tries to break the face, so to speak, that people as individuals claim. In a segment called “Lie Witness News-Coachella 2013,” young people are interviewed about their thoughts on some of the bands performing. What the audience knows that the interviewees do not know is that the band names are completely made up. Their responses, while funny, also shed light onto the fact that face- work is very evident in certain social contexts, particularly within subcultures such as music enthusiasts. The interviewer says to two young women “one of my favorite bands is Dr. Shlomo and the G.I. Clinic, they’re amazing” and the girls promptly agree, saying things like “yeah, I’m really excited to see them live.” What’s interesting about these girls in particular is that they acknowledge that they are on camera. So really, they have two roles to play in this performance: the role of seeming qualified and intelligent on television and the role of being a totally up to date music enthusiast that has in fact heard of every band at Coachella. They feel the need to back up their claims of being Coachella enthusiasts and go to great lengths in terms of their performance to maintain face.
Another aspect of the music world is that many music enthusiasts like to have background information in order to have successful interaction. Goffman says that in order to maintain control over the expression you give off and the expression that you actually give, we should use whatever resources we have available. In the case of the video, the interviewees likely did not use their resources as they did not know much background of the music festival and therefore lacked control in terms of their performance. Some were not able to give specific answers to the questions, but rather more generic answers such as “I just like their whole style” when asked about a band. In other instances, some of the interviewees just completely lied about background information, making false claims about the bands entirely such as playing records of a certain band on the radio and claiming to be a fan of the band but not realizing that the interview gave a completely fake album name. It is simply a mechanism to seem valid to the audience.
Goffman says that when a person claims to be someone in particular, he or she expects others to treat him as the person he or she claims to be. So when a situation occurs that may challenge this claim, we go to certain lengths to avoid the embarrassment or shame that follows that challenge. Although this particular segment doesn’t show how the interviewees reacted once they realized they had in fact been set up for a Jimmy Kimmel Live segment, we could assume that (based on Goffman’s theory) they would resort to some type of defensive practice when caught being out of face in order to either restore their claim or avoid embarrassment. In the case of the audience’s protective practices, there really is none of that going on. In reality, everyone is basically rooting for the failure of the interviewees to get a good laugh rather than trying to avoid embarrassment.
In conclusion, there are aspects of Goffman’s Presentation of Self in everyday life presented in Jimmy Kimmel Live’s Lie Witness News segment. The performers attempting to maintain face through performance and expression, ultimately leading to embarrassment is Goffman’s theory put to practice.
Works Cited
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Lie Witness News: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_IzYUJANfk