So you want to do whatever the opposite of cultural enrichment is and make your own sitcom. It's not that hard -- look how many shows premiere every fall. Your four major networks will probably pump out at least six sitcoms each, and within a month and a half they'll be gone and your only knowledge of them will be a mild headache when you try to remember what happened last Monday at 9 on CBS. That headache is a little, rotten piece of brain matter that will never fully repair itself. It died so that you might not remember that they tried to make a sitcom out of those cavemen characters from Geico commercials.

Sitcoms are pretty easy to slap together because they're all basically the same, in the way every game of Monopoly will be the same -- same pieces, same layout, same sense of impending dread the longer it goes on. To save you some time, I'm going to lay out all the important sitcom characters you'll ever need. Some shows only use a couple; you'll want to take all of them if you want to ensure that your show really lasts. Or fails really fast, it can go either way.