Viewers of a hit television show like “Will and Grace”watch it because it is funny, not because of its effects on their social and political views, according to Edward Schiappa, the guest in the Biever Lecture series Wednesday night.

Schiappa, professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Communications at the University of Minnesota, criticized the current methods of analyzing pop culture by examining three different studies on “Will and Grace’s” effects on viewer attitudes toward homosexuality.

The Emmy Award-winning comedy series “Will and Grace” centers around the life of four friends: Will, a successful gay lawyer; Grace, a straight self-employed interior decorator; Jack the flamboyantly gay and self-involved neighbor; and Karen, an alcoholic socialite.

Schiappa selected “Will and Grace” because of its historical significance. “It is the first successful mainstream show that feature two openly gay, male, lead characters,” he said. Textualists at the University of Iowa wrote the first study. Schiappa said it found “Will and Grace” to reinforce heterosexism.

Textualists are trained in semiotics or rhetorical studies to read the meaning of a text, according to Schiappa.

Schiappa attacked the study’s claim that the show “feminized the gay characters” because of its highly selective process for choosing scenes used as proof.

He also questioned the study’s definition of feminine and masculine.

“What troubles me more is what counts as feminine and masculine is not as clear as it was 50 years ago,” Schiappa said.

Schiappa refuted the textualists’ study’s statement that “Will and Grace” “infantalized the subversive characters of Jack and Karen.”

“Jack and Karen are the most out-there characters and get the biggest laughs,” he said.

Schiappa pointed out that the authors did not do the audience research to back up their claims.

The second study presented contained both textual analysis and audience research, but still received criticism from Schiappa.

Commissioned by GLAAD and conducted at the University of William and Mary examined the use of feminine appellation in “Will and Grace.”

Feminine appellation, as defined by Schiappa, is calling a male by a female word such as “witch” or “queen,” and is commonly known as shebonics in the gay community.

The study’s authors counted how many times this occurred and in what kind of scene. They found that it occurred 288 times in three seasons.

Schiappa described this procedure as “rhetorical salience run amuck.”

Rhetorical salience takes place when a reader pays more attention to parts of a text that are most interesting or important to that reader.

Schiappa pointed out studies arguing that shebonics is an important tool for the gay community to separate them from traditional gender expectations as another problem. “The sole thing he picks out as evil, the gay community describes as good,” Schiappa said.

Schiappa noted that most of the people in the focus groups shown clips featuring shebonics did not notice them. The final study discussed used quantitative audience research conducted by Schiappa at the University of Minnesota.

The study surveyed the undergraduate attitudes toward male homosexuality and the television show “Will and Grace” in an attempt to examine the relationship between parasocial interaction and the contact hypothesis.

Parasocial interaction occurs when viewers respond to characters as if they were real people. The contact hypothesis states that an effective way to reduce prejudice is to increase contact between members of the different groups.

The study found that “the more they watch the show the less likely they are to hold stereotypical views of gay men,” Schiappa said.

The study also found that those with three or more gay friends did not show a significant correlation between viewing frequency and stereotypical views.

Though enthusiastic about presenting his study to the public and despite urgings from the local media and GLAAD, Schiappa is waiting to be published in a “bona-fide” communications journal. Schiappa believes that pure textual analysis and audience research do not exist because the researcher, who is also a member of the audience, selects the area to focus on.

“Any method can be used or abused,” Schiappa said. “If [researchers] want to make audience conjectures, they need to do more than look in the mirror.”