Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 85

"Where Everybody Knows Your Name"

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vacation with her professor, is left in the bar, starts working there,
and falls in love with Sam, while always asserting her intellectual
superiority. After her break-up with Sam, Diane has a relationship
with Frasier Crane. But on their trip to Europe, just as they are about
to get married, Diane breaks off the engagement, joins a convent, and
reemerges to have a new romance with Sam, proving that in spite of
her emphasis on intellect she prefers Sam's good looks to Frasier's
education and financial security. But again, just as the wedding is
being performed, Diane is told that her former professor has found a
publisher for her novel. She leaves Sam and "Cheers," supposedly
for six months during which she hopes to finish her book, but never
comes back. It is not only her move from graduate student to waitress
and her frequent defeat by Carla in their verbal battles that
characterize Diane as comically flawed. She also has a facial tick,
cannot always control the pitch of her voice, is allergic to Frasier's
dog Pavlov, and occasionally threatens to bore the bar's population
almost as much as the mailnuin Cliff.
As the name "Diane" reveals, she is a hunter. She leaves her
upper-class home hunting for something other than a pre-arranged
marriage. After her unsuccessful graduate studies and after the affair
with her professor she hunts Sam, then Frasier, then again Sam, and
finally she hunts for a career as a novelist. Diane's last name,
"Chambers," is equally appropriate but contradicts her first name:
Diane prefers being in her chamber, reading or writing. She is more at
home in a study than in a bar. Diane represents the fragile but
assertive woman taken out of her protective surroundings and
struggling to make it in a new environment. When she leaves
"Cheers," where she had to be a hunter, she goes back into her
protective chamber to write.
Her intellectual nature seems out of place in the bar and is
therefore often the source of comedy. She can't simply tell Sam that
she hates him but instead uses expressions like "Sam Malone, you
should be staked out naked on an anthill." But Sam proves that he
too can think fast when he retorts, "Funny how you always have to
bring in the word 'naked' when you thirdc about us." The comedy
created by Diane's intellectualism suggests that the mingling of
characters from different educational and social backgrounds, which
is supposedly easy in "Cheers," remains rather imperfect. This point
is further illustrated when Diane's mother or her doppelganger