Comedy and the Mockumentary

The mockumentary: where the documentary form meets fictional events. Mockumentary productions are often used to analyze or comment on current events and issues by using a fictional setting, or to parody the documentary form itself [1]. It therefore challenges documentary’s claim to true representation.

A postmodern shift in cultural sensibilities during the 1980’s resulted in a trend of self-reflexive television and cinema that explored satire, parody and irony and pastiche.

The self-reflexivity of these popular texts of the later 1980s and earlier 1990s does not revolve around the problems of self-expression experienced by an anguished creative artist so ubiquitous in modernism but instead focuses on antecedent and competing programs, on the ways television programs circulate and are given meaning by viewers, and on the nature of television popularity. [2]

Feature mockumentary films like Christopher Guest’s The Spinal Tap (1984) and Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983) helped to popularize the genre and pave the way for shows like Stella Street (1997-2011), The Games (1998-2000), The Office (2001) and Come Fly with Me (2010).

Documentary conventions are employed in mockumentary productions such as interviews, speaking directly to camera, voiceover narration, handheld camera work and location shooting. Improvisation is also common in mockumentary shows as it helps to maintain the impression of reality.

The Office:

The Office achieved global success with the original UK series and the later US series as well as multiple versions produced in countries like France and Germany. I think the key to its success is that the ‘office’ setting is something most of us can all relate to on one level of another. It is mundane but recognizable enough to provide the cynical comedic material needed for the mockumentary form. The show has proven that the concept on the whole is a transnational format.

The Office can be considered within the ‘docu-soap genre.’ The observational documentary mode strives for a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ perspective of its subjects. Yet there are clear flaws with this approach. For example, the behaviour of your subjects undoubtedly alters when there is a camera present and therefore cannot present a true reality. The Office acknowledges and represents this weakness. For example at 0.08 of the below clip, Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) looks directly at the camera before laying into an employee clearly playing to the camera and wanting to exert his authority to show the audience.

The Games:

Mockumentary often employs a dry and drawn out sense of humour with the absence of recorded laughing tracks. Take the sequence from the episode screened in the lecture. The farcical problem of the 100metre track only measuring 96metres was extended and over-worked through to the point it became ridiculous and tedious. It is the impression of unscripted and wearisome banter that typifies this series; it is as though you yourself are forced into a workplace with these incapable characters. The episodes are short in duration compared to recent long form narrative shows for example and the humour therefore is situational rather than character based and it cleverly reflects current issues in the media within the context of the episodes.

I think the success of the mockumentary form is that it allows us as viewers to laugh at the mocking of people and places where it is normally unacceptable. We recognize character traits, behaviour and situations on screen that we experience in society. My favouite example is Chris Lilley’s series Ja’mie: Private Schoolgirl where he parodies perfectly a spoiled teenager in her final year of schooling. Lilley has successfully used the mockumentary form in previous series We Can Be Heroes and Summer Heights High and Angry Boys.

[1] Campbell, Miranda (2007). ‘The mocking mockumentary and the ethics of irony”. Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education 11 (1): 53–62.

[2] Jim Collins on ‘Television and Postmodernism’ in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed. R.C.Allen (1992)