Last week, we briefly unpacked how parody functions as a mode, before receiving a visit from local comedian Hannah Camilleri, who had some great advice to share about making comedy. Thinking of parody as “a mode of comedy” (Neale S & Krutnik F 1990:19) was different to how I’d thought of parody previously, having only considered it something inherently comedic, which is not the case.
Through class discussion, it became clear that parody functions as a subset of comedy, as parody is “not the combination of generic elements,” compared to comedy and other genres, “but the subordination of the conventions of one genre to those of another” (Neale S & Krutnik F 1990:19). For our parody sketch, Luciana, Claudia, and I, took the conventions of the found footage horror subgenre and exaggerated them to our best comedic ability. As Hannah touched on, a lot of the humour in comedy comes from “delivery” and “performance” (Camilleri, personal communication, 25 March 2024), so we focused mostly on how we delivered our lines rather than reading a script word for word, which hopefully aided in the feeling of realism found footage films offer.
Other conventions of found footage we parodied in our own work were mostly surrounding production – a shaky handheld camera and a poorly lit room is what we were going for and I think the final result shows exactly that. We considered using my family’s camcorder for the sketch, but it would’ve been a hassle digitalising the video cassettes in such little time and the quality probably would’ve been too terrible, even for found footage. Before we started editing, we were already thinking about what sounds would work well with each shot, and how to make Elmo as creepy as possible. Taking obnoxious horror sound effects and plugging them in at any given moment was what, I personally think, made our sketch genuinely laughable and I’m happy with what we managed to put together.
References
Neale S & Krutnik F (1990) ‘Definitions, genres, and forms’ in Popular Film and Television Comedy. London: Routledge, pp. 10–25