Beyond a joke, beyond a genre – final reflective essay and film

 

Final reflective essay

The studio prompt is ‘how can we creatively think of comedy as a mode within (and beyond) genre, form, and media?’. I believe my group’s final production Rogue communicates a range of different ideas from the studio. Firstly, I think we communicated comedy through genre in creative ways. We were very interested in the idea of genre hybridisation, though initially this was a challenging concept to navigate. Dunleavy (2008) describes genre hybridisation as “forms whose blend of conventions can be sources to generic categories which have been historically distant from each other”. Our hybrid of comedy and action are not necessarily historically distant, with films such as Johnny English and Austin Powers serving as large inspirations for us. However, I believe we explore the different conventions and tropes of action/spy films in a unique way, creatively adding in comedy (particularly satirical and situational comedy).

A concept we had to navigate was the difference between genre hybridisation and parody; a parody makes fun of a particular genre whereas genre hybridisation combines the genres together. Toplyn (2014) asserts that to create a successful parody you must study the stylistic and technological elements so you can use these comedically. We had to do this for a spy/action genre, though we had to be careful not to parody the genre the whole time, as we didn’t want that to be the focus of the film. Learning about these modes of comedy (parody, satire, genre hybridisation) and their different distinctions has definitely shifted my idea of comedy over the semester. I used to think about comedy as just one big mode of its own, and hadn’t considered the different sub-types of comedy and their unique conventions.

If I were to keep working on the project, I would enhance the incongruity and absurdity in the film. Audissino (2023) describes the incongruity theory of humour as a norm, an anticipation, or common sense being disrupted, the surprise of which creates the humour. Our original concept was the idea of the main character being out of touch with reality in some way. Whilst we remained true to this concept, I would have liked the absurdity and incongruity of the character in the ‘normal’ world to be more pronounced. I would have also liked the beginning and end which are set in 1964 to be more obvious, perhaps through props, editing, or setting.

In the first three weeks of semester, the class produced individual weekly sketches. I found this was useful to work alone while I adjusted to the class and began learning about the basic theories of comedy. Then in weeks 4-6, we formed different small groups every week to produce more detailed sketches. I was sceptical about this idea to begin with as I had enjoyed working by myself in the first three weeks, however I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I actually enjoyed collaborating with new people each week. It was useful to have more people sharing ideas that we could all help develop, and was interesting to hear others’ creative processes. Through these sketches, I found people who I worked really well with, and we formed a group for the major production.

I found the first couple of brainstorming session for the major production a bit challenging; every member of our group is so creative and have lots of ideas that it was a little difficult to narrow down an exact narrative and comedic style we wanted to explore. Though after we settled on the spy agent and time travel narrative, it was much smoother sailing from there. I had a large contribution to writing the script as that is my strength, and I was pleased with the final script. Filming was long and we shot over a few days. Our group members all had acting roles in the film (with Zoe as our lead protagonist). I’m not too keen on performing so it was daunting yet exciting to step out of my comfort zone. I feel that filming could have been easier if we had done more location scouting in pre-production. However, I enjoyed shooting; it definitely made our group closer, and we were able to collaborate and direct efficiently.

Editing was a long and intense process. I had never been part of a production this big before and didn’t fully realise the huge amount of editing that needed to be done until we got there. Two other members and I spent long days and nights in the edit suites, tediously editing and refining our footage. I didn’t have a large amount of actual ‘hands-on’ editing skills, so my main role was to watch and help inform the choices. I feel as though in this process, some members had to do an enormous amount of more work than others, which was disappointing but made me extremely proud of the editing teams’ colossal effort. I couldn’t be prouder of our final film, and this whole experience has given me plenty of new skills that I can take with me in other productions.

 

References

Audissino, E. (2023), “From Dionysia to Hollywood: An Introduction to Comedy’s Long (and Bumpy) Road” in The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema, London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 8.

Dunleavy T (2008) ‘Hybridity in TV Sitcom: The Case of Comedy Verité’, Flow, Victoria University of Wellington, available from https://www.flowjournal.org/2008/12/hybridity-in-tv-sitcom-the-case-of-comedy-verite%C2%A0%C2%A0trisha-dunleavy%C2%A0%C2%A0victoria-university-of-wellington%C2%A0/

Toplyn, J. (2014), “Parody Sketches” in Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV, New York: Twenty Lane Media, pp. 239–261.

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