This Week of the comedy studio we focused on Genre Hybridisation. Looking back at other weeks, this week was challenging in comparison. Genre Hybridisation is when a piece of media that focuses on a specific genre and then enhances this slightly with comedic themes and elements, it is not supposed to rise full of comedy or else then it would just be a parody(this can also not involve comedy as well). During this week of class we watched the documentary film ‘American Movie’ which follows the story of a cinephile named Mark Borchardt and his passion of cinema in the making of his own projects. This documentary is special because through the editing, it provides foreground into a hidden genre that is outside of the documentary sort of style, which was comedy. Through the reading ‘Documentary Comedy’ by Jason Middleton, he explored on the idea of “cutting on the absurd” (Middleton, 2002, page 57) in these types of comedic documentaries, for the audience to gain laughter out of a documentary, ‘American Movie’ cuts from scenario into interview immediately to provide “a juxtaposition that contributes to the film’s overall argument” (Middleton, 2002, page 57), this idea is promoted in the documentary to give higher emphasis on the unique dialogue of characters such as Marks friend Mike Schank. The interesting part of my groups media artefact this week is that we hybridised the drama genre by including a divorce, a very hard time to then introduce the comic form at the end of the piece significantly to then provide a punchline. We attempted to use dramatic style cinematography like shots from ‘Succession’ and also a tight little room to signify the emotions in the room. By making this sketch, i think comedy’s relationship can be applied anywhere in any genre and ours obviously does the same by possibly not realising it is a comedy all until the end, which was our aim. We also included a hint or two as well to slowly pave the way. I think in these past three weeks of working collaboratively, with more people, more than one brain, my comedic sensibility has improved week after week, i started off dragging myself to think of ideas and realised we need to work together to go step by step in a process which would then gradually improve not only myself but everyone’s comedic way of thinking.

References:

Middleton, J. (2002) ‘Documentary Comedy’, in Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy 104(1), pp. 55–66.