This week’s mode centred around satirical comedy. Whilst parody typically pokes fun at a certain aesthetic conventions , satire tends to draw and highlight social ones (Neale, Krunick, 1990). In Neale and Krunick’s reading from week 4, they state that the purpose of satire is to “mock and attack” certain ideologies and social norms.
Our group decided to critique on harmful diet culture, and the lengths people go to in order to “remain healthy”. Each group member chose an extreme diet method. The areas included carnivore, intermediate fasting, supplement abuser, and the “locally sourced” fad diet. We decided to set the sketch in a lunch room scene, that way everyone could introduce their latest diet craze. In doing so, I think we somewhat unintentionally criticised toxic coworker dynamics through the way each one attempted to one up the other by comparing their extreme diets, and the notion of competitiveness is typically present within a work environment. This feeds into how people tend to jump on to the latest diet trend, disregarding what they may have heard prior in terms of health benefits.
In one of this week’s readings, “A Preposterous Life”, Simon Caterson describes that the “most effective satire blurs irretrievably the line between fact and fiction” (Caterson 2005). Whilst I think our exaggerated portrayal of specific diets allowed us to critique on disordered eating and how it has been normalised by diet culture in a satirical manner, I believe that if we rewrote it in a way where the sketch emits more of a passive aggressive tone, specifically where the characters are comparing diets, and additionally having the characters be less overemphasised, it’ll highlight the jokes slightly more. The use of a passive aggressive tone could also help play into the realism of the sketch, as we would be portraying the characters to have more of a toxic mindset that one may own when on an extreme fad diet, and the competitiveness that comes with it.
Link to Sketch:
References:
Caterson, S. (2005), “A Preposterous Life“, Griffith Review, 8 (June 2005), pp. 186–192.