This week’s concepts focused on genre hybridisation and documentary and reality comedy. In their reading “Comic Investigation and Genre-Mixing…”, Leslie Speed states how the typical conventions of genre hybridisation , specifically documentary comedy , revolve around how they use “performance reflexively to highlight spectacle”, with majority of its humour emitting from moments of awkwardness and change of cultural values. If I am being honest, I did somewhat struggle with grappling the concept as whenever I was trying to come up with ideas for this weeks sketch, I felt as though it was leaning towards parody as opposed to adding comedy into a specific genre, however I think my group and I somewhat achieved genre hybridisation.
Whilst for this task we didn’t necessarily have to comment on documentary, my group and I decided to film a true crime documentary of the Old Melbourne Gaol, with the producer (played by me), knowing nothing about the prison, but still tried to reveal it’s secrets. Relating back to the reading, I like to think “moments of akwardness” were created through dialogue and my general persona. When editing the rough cut, I tried to mimic editing styles of older documentaries, however when researching this, I found their opening sequences to be quite humorous (please see reference below), which is due to quick cuts of the supposedly haunted location paired with ‘scary’ music, and on top of that, having this weird blue filter displayed over some of the shots. Having said that, I did try to implement some of these techniques, but for me, this part felt more like a parody rather than staying true to the material, even though I technically was. I think the first half of the sketch worked really well in terms of combining documentary with comedy, especially as we were shooting it with the intention of creating an accurate documentary. Whilst I somewhat enjoyed the sketch, I do think that the latter half leaned more towards parody, especially through the section where I am improving at the end, and it cuts to moments of the interview, ultimately juxtaposing each other’s responses. also the part where the documentary halts in tempo as I interrupt the interviewee because he said something I didn’t agree with.
If I had the opportunity to recreate this, I would edit it in a way that the documentary has a slow build up , that way it could appear to be more authentic, I would also remove the “editor’s beef” that they have with the host, but keep in the budget cut section and of course, fix audio levels.
What have you learned about your own comedic sensibility over the past three weeks of collaborative making? What kind of work are you interested in producing for the major project?
I did enjoy creating all three hybridisation sketches. I do believe parody was probably the easiest to produce however I would like to try creating another project that is either satire or a mixed-genre situation.
Inspiration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbjHZdD5eCs -An actual horror documentary, took reference from the first minute
References:
Speed, L. (2020). “Comic Investigation and Genre-Mixing: The Television Docu-Comedies of Lawrence Leung, Judith Lucy and Luke McGregorLinks to an external site.“, Continuum, 34(5), pp. 690–702.
Link to Sketch: