Sketch: Reaction Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxHbgMgsxNE
We explored the concept of parody this week. While this concept was not unfamiliar to me, I learned a lot more about how to implement it into my own media artefacts. The highlight of the week was undoubtedly the screening of Hannah Camilleri’s series ‘Little Shits’ in class. I thoroughly enjoyed getting an insight into how it was written and produced. This gave me an idea of the kind of work that goes into crafting comedy media and I’m excited to do this for the rest of this semester.
While working on our sketch this week, I referred to Toplyn’s nine steps to creating a parody sketch. We chose to parody reaction youtubers who most of the time fail to contribute anything of their own and rely heavily on the media they’re reacting to. One of Toplyn’s steps is to ‘add an angle to the video you’re parodying.’ By incorporating clips of someone documenting the mundane activities of the YouTuber, we gradually escalated the absurdity, eventually leading to filming drug deals. This heightened the comedic effect and also highlighted the critique of the conventions of reaction videos. We used Toplyn’s steps like studying the stylistic elements of the media being parodied. In this case, it was the over-the-top editing and heavily bass boosted music they use in their intros and outros.
Parody was an interesting mode of comedy to base a sketch on. I found that creating a parody sketch was relatively easier than other sketches I’ve had to do, since it lays down a good starting point and framework for a sketch. Building layers and elevating this basic structure is a unique and rewarding form of creative expression.
References:
- Toplyn, J. (2014), “Parody Sketches.” in Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV, New York: Twenty Lane Media, pp. 239–261.