This Week’s Sketch ^^

This week’s focus was that of a hybridization sketch, a look at how to indirectly portray reality comedy through modulating the content instead of outright making it funny. I can admit, it took a bit of time to wrap my head around the subtleness of this idea. Much of this comes from layers; a base foundation of a fairly normal piece of content, be it a documentary or whatever, where the funny comes from it being added onto in some way, via juxtaposition or a range of applications.

When it came to producing this sketch, taking feedback from last weeks, we kept it simple. A grounded, doco-style day in the life of an RMIT student with slight delusions of grandeur. On a technical level this was a fairly simple production as we kept our cards tight and close, to smash it out as our group had some exterior time constraints. Adhering to a realistic documentary theme, the sketch was meant to be far more minimalistic and reserved than our previous experiences with these sketches, so that certainly kept us on our toes. Much of the humour came in the editing room, as visual juxtapositions and a few funny lines meant we might have pushed the comedy angle a bit too far into parody. Even still, as Middleton (2002) would label the format, the ‘offbeat character study’ perspective of the sketch is still very much present.

‘Cutting on the absurd’, as the Middleton reading put it was an engaging part of this task, as we shot more footage than we needed, so in the editing booth, there was a lot of potential jokes or cute gags to pull. We were heavily influenced by American Movie (1999) which we tried to simulate as a prime example of outlandish characters unaware of how they sound. In all, the delicateness of reality comedy is such a fine art, using editing especially, that it almost beckons for a harder-hitting joke. The editing process was wrought with times were we had to wind it back because we were going too far. Still good though!

Citations:
Middleton J (2002) Documentary Comedy, Media International Australia, Accessed 17 April 2024. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/ielapa.418026005601603
Chris Smith (1999) American Movie, Sony Pictures Classics, USA.