Week 6: Genre Hybridisation Sketch Here
This week, we looked not at forms of comedy, but how comedy is tied into genre, specifically documentary comedy. In class, we looked at ‘American Movie’ (Dir. Smith, 1999), and how it implemented editing and cuts to create comedy out of absurdity. This was something we looked at throughout class, and how you can time cuts when the dialogue or action goes in a direction where it would be absurd to suddenly cut, but that sudden cut-off is what creates the comedy. For a documentary format, I think it is also so essential to have a subject who creates comedy with their actions and words so there is something to edit. The making of comedy within a documentary was also discussed by Middleton, J. (2002), which goes into more depth about what they call ‘cutting on the absurd’.
Inspired by ‘American Movie’, our group wanted to create an awkward documentary with a quirky subject. We focused on Sam, who already had the improv skills and slightly odd character that he could amplify for what we needed. Given the time restraint, we couldn’t do a whole lot of interviews, so we decided to try create the comedy in the B-Roll and the dialogue of what is being said. We wanted to attempt to create a contrast in what was being said and what was being shown.
In terms of comedy in other genres, it is a much more nuanced situation than something that is intended to be fully comedic from the beginning. Having to try new techniques to tie comedy in was much more complex than having one funny situation/premise. Whilst we only practiced using some techniques in the documentary format, I wonder how fitting in comedy to other genres would be, particularly something like action or horror.
I feel as if my own comic sensibility has developed massively over the last 3 weeks, and felt most proud of the parody and satire sketches I created collaboratively, as I felt our work responded to the prompts very closely. For the final project, I would love to create some sort of parody, whether it be a mockumentary or a sitcom subversion.
References
- Middleton, J. (2002), “Documentary Comedy”, Media International Australia, 104(1), pp. 55–66.