Abstract
Mockumentary Comedy begins with a chapter that puts forward the view that comedy has been neglected as a key mode of mockumentary expression in existing scholarship, and that definitions of what constitutes a mockumentary text appear increasingly narrow as the form continues to evolve. This chapter positions the book within the existing critical field and suggests that by studying comedy, and particularly the comic performance of both actors and of the stylistic features of the documentary, mockumentary comedy makes visible the constructed aspects of non-fiction forms of audio-visual media, and the performances of public figures in everyday life. The case is also made for focusing on the rock star and the politician as case studies elsewhere in the book.
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Notes
- 1.
Letter from Leonard Miall to David Wheeler, 5 April 1957, BBC WAC T32/1,218/1: ‘Panorama: tx.57.04’.
- 2.
‘Telegrams to Mr. Richard Dimbleby relating to remarks about spaghetti in Panorama—2.4.57’, ibid.
- 3.
Surprisingly, Craig Hight does not make a single mention of The Thick of It in his book-length study of the television mockumentary. Roscoe and Hight’s book was published before the show was first broadcast.
- 4.
I’m Alan Partridge is the first show to exhibit writer and producer Armando Iannucci’s mockumentary style which he claims (in the 2009 documentary This is Spinal Tap: Up to 11) is directly influenced by the mockumentary style of Spinal Tap . Partridge (Steve Coogan) himself, in the in-character commentary on the DVD release of I’m Alan Partridge, suggests that the show is not a documentary but a re-enactment of things that really happened to him, filmed in a documentary style (Partridge 2002).
- 5.
The omission of the apostrophe in the title of Dont Look Back is deliberate. As Dave Saunders argues, it ‘exhibits a typically counter-cultural disregard for formalised language’ (2007: 59) and Pennebaker himself has suggested that it was an attempt to ‘simplify the language’ (Sounes 2002: 208) in line with the experimental nature of direct cinema documentary filmmaking. This has also become the accepted way of referring to the film in academic work. See for example Saunders (2010) and Beattie (2016).
- 6.
- 7.
It also won the 1966 Academy Award for Best Documentary which poses its own set of questions.
- 8.
To these we could also add episodes of C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation (2005–2015), The Simpsons (1989–) and The West Wing (1999–2006) among many others.
- 9.
Given Linehan’s statement, it is ironic that the initial treatment of the sitcom Father Ted, written in 1990, was for a one-off mockumentary comedy. In Small, Far Away: The World of Father Ted, a 2011 documentary on the making of the show, Declan Lowney, one of its directors, acknowledged that it was a script that ‘was never going to be commissioned by anybody’, perhaps signalling that in hindsight 1990 was slightly too early for a mainstream mockumentary project. In the end, comedy producer Geoffrey Perkins suggested it be turned into a standard sitcom.
- 10.
For an account of how this works in practice, see Morson’s (1979) work on framing in Orson Welles’s ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast.
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Wallace, R. (2018). The Fine Line between Stupid and Clever: An Introduction. In: Mockumentary Comedy. Palgrave Studies in Comedy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77848-8_1
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