During week 4 we covered the topic of parody, the reading by Neale and Krutnik describes Parody as a mode which “draws on and highlights aesthetic conventions” (Neale and Krutnik 1990) in which a subject can be replicated in a way that draws comedy from following or violating conventions of the subject being parodied.
The Toplyn reading introduces a looser definition of ”a funny imitation of work that typically wasn’t intended to be funny” (Toplyn 2014). As this was a group project, Yusuf, Saskia and myself decided on creating a parody of a group zoom presentation, seen in our use of the aesthetic conventions of awkward stilted delivery contained to video chat bubbles, slides of varying coherence presented earnestly each drawing on the expectedly familiar feeling of presenting a group project over a zoom call.
This sketch was entirely based on a meme I saw as a teenager which consists of “Dead*** spent 2 hours doing project on Youth in Asia then find out it’s supposed to be on Euthanasia” in a snapchat message over an image of a PowerPoint presentation captioned “Youth in Asia”. Whilst the joke at its core is simplistic wordplay, the scale of the incongruence implied has always struck me as a poignantly funny comedy of error.
To combine this joke with a form of media I chose to replicate the obscure but relatable experience of presenting over a zoom call, as the aesthetic conventions would be easy to replicate effectively and provided an exceptional comic frame to deliver this gag. I created a storyboard which allowed my group members to understand their roles, and they self recorded footage of them improvising dialogue and reactions based off of the plot outlined. This meant editing together the footage was extremely easy as there was a clear narrative throughline to replicate.