Comedy verite

Comedy verite or Comedy vérité is a television format that presents fictional Comedy series in the staged form of a Docusoap. This is a technical term from the field of television studies, introduced in order to be able to make more precise distinctions and differentiations between evening-filling mockumentary-films and 'mockumentary series' with an average episode length of 30 minutes. While mockumentary films play with the idea that what is shown could be true, mockumentary-series or Comedy Verite leave no doubt about their own fictionality.

Stylistic features

Humorous situations and characters are presented as if they were spontaneous and real observations of everyday life at first sight. This means that there is usually a high use of emphasized hand-held camera, emphasized because the recordings are interspersed with Pannings, Whip zooms and 'tracked' Autofocus, as well as occasional covert filming. These alternate with interview-scenes in the style of Talking Heads, as we know them from Television's pundits.

This way Comedy Verite refers to a series with episodes of up to half an hour in length that combines to the specifications of a classic Sitcom in terms of narration and character constellation, but on a formal level gives the impression that it is a Docusoap. In Comedy verite, the clichés and stereotypes of classic Sitcoms are parodied.^[1] The television scholar John T. Caldwell also judged this as follows: "[Th]is 'sitcom' is shot like a 'documentary that critiques 'reality television'"^[2]

Word origin (etymology)

The term Comedy Verite is a compound word of comedy and vérité (French for "truth") to emphasize the fusion of Situation comedy with Cinema vérité. Cinema vérité stands for a French documentary style of the 1950s and 60s in which the filmmaker constantly intervenes in the filming process and thus stands for stylized productions, interactions between filmmaker and subject, and even moments of deliberate provocation. Television scholar Brett Mills coined this term in 2004 based on an analysis of the series The Office.

Examples

In addition to The Office other well-known examples of this include series such as Arrested Development, Modern Family, Parks and Recreation, The Comeback, What We Do in the Shadows, Abbott Elementary, St. Denis Medical and The Paper (2025 TV series).

Further reading

• Mills, Brett (2004): „Comedy verite: contemporary sitcom form", Screen, Volume 45, Issue 1, Spring 2004: pp. 63–78.
• Thompson, Ethan (2007): „Comedy Verité? The Observational Documentary Meets the Televisual Sitcom", The Velvet Light Trap, No. 60, Fall 2007: pp. 63–72.
• Heaney, Dermot (2016): "Taboo infringement and layered comedy: a linguistic analysis of convolution in Gervais and Merchant's Life's Too Short", Comedy Studies, 7(2), pp 152–168.
• Duncan, Pansy (2017): "Joke work: comic labor and the aesthetics of the awkward", Comedy Studies, 8(1), pp. 36–56.
• Marx, Nick (2022): "Home Economics: Sitcom Capitalism, Conservative Comedy, and Media Conglomeration in Post-Network Television", Communication, Culture and Critique, Volume 15, Issue 1, March 2022, pp. 21–35.