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Cinéma-vérité style films and television shows

Many film directors of the 1960s and later adopted use of the handheld camera, techniques and cinéma vérité styles for their fiction films based on screenplays and actors. They often had actors use improvisation to try to get a more spontaneous quality to the takes. Influential examples include director John Cassavetes, who broke ground with his film Faces.^[1]

The techniques of cinéma vérité were also readily adapted to use in TV fiction programs, such as Homicide: Life on the Street, The X-Files' COPS episode,^[2] Sanctuary, Friday Night Lights, NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues, Battlestar Galactica, The Thick Of It, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Louie, Lost, Arrested Development, Reno 911!, Trailer Park Boys, various episodes of the Law & Order franchise, as well as both the UK and American versions of The Office. Documentary series are less common, but include:

• An American Family
• COPS
• The Real World
• Trauma: Life in the E.R.
• American High
• The First 48

One might argue that a pioneer of this style in television was Orson Welles in his 1955 program for British television, Around the World with Orson Welles.

Comedy Verité

“Comedy verité” is a term first coined by Brett Mills to refer to the exploitation of the documentary cinéma vérité style specifically in sitcoms for comedic effect.^[3] Comedy verité is most easily identifiable by the use of a handheld camera, which gives the sitcom the sense of “truth” like it does in cinéma vérité documentaries. It is often filmed in on-street locations rather than in studio sets and does not use a studio audience or laugh track.^[4] Comedy verité may also include character voice over narration, like it does in Arrested Development.

One of the benefits of using comedy verité is that it does not use studio lighting, the multi-camera studio set up, or a studio audience and therefore has a quicker pace, both in terms of comedic pace and in terms of production speed.^[5] Also, unlike the traditional sitcom which uses well-rehearsed and well-timed camera movements to ensure that every take is essentially the same, comedy verité allows the sitcom performers more room for improvisation.^[5] A combination of the improvised style and the use of handheld cameras often gives the comedy verité sitcom the feel of being “real” or even entirely improvised. However, this is rarely the case. Usually episodes contain dialogue that is written to sound improvised, though the scripts often include places where plot is less important and performers may improvise new lines. In order to create the sense of spontaneity in some episodes, the episode is unrehearsed, not unscripted. Rebecca Front, an actress in the popular British comedy verité sitcom The Thick of It, stressed this aspect of comedy verité when she tweeted, “it was unrehearsed, but NOT improvised. Brilliantly written by the writing team, as ever.”^[6]

Comedy verité exploits the cinéma vérité style for comedic effect by introducing an absurd subject into the sober form of documentary.^[5] Oftentimes, the subject of comedy verité is insignificant or incompetent. However, their story is being told through cinéma vérité which is usually used to tell serious stories or truth, such as stories about war. The incongruity between a high art form and low art subject then creates much of the inherent comedy in comedy verité.

List of Sitcoms with Comedy Verité

• Arrested Development
• Curb Your Enthusiasm
• Louie
• The Thick of It
• Trailer Park Boys
• Veep

See also list of mockumentaries.

See Also

• Docufiction
• Mockumentary
• Direct Cinema
• Documentary
• Sitcom
• Comedy

Situation Comedy

A situation comedy, usually called a sitcom, is a type of comedy program. Sitcoms were first on radio, before television was invented, but are now on television and are a large part of the programs shown. Sitcoms started on television in the 1950s as a cheap type of television program to make. They were cheap because they usually used the same characters in the same places on every episode. For example, many shows use a group of friends who spend a lot of time in a home, a workplace, or a certain city or town.^[7] They use the same situations in many episodes. That is why they are called "situation comedies." Usually, the stories in 1950s and 1960s sitcoms were about family problems, and the episode was used to teach the audience a lesson about what was right and what was wrong.^[8]

Style and Structure

Situation comedies are often filmed indoors on a set designed specifically for the show. They are usually filmed in front of an audience, or group of people. Sometimes, sitcoms will also use a laughtrack, or the sounds of people laughing that can be played after every joke. That is why you can hear people laughing at the jokes on many sitcoms.

Now, there are still many sitcoms that look like the 1950s sitcom, but there are also some newer sitcoms that do not look like the old type of sitcom. Some sitcoms film outdoors, so they look more real. Some sitcoms do not film in front of an audience, so you do not hear people laughing at the jokes. These types of sitcoms are cheap because they do not need to build as many sets or record the audience laughing. These sitcoms can also tell more jokes because they do not need to wait for the audience to stop laughing before they tell their next joke.^[7]

Sitcoms usually have one new episode every week. The collection of episodes in one year are called a season. Sitcoms will make as many seasons as they can until they are no longer popular. Most sitcoms air for four or five seasons. Some very popular sitcoms may have ten or more seasons. The number of episodes in each season and the length of these episodes are different depending on the country and the type of channel it is shown on. For example, in America, most sitcoms have 20 to 24 episodes in a season. Each episode is 22 minutes long. However, in the United Kingdom, most sitcoms have six episodes in a season. Each episode is 28 minutes long.^[9]

Humor

Sitcoms tell many different types of jokes. There are jokes that people say, called verbal jokes. These types of jokes usually use “puns.” A pun is a “play on words” or a word game where you use one word with two different meanings or two words that sound the same to tell a joke.^[10] There are also jokes that people make with their bodies, or physical jokes. One type of joke is called “slapstick comedy”. Slapstick is when a character does something silly with his body to make the audience laugh.^[11] For example, a character slips on a banana peel and falls down. The character then becomes embarrassed. The audience laughs because it is funny when someone falls and is embarrassed. Finally, there are genre jokes, called parodies, when a sitcom pretends to be another type of movie or TV show. For example, a sitcom may start the episode with the same way Star Wars starts, but change the words to make it about their show.^[11]

See Also

• List of sitcoms
• Comedy
• Television

Additional Reading

• 'Sitcoms Online'
• 'Television Comedy Bibliography'

References