Mockumentaries are, in their own way, a genre of the virtual worlds and alternate reality games that we specialize in. For North American audiences, I suppose that Christopher Guest’s work or “This is Spinal Tap” are among the best-known examples.
I love this stuff. Mockumentaries count among my favorite “practical jokes” because of their delicate blend of absurdity and plausibility. As a kid, I used to torture my long-suffering mom with stories involving a special mix of ridiculous bullsh*t (i.e., a neighboring county being colonized by menacing Druids) and detailed, realistic elements that would leave her very unsure as to whether or not my stories were true. Making the little details boringly believable - dropping the name of local city councilperson or mixing in some mundane real-life issue with the story - made it hard for her to separate the narrative wheat from the chaff. My mother saves a very unique kind of exasperation for these moments (confession: I still do it, albeit rarely). Oh how I savor her all-too-visible temptation to believe me, along with her knowledge of my mendacious ways…
So I was pretty thrilled to stumble upon the work of Australia’s Chris Lilley, and I apologize if I’m behind your surely very steep pop cultural curves, dear readers. He has been rocking Australia - and global premium cable audiences - since 2005 with two great mockumentary TV series, We Can Be Heroes: Finding the Australian of the Year and Summer Heights High. Lilley does all the main characters in both shows.
It’s the kind of humor that has us laughing at our own ostentatious self-righteousness, hypocrisy, and petty mean-spiritedness, but does it all with a huge and very sympathetic heart. It’s also a really interesting snapshot of contemporary Australian pop culture. It’s all great, but my favorite character by far is “Ja’mie King” - she is in both series. She’s summed up by Wikipedia as a girl who “lives in the North Shore of Sydney, New South Wales, but was born in South Africa. Ja’mie is a 16-year-old girl and has sponsored 85 Sudanese children for Global Vision (a fictional organization parodying World Vision), which gave her the National Record. Due to her work of raising money Global Vision decided to make her the ‘face’ of their organization. Ja’mie also does the 40 Hour Famine twice a week which she says not only helps raise money but ‘keeps me looking hot.’”
Ja’mie’s not a bad person, she’s just really, uh, confident and/or self-absorbed. You can find her all over YouTube, but if you have very delicate sensibilities about, well, all the things people get sensitive about, consider yourself warned.
