Mockumentary

A mockumentary is a work of fiction that is presented in the style of a nonfiction documentary, usually to “mock” or satirize its subject matter. The term itself is a portmanteau of mock and documentary.

Characteristics and styles

Like documentaries, most mockumentaries have taken the form of a film or television series, but there are also mockumentary podcasts and radio programs. Documentaries and news reports differ from mockumentaries in the way they feature real people, including journalists and subject matter experts, and rely on authentic interviews with unscripted dialogue or recordings of factual events. Mockumentaries usually employ actors and use staged or fake footage and scripted or improvised dialogue.

Mockumentaries encompass many narrative styles and techniques, much like the works they mimic. Common mockumentary styles include:

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• cinéma vérité: an improvisational style of filmmaking that uses actual conversations, interviews, and opinions and shows people in everyday situations with authentic dialogue and naturalness of action. Examples: The Office (2001–03) and This Is Spinal Tap (1984).
• found footage: a technique in which some or all of a narrative film’s shots are presented as if they were recordings of nonfiction events that have been discovered and relayed to the audience with little or no mediation or alteration. Example: The Blair Witch Project (1999).
• fake news broadcast: a style that mimics and spoofs the reporting of a breaking or investigative news report and may include “on-the-spot” interviews or scenarios performed by actors posing as reporters and/or interviewees. Example: Orson Welles’s 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s science fiction novel The War of the Worlds.

Notably, some mockumentaries blur the lines between reality and fakery. The 2006 comedy film Borat, for example, follows British actor Sacha Baron Cohen posing as the title character, a racist, antisemitic, homophobic, sexist Kazakh reporter. As he travels the United States in search of former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson (who was in on the joke), he has numerous embarrassing encounters with everyday Americans (who were not in on the joke).

Similarly, in the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night (1964), which purports to depict two days in the life of the Fab Four at the height of Beatlemania, the band members are, of course, playing themselves. Yet most of the scenes are scripted and intended to be tongue in cheek, conveying the musicians’ irreverent sense of humor.

History and examples

Film historians generally credit Luis Buñuel’s Las Hurdes (1933; Land Without Bread) as the first film to feature mockumentary elements. An anarchist-funded travelogue about life in an impoverished region of western Spain, Land Without Bread presents many unsettling scenes of poverty and hardship, such as a donkey being swarmed by bees and a dead infant in a crib. However, some of the scenes are known to have been staged or faked, leading some critics to wonder whether other parts of the film were bogus or embellished.

Other notable documentaries of the time that featured actors in staged scenes include Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934), a look at life among the islanders of Ireland’s Aran Islands.

Another early prototype of the modern mockumentary is Welles’s radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds during his radio program The Mercury Theatre on the Air. Using the format of a news broadcast, Welles announced an attack on New Jersey by invaders from Mars. Some listeners who missed the introduction that explained it was a work of fiction mistook the broadcast for actual news coverage.

The modern era of mockumentaries began in the second half of the 20th century. Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary (1967), a metafictional satire of cinéma vérité, is called by some the first modern mockumentary. Woody Allen’s pseudo-prison documentary Take the Money and Run (1969), about an inept thief, and his surreal comedy Zelig (1983), about a “human chameleon,” were both groundbreaking films that showed tries began in the second half of the late 20th century. Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary (1967), a metafictional satire of cineéma veériteé, is called by some the first modern mockumentary. Woody Allen’s pseudo-prison documentary Take the Money and Run (1969), about an inept thief, and his surreal comedy Zelig (1983), about a “human chameleon,” were both groundbreaking films that showed the potential for fake documentaries.

In 1984 the landmark mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap was released. Directed by Rob Reiner and written by Reiner, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer, all of whom star in the film, This Is Spinal Tap mercilessly skewers rock documentaries by tracking the ludicrous mishaps and pathetic creative demise of a has-been heavy metal band. The movie’s tone, humor, structure, and style influenced many mockumentaries to come, and the filmmakers (particularly Guest) revisited the format in such films as Waiting for Guffman (1996), Best in Show (2000), and A Mighty Wind (2003).

Another groundbreaking late-20th-century mockumentary is The Blair Witch Project, a hoax horror film written and directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. Whereas Allen’s Zelig uses actual period film footage that Allen and his film editor, Susan E. Morse, painstakingly altered, The Blair Witch Project uses footage shot by the actors playing three student filmmakers who “vanish” in the woods of Maryland while investigating and shooting a documentary about local folklore. Myrick and Sánchez also built a realistic looking website and an online message board to promote the movie and to convince audiences that what they were seeing were factual events caught on found footage.

Mockumentaries also found their way to television. Pioneering TV mockumentaries include The Canadian Conspiracy (1986), an “exposé” of a plot to infiltrate the United States by the entertainment industry via Canadian actors including Eugene Levy, William Shatner, and Lorne Greene; Ghostwatch (1992), a BBC production about an alleged ghost haunting; and People Like Us (1999–2001), an early reality TV-style comedy from the BBC.

Perhaps the most influential TV mockumentary was the British series The Office, created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. Using the pretense of a documentary film crew, the show follows the excruciatingly dull workday experiences of a paper supply company in a drab office in a bleak industrial estate in Slough, England. The surprise hit show ran for two seasons and spawned a U.S. version and other workplace mockumentary series, including Parks and Recreation (2009–15), Abbott Elementary (2021– ), and The Paper (2025– ).

Other notable TV mockumentaries send up family life (Modern Family), horror and the supernatural (What We Do in the Shadows), and even documentaries themselves (Documentary Now!).