Holly loves Sacha Baron Cohen. I love Christopher Guest. So when people started asking us to talk about mockumentaries, we got right down to that. Here’s what happened.

• A definition of mockumentaries
• Christopher Guest and all his mockumentaries, and their sometimes transcendence of the mockumentary genre
• The name Holly couldn’t think of was John Michael Higgins
• The truth buried within mockumentaries
• Mockumentaries as an act of love
• The parallel between Weird Al’s music and mockumentaries
• Sacha Baron Cohen, “Borat” and whether that’s really a mockumentary because of the whole deception thing
• A “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me” “Bluff the Listener” about credulous people
• Satire picked up as news, and how that ties in to the “Borat” question
• The fake David Petraeus  book cover that got picked up by real news
• A review of my problems with “The Office,” which do not exist for “Parks and Rec”
• The similarities between documentary tropes and reality TV tropes in mockumentaries
• “Arrested Development” and how you should tell everyone if you love our show
• “The Rutles”
• “I’m Still Here” and that time Crispin Glover was on Letterman
• “Man Bites Dog”
• “Razzle Dazzle”
• Mockumentary episodes of non-mockumentary TV shows, including a very old episode of “Doogie Howser, M.D.” and a recent “Castle” and a not too long ago “Grey’s Anatomy”
• Listener mail! From Ginny, on Christmas creep
• Episode link: These Mockumentaries Go to 11

My research:

• Kocela, Christopher. “The Office as Reality Viewer Training.” Journal of Popular Film and Television. 2009.
• Steinberg, Shirley R., ed. Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education. Volume 11, Number 1, Spring-Summer 2007.
• MacLeod, Lewis. ““A Documentary-Style Film”: Borat and the Fiction/Nonfiction Question.” Narrative, Vol 19, No. 1 (January 2011).
• Waller, Gregory A. “The Great Ecstasy of the Woodsculptor Steiner: Herzog and the ‘Stylized’ Documentary.” Film Criticism.

Holly’s research:

• The Mocking Mockumentary and the Ethics of Irony
• (Part of Taboo: The Borat Issue)
• 10 Hilarious Mockumentaries That Aren’t ‘This Is Spinal Tap’
• Mockumentary v. Documentary: Josh Glick Reflects on Documentary Appreciation Salon Topic

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