BBC 3 Comedy and Target Audience Research
Comedy Theory and Types Research
There no universally agreed upon explanation for what is funny. One of the many videos I watched, “How To Be Funny – Easily Visualised” by Improvement Pill (2016), said the following, which I agree with,
” Humour is one of those things that is easy to point out, but kind of hard to explain.”
When I was younger, it took a long time for me to understand why some things are funny, and I would ask my parents to explain. I would say “I don’t get it, why is that funny?” and they would do their best to explain. These days I show my parents memes, and they are the ones who say, “I don’t get it, why is that funny?”. There are things that my friends and I find hilarious that my parents just don’t get.
When I did my pitch, these are some the key things I said:
My message – “We need more joy”. This is from the BBC’s creative brief on their commissioning page of their website. To be fair, it is for their factual programs, but I think that right now, with all the stress of Covid-19 around, it is as true for fiction as it is for factual content.
I want to create a comedy/drama short film that entertains people and makes them smile or even laugh – we need more Joy.
My Idea
I want the film I make to be potentially part of a series of 6 comedy/drama shorts, all about 6-10 minutes long, all under the overall title of “The Wrong Hat”. The “Hat” motif gives it the “Gareth Edwards Twist”
I have over 50 trilbies so I will use various of my trilbies as the hats in this film, which also ties it in to my brand of always wearing trilby hats.
These could be shown on TV, maybe scheduled on BBC4. Or on BBC Three Comedy and on BBC iPlayer, and later also be viewable on YouTube. Other areas I have heard about but need to investigate are Amazon, BFI Channel, Sky Arts and Netflix, all of whom are currently encouraging young independent film makers.
When I was researching, I found out that what we find funny depends on many things including our culture and particularly our age. This is why it is important to have an idea of your target audience, and for Commissioning Departments like the BBC Three Comedy Commissioning Department to know what age they are targeting, since it makes the difference between success or failure of a program. Across the UK, and across the world, we are all different generations, which is why BBC Three specifically know that their target audience’s age range is 16-24 year-olds, which is what I am aiming this Year 2 FMP version of my film at, and is a reason that I regard BBC Three as a good place to be aiming my film at.
I feel that 16-24 year olds will get my humour, since that is obviously my age range. I think that many of us also have grown up with programs about Time Travel and shows like Rick and Morty are very popular with my age range. Also Doctor Who. As part of my Primary Research, I had several discussions with people to find out their ideas about Time Travel. I didn’t do this as a survey since previous Primary Research for Units on this course has shown me that for surveys people are more likely to take the time to answer them if you keep the amount of writing you want them to do short. They are happy with multiple choice, but when I talked to people one-to-one I got much more detailed answers than they would write down. Pretty much all the people I chatted with had ideas about what you could or couldn’t do if you Time Travel. Many discussed it with reference to Doctor Who, the various Terminator films and Rick and Morty (although technically in Rick and Morty it is dimension hopping).
The main take-away is that Time Travel is a popular subject with my target audience. BBC Three want subjects that are “timely and contemporary”. My Primary Research showed me that my contemporaries find Time Travel a contemporary subject.
Offensive Humour
My friend’s Dad always called Harry Potter “Harry Snotter”. My friend and his Dad found this hilarious, and I didn’t get why at the time. Now I can explain it from my research as being a bit rude, and people often find things that are a little rude, but harmless, funny. This is a very personal type of humour since it depends on your definition of harmless. I don’t think anyone could take offence at “Harry Snotter”, but there are quite a lot of older jokes that would now be regarded as sexist or racist. I’m not going to list any here, because I don’t want to cause offence, but you can probably guess which type, and there is quite a lot of discussion around now about whether they are appropriate or not. They are very split by age. I often don’t get why they are funny, which is interesting, and probably because my age group are much more aware of discrimination these days and about respecting people’s differences. Is it true comedy if you are hurting someone when you say it? It is certainly a Violation, but I wouldn’t say it is Benign. You could say it is a fine line, but it is also a line that is moving. You really do have to know your audience and whether they would find something funny or not. I think that my target age range have a much greater sensitivity to not offending certain areas of the community, and are also more accepting of, for example, Sam in my film having a boyfriend rather than a girlfriend. From general conversation, my age range, 16-24 want to see this reflected more in stories as nothing out of the ordinary.
British vs American Humour
Regarding different cultures, as I say, culture affects what we think of as funny. I included a question in my Primary Research Survey about whether people preferred British or American humour and if they had a preference then why? Almost half of the 94 people who replied said they preferred British humour, and half said both are good.
This is not surprising since most, but not all of the people who replied are British. However, a few are American and I found their responses interesting.
“As an American, i appreciate both types of humour. American comedies are usually more crass and British comedies are so… British”
“I love to laugh so a good comedy is appreciated! Even though I am American and like American comedy, I prefer British comedy. I just like the humor. American humor is very straightforward. British humor is often dry and witty. There is a lot of innuendo and subtext to British humor. However, I really didn’t like Benny Hill at all.”
There does seem to be an impression overall about British humour being more witty and American humour going more for straightforward one-liners. For example:
“I like american comedy as it seems quite upbeat and less serious, but british comedy is good too as it’s often relatable and more sarcastic”
“British comedy is more witty and if done well can be much more funny. However there is little margin for error and many low quality British ones are just shoddy which is where the American ones pick up.”
But a few people were from Europe and English is not their first language, so I can see a lesson there too.
“I’m not native English speaker so I may not be really get the difference between British and American comedy”
That is that sometimes as English speakers we can assume that certain subtleties of the English language are accessible to all our audience, whereas if English is not your first language, then you may not get the joke, so that is a reason to remember about visual jokes and also creating humour by the way you shoot and edit something.
I think this comment sums it up well.
“US and UK comedy styles are different, so both can be funny depending on context.”
But these perceived differences due to culture show why it is very important to know your target audience. Even within Britain we have many different cultures, and Commissioning Departments such as that at BBC 3 will spend a lot of time researching their target audience since they want to provide content that their target audience wants to watch, so that they have successful viewing figures.
BBC and BBC Three
Right now there are some very exciting opportunities on BBC and BBC Three for Comedy and my age range. This is from the BBC Three Commissioning Page.
Also from BBC Three:
As I have mentioned in my Diversity section, I have written my script so that the characters could be played by a diverse range of age, race, sex, gender etc. My actors are based on my availability during Covid. If I was going to submit this idea to BBC Three, I would emphasise the flexibility in my film to cast diverse actors, and also explain my idea about how diversity shouldn’t always drive the plot, sometimes diversity is best presented as simply normal, and my script/film gives the opportunity for this.
Comedy
Often people think that to be new, fresh and original it means that something has to be “edgy”. But right now, as the BBC Creative Brief stated, “We need more Joy”. I feel that people can get a bit fed up of “edgy” and I agree with the BBC that we do need more Joy. Pure and simple entertainment, but with a diverse cast shown as normal. I feel that my script if reshot the same way but with diverse actors would give exactly that.
BBC Three Opportunities
I feel that it is good to know that BBC Three want to support new talent in Comedy
And finally from the main BBC Comedy pages
I feel that all this shows that I have successfully researched and considered my target audience, where my film could be shown, and also how this could help me moving forwards in my career.