It’s hard to know exactly what to think of Will Ferrell’s latest project, Ferrell Takes the Field. The documentary, which airs on HBO this Saturday, 12 September at 10pm EST, follows the Anchorman star as he plays 10 different positions for 10 different major league baseball teams in one day. He tries to best the record of Bert “Campy” Campaneris, who played all nine positions on the field in 1965 in a game for the Kansas City Athletics. Ferrell plays every position and third base coach, just because there’s no other slot for him on the field other than umpire, bat boy or maybe a streaker taking advantage of the seventh-inning stretch.
This is a very real event that took place earlier this year during spring training – Ferrell even raised a bunch of money for a friend’s cancer charity while performing the stunt – but watching the documentary, you’re never quite sure how seriously Ferrell takes it. He’s pretending like he’s a minor league player who keeps getting traded, which is why he has to continuously switch jerseys and positions. Ferrell, of course, clowns around the whole time he’s on the field, like a one-man Harlem Globetrotters, except with a mitt. Is this supposed to be Will Ferrell or something else? Is this a documentary or a mockumentary?
It’s unclear, but right now the mockumentary is having something of a boomlet. After The Office introduced the trope of sitcoms posing as cinéma vérité film-making, a bunch of critically acclaimed shows such as Modern Family and Parks and Recreation jumped on board. But recently there have been programs more akin to This Is Spinal Tap then the recent permutation of the genre.
7 Days in Hell, a faux tennis documentary that was far funnier than it ever needed to be, debuted earlier this summer also on HBO. In a spot-on parody of an HBO sports special, Andy Samberg and Kit Harrington portrayed two tennis players who embarked on a match that lasted an entire week. The gags and performances were just as funny as the skewering of the form, which differed from an HBO Sports report in content only.
Over at IFC, Documentary Now is in the middle of its first season starring Samberg’s Saturday Night Live cohorts Bill Hader and Fred Armisen. Supposedly Documentary Now is a PBS special that has been on the air for 50 years and is celebrating with a retrospective of its best features over the past five decades. Actually, it’s Hader and Armisen doing dead-on impersonations of Grey Gardens, Nanook of the North and HBO’s Vice series. The show is as astute as it is hilarious and one of the funniest things that IFC has produced in years.
These are very specific types of comedy. They’re not the broad mockumentaries of Christopher Guest that skewer subcultures, instead they’re poking fun at the genre itself. Sure the audience for comedy riffing on one of the least commercially viable subsets of cinema has an audience about as big as those clamoring for gluten-free, vegan cupcakes, but in both cases they’re treats worth looking into (well, maybe not the dry cupcakes).
These all might be a coincidence or it might just be that we’ve been getting our news from The Daily Show and our humor from The Onion for so long, that we can’t handle news that doesn’t have a little dose of satire thrown in – or, for that matter, is entirely made up.
As far as Ferrell’s entry is concerned, this is the latest in a string of genre deconstructions from the star who seems to be floundering around for something fun to do. Just this summer we’ve seen him host the jazz miniseries send-up The Spoils Before Dying and the self-aware made-for-Lifetime movie A Deadly Adoption. These days there are enough cable channels where Ferrell can just keep tossing out silly projects with his friends like Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph and someone will foot the bill.
Maybe Ferrell’s experiment isn’t facilitated by the fracturing of the television audience – maybe it’s actually some sort of meta-commentary about it. All of these parodies – the over-the-top miniseries, the made-for-TV movie, the documentary – are from a simpler time when we sat down as a nation and watched one thing all together, so much so that the conventions became cemented in our subconscious. Perhaps these silly little projects are really Ferrell’s way to unify us once again by reminding us of all the things we shared.
Nah, he was probably just a little bit bored and between movies.
