Satirical videos or mockumentaries (films) often challenge the ‘otherized’ gaze and question the so-called ‘truths’ presented by colonial and post-colonial narratives, exposing a mode of representation that has shaped not only Africa but also Asia.
Humor has become a common form of expression on digital media. From memes and satirical videos to satirical news articles and witty comments, comedy serves as a coping mechanism and helps create a sense of community or neutralizes the officious narrative. On Instagram, there is a page called “ The African Guy” that creates humorous videos about how African people have often been portrayed in documentaries. The videos imitate the authoritative narration and visual style commonly associated with broadcasters such as the BBC and CNN, as well as European filmmakers. Their captions deliberately exaggerate familiar documentary tropes, with lines such as “The boy who sold his entire family just to get his dream house” or “The first woman in their entire history to go to an airport.” “The first man in Africa to own a clock.”
At first, these videos seem like simple comedy. However, their humor lies in exposing the stereotypes that have long shaped documentary representations of the “colonized” countries. These representations continue to shape even today’s reality; many Western travel content creators continue to portray native communities through an Orientalist lens, representing them as “exotic,” “savage,” or “primitive.”
Such content continues to otherize local people and reinforces stereotypes instead of presenting them as they really are. The binary division between the West and the East is reinforced and perpetuated through this travel content. The people featured in these videos are often presented as objects for Western consumption or as part of a validation economy, where their representation is shaped to attract the attention, approval, and engagement of Western audiences.
Marginalized groups continue to find spaces for negotiation, reinterpretation, and resistance. If we look at some mockumentaries in India, apart from the recent digital creations, such as reels, memes, and other comedic productions, they expose not just colonial narratives but also post-colonial politics of development, identity-making, and neoliberal narratives.
While humor can, in many cases, challenge the dominant narrative, it has also been used by dominant groups to target minorities and marginalized communities. In this article, however, I focus on how satirical videos or mockumentaries (films) challenge the ‘otherized’ gaze and question the so-called ‘truths’ presented by colonial and post-colonial narratives. The African Guy often asks with the caption, “Which country are you watching from?”
The comments include viewers from many countries, including India. Many associate these mockumentaries with their own experience of watching colonial documentaries, which have been made through an exotic, patronizing lens. The satire resonates because it exposes a mode of representation that has shaped not only Africa but also Asia.
Colonial Documentaries on India
In a few of the documentaries, including An Indian Washing a Baby, a woman bathes an infant lying across her shins while another woman pours large amounts of water over the child’s head and back. In its caption for this documentary, the British Film Institute writes, “The film feels artificial and orchestrated, so Westerners could amuse themselves with the primitive bathing rituals of native Mowglis.”
A similar exotic gaze is also evident in A Road in India (1938) by Jack Cardiff. The film focuses on scenes of young women dancing beside Indian rulers. Many of these scenes seem staged, giving the impression that they were created to match Western expectations of India as a land of spectacle, mystery, and tradition rather than to show everyday life. Most of these documentaries have colonial biases, which include representing locals for the commodification for the West. Edward Martinez writes in the Navigating the River: The Hidden Colonialism of Documentary “For decades upon decades, Western filmmakers—almost exclusively white men—traveled to other countries and cultures to extract resources (footage), which they would exploit (edit) for the benefit of their home culture (theaters, film festivals, PBS, etc.).
This flow of power, and along with it the control over these stories, historically traveled in one direction—from those without it to those with it.” In many of these documentaries, what is presented as “truth” is shaped by fictionalized and fixed ideas rather than lived realities. This kind of representation is not new. It continues a long tradition of distorting the truth about colonized people for governance purposes, and media production often repeats these older narratives. For instance, similar biases can be found in eighteenth-century colonial paintings, which were used to classify Indian people and support colonial knowledge production. As Kanupriya Sharma notes, Charles Gold’s paintings, later published in Oriental Drawings, reflect these colonial attitudes.
In Coolies at Dinner on the Road, Gold describes Indians as “a refined and luxurious race of people, who have not yet emerged from barbarism in some of their manners and customs.” Similarly, Gold’s painting Female Brahmins, Carrying Water from the Well, also combines the male gaze with racial prejudice. He writes that “were it not for their complexions, they might be termed beautiful.” Photography was used for the same supermacist and imperial goals.
Achille Mbembe explained this ‘tradition of seeing’ well, while discussing the ‘otherized’ identity of Africa in Western knowledge production. Mbembe, in On the Postcolony, writes how Africa has often been understood through two dominant psychic interpretations: either Africans are viewed as “animal-like,” or they are seen as people who must be “made human” through external intervention.
Drawing from Hegel, Mbembe discusses the concepts of “facticity” and “arbitrariness” in relation to traditional societies. By “facticity,” Hegel refers to the idea that things exist simply because they exist, and that this existence itself is treated as their justification. In such societies, truths are accepted without questioning their origins or legitimacy because they are assumed to have always existed.
Mbembe argues that such representations reduce societies to static and irrational entities. He further asserts that identities are not only matters of discourse, representation, or symbolic construction but also have the material realities of power and domination that shape lived experience. The history of the images shapes the history of seeing and visuality. Myth, created using images, becomes reality; as Roland Barthes says, Myth allows the connotative meaning (hidden meaning) of a particular thing or image to appear denotative (natural meaning).
Here, a major question emerges: How do we challenge the existing notions of reality? Or, how do we challenge the ‘archive of the senses’? The power behind these senses that have shaped how we look at, see, and perceive human beings continues to be reproduced through technologies of power.
Mockumentaries in India
Humour has become a popular, trending tool for combating these narratives and challenging existing representations. It is being used to deconstruct the authoritarian narratives. However, the use of humour in subverting the dominant gaze is not a new thing, as Bakhtin writes that “laughter has a deep philosophical meaning; it is one of the essential forms of the truth concerning the world as a whole, concerning history and man.”
Bakhtin defines the carnivalesque: laughter is not theatre or spectacle, but a lived social condition in which all people participate. During medieval carnival festivals, ordinary hierarchies and structures of religious authority are temporarily suspended, and life is governed by what he calls the “laws of freedom.” Carnival laughter is therefore festive, universal, and ambivalent.
Drawing on Bakhtin’s ideas, Makombe, in Comedy and Satire in Zimbabwe (2025), uses the term “imaging” to emphasize how comic performances invite audiences to visualize and reinterpret the world from the comedian’s perspective. He argues that comedy and satire are important cultural forms because they articulate perspectives that are often excluded from official channels of representation. Comedy possesses a unique adaptability that allows it to capture the contradictions and ambiguities of the postcolony more effectively than rigid official discourse. He further employs Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of the “third space” to explain how hegemonic power can never become fully totalizing, even within systems of domination.
Marginalized groups continue to find spaces for negotiation, reinterpretation, and resistance. If we look at some mockumentaries in India, apart from the recent digital creations, such as reels, memes, and other comedic productions, they expose not just colonial narratives but also post-colonial politics of development, identity-making, and neoliberal narratives.
In Aavasyauham, for instance, the 2022 Malayalam mockumentary (Film), the focus is on the politics of development and how both nature and human beings are alienated by it. It critiques the neoliberal discourse of development while humorously examining ‘otherized’ identity of a migrant and their exploitation. The protagonist, Joy, is eventually perceived as a “frog man”, a hybrid of a human and a sea creature. The local people begin to worship him as a god, triggering debates among religious groups, scientists, and academics, each offering their own interpretation of his existence to claim a discovery in their name.
One character explains: “The colonialists brought African slaves here during the slave trade of the sixteenth century. When they returned, they killed the slaves they had brought. The spirits of those dead slaves merged with the forces of nature. I believe this creature is the result of that mixture of spirits.” People even stand in long queues, paying money to see him. In the end, however, he is shot, and his body is preserved in a natural history museum as an extinct animal.
The film satirically exposes neoliberal conservation politics, that prioritizes preserving the destructive forces of development. Conservation often intervenes only after extinction, transforming life into an object of display and consumption, rather than protecting living beings. By placing the protagonist’s body (Frog man) in a museum, the film explores how nature, once destroyed by the very logic of development, is commodified as heritage, spectacle, and scientific curiosity rather than preserved as a living ecosystem.
Another mockumentary, The President Is Coming (2009), is based on the 2006 visit by then-American President George W. Bush to India. During his visit, one of his goals was to meet the young faces of “new India.” The mockumentary satirizes the aspirations of India’s middle class (mostly Upper caste) to align themselves with American politics and culture. It starts with a competition in which six participants vie for the chance to meet and shake hands with then-U.S. President George W. Bush. In one scene, when a security guard attempts to shake hands with a participant, the participant dismissively says, “Get your hand out of my way,” revealing the obsession with power, while ‘otherizing’ their ‘own’ country people because of caste and class.
The exaggerated imitation of American accents, fashion, and manners highlights the cultural and political effects of McDonaldization and globalization, as Bush even said in his speech: “Americans who come to this country will see Indian consumers buying McCurry meals from McDonald’s, home appliances from Whirlpool.”
These mockumentaries (films or digital productions) alter the dominant mode of seeing. The representation, or the dominant culture of seeing, not only distorts the truth but also otherizes people from themselves. They come to see themselves through the dominant gaze. Therefore, it becomes necessary to counter such visual politics. Satire, as Mbembe argues, is not particularly revolutionary, but it does neutralize hegemonic productions.
Image Credit: Fred Cherrygarden / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).
