[5] A very early example was a short piece on the "Swiss spaghetti harvest" that appeared as an April Fools' prank on the British television program Panorama in 1957.
Early work, including Luis Buñuel's 1933 Land Without Bread,[6] Orson Welles's 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, various April Fools' Day news reports, and vérité-style film and television during the 1960s and 1970s, served as precursor to the genre.
[7] Further examples are The Connection (1961), A Hard Day's Night (1964), David Holzman's Diary (1967), Pat Paulsen for President (1968), Take the Money and Run (1969), The Clowns (1970) by Federico Fellini (a peculiar hybrid of documentary and fiction, a docufiction), Smile (1975), Carlos Mayolo's The Vampires of Poverty (1977) and All You Need Is Cash (1978).
Albert Brooks was also an early popularizer of the mockumentary style with his film Real Life, 1979, a spoof of the 1973 reality television series An American Family.
[8] Early use of the mockumentary format in television comedy can be seen in several sketches from Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969–1974), such as "Hell's Grannies", "Piranha Brothers", and "The Funniest Joke in the World".
Guest went on to write and direct other mockumentaries including Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind, all written with costar Eugene Levy.
[11] Tim Robbins' 1992 film Bob Roberts was a mockumentary centered around the senatorial campaign of a right-wing stock trader and folksinger, and the unsavory connections and dirty tricks used to defeat a long-term liberal incumbent played by Gore Vidal.
Man Bites Dog is a 1992 Belgian black comedy crime mockumentary written, produced, and directed by Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, and Benoît Poelvoorde.
REC, a 2007 Spanish film by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, uses journalism aesthetics to approach a horror universe set up in a real building in Barcelona.
[14] Ivo Raza's 2020 mockumentary Reboot Camp is a comedy about a fake cult that uses an ensemble cast of celebrities from the film (David Koechner, Eric Roberts, Chaz Bono, Ed Begley Jr.), performing arts (Ja Rule, Billy Morrison), and TV (Lindsey Shaw, Pierson Fode, Johnny Bananas) to play fictional versions of themselves.
[15] In television, the most notable mockumentaries in the 2000s have been ABC Australia's The Games (1998–2000), the Canadian series Trailer Park Boys (1999–present), the British shows Marion and Geoff (2000), Twenty Twelve (2011–2012) (which follows the fictional Olympic Deliverance Commission in the run-up to the 2012 Summer Olympics), and W1A, which follows the main characters of Twenty Twelve as they start work at the BBC, as well as The Office (2001) and its many international offshoots, and Come Fly with Me (2010), which follows the activity at a fictional airport and its variety of staff and passengers.