This week readings was Amber Davisson & Mackenzie Donovan’s “Breaking the news … on a weekly basis”: trolling as rhetorical style on Last Week Tonight. It focused on the use trolling, a term often associated with keyboard warriors on the internet, in satirical news shows using John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight as an example. It focused on Oliver’s history of using trolling as a tool to enact change, like with his website gofccyourself.com, which redirected users to the FCC’s comment section to vent their frustrations with net neutrality, which proved so popular it had to be temporarily shut down. As well as his fake storybook A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo a children’s book about a gay rabbit, parodying the very homophobic Vice President Mike Pence’s daughter’s storybook about their rabbit named Marlon Bundo. We discused in Tuesday’s class the reading as highlighted that although it is considered trolling, which can often be interpreted as cyber bullying, it often times is for a good cause. Although this type of trolling often times doesn’t have lasting effects and it more a temporary media hype and attention before quickly fading out.

We then presented our pitches in small groups. It proved a useful exercise as it helps convey your ideas and present them in greater detail than in writing. It was also useful to hear what the other pitches were from the other members. We were then tasked with casting votes for pitches with the four most popular being selected as ideas for the later group assignment.

On Friday’s class we began by looking at some Mad as Hell scripts and how they differ from the finished recorded segment. Then we did an exercise where we wrote a brief paragraph about The Masked Singer‘s halted production due to an outbreak of covid-19 on set. This also proved a useful exercise as it helped us get into writing comedic content. Here is our group’s paragraph we came up with:

“Last week production of “The Masked Singer” halted as 16 cast and crew members tested positive for Coronavirus. I guess the conspiracy theorists are right, masks don’t work. I personally love the Masked Singer. You watch the show and you don’t know who the contestants are, then they reveal themselves and you still don’t know who they are! I also love how the judges are so optimistic about who the contestants could be under the mask. “I think under this mask it could be maybe Leonardo DiCaprio, or Julia Roberts, or maybe that old lady from the ‘I just milk that tastes like real milk’ commercial. Apparently the show was deemed an essential service under stage 4 restrictions. Who would have known that a televised furry convention was considered an essential service. The host of The masked singer, Osher Gunsberg stated that “nothing we make is worth risking that many lives”. Truth be told, nothing Osher makes is even worth making. The last time Osher made something that was worthy was when he was Andrew G, and was robbing Shannon Noll of the Australian Idol crown.”