With more research and analysis being done, our group found this topic quite appropriate to make comedy news and we became more confident of the presentation. This post is a reflection of what we did well and not so well for the pitch, and also covers the thoughts of audiences’ feedback.

People already have heard enough information about opposing immunisations, but most of them don’t know about the conflicts between vaccines and vegan beliefs. So, for the presentation, our first point was to explain this idea by showing multiple researches from each group member. The major sources of related information are blog and Instagram posts. The advantage of online information is that people can leave their comments so we are able to learn about different attitudes towards this issue. We mainly talked about rational vegans who support vaccinations in our script, because it could stand out as a contrast to anti-vaxx vegans and clarify our subject of satire. Moreover, the new-found video of Rob Schneider’s anti-vaxx stance worked very well to attract audiences’ attention. He is an anti-vaxx vegan celebrity which is the same to Kat Von D and his words has a clear logical problem which we could argue against. By contrast, the vegan and farmer video might be too aggressive that offends the whole vegan group. As tutors suggested, we should always focus on the specific subject and notice the extent of our jokes to avoid ethical problems.

For the production format, we only came out with John Oliver style comedy news because we had an experience of doing it. Among audience’s recommendations, I was interested in having a debate in the segment and watched some relevant clips on YouTube. In Last Week Tonight, John Oliver usually uses the monologue format, but once he hosted a climate change debate which made the show so hilarious. The show invited 96 actors to play climate scientists and speak against climate skeptics. Of course, they didn’t have a real debate to exchange opinions, but it created a great irony of people who always think they know the truth. In difference from John Oliver, Real Time with Bill Maher uses debate as a fixed format to discuss political issues with celebrities. Its most-viewed one is about radical Islam between the host, Sam Harris and Ben Affleck. In my opinion, this was not a successful conversation that all the debaters sometimes got over emotional and didn’t really listen to others’ arguments. Watching this clip even made me a bit agitated that everyone was shouting and repeating their own thoughts to ‘win’. For our comedy news project, I definitely prefer Oliver’s style to use debate as a mini sitcom to entertain audiences. Based on these two examples, an inappropriate debate could turn a comedy news show into a serious political meeting, or even an uncontrolled quarrel.