Gambling in sports sponsorship is honestly such a challenge to craft into comedy. Personally, my biggest struggle with this topic is the fact that I was never an avid follower of AFL/NRL, therefore am unfamiliar with the little details and players or inside jokes that could be useful to turn our topic into a full blown comedy news segment.

The research process itself was fairly simple and I think, was the easiest part of our tasks ahead. Matilda, Rudi and I work well together as we tend to get things done on time and communicate well too. My being away for 2 weeks obviously hindered the process but overall I’d like to think we’ve done well.

I was tasked with the writing of the script for the proposal as we decided it was pretty standalone and I could do it on my own at any time, considering the time difference. I did however come to a road block while writing it mainly because I just found it so hard to find/craft jokes out of what we had. I feel like it’s such a serious topic (gambling in sports sponsorship affecting children and young adults and also detrimental to other aspects of their lives etc) that it’s almost sadistic to laugh at it. But then again, I guess that is the very nature of comedy news. Addressing important topics in comedic way as almost a calling out on it’s flaws – like how Colbert and Stewart holds those accountable through their humour.

We really wanted the show to convey how bad gambling is for youths especially young men in an almost exaggerated humorous way. We tried to incorporate jokes that pointed out the importance by blowing it out of proportion or sometimes even devaluing the importance through sarcasm so people could see the joke. We also think the idea has a social media potential because it the demographic being spoken about are essentially young men who also happen to be a tech-savvy generation.

Since our last submission, we’ve looked at more visual texts like ads and TV commercials as a way of finding material we could work with/make fun of in the actual show- especially with the drafting of the script. I think as a comedy news show it’s important to have a variety of miscellaneous graphics and videos to break the show up. I think our initial research process was fairly thorough and gave us and abundance of factual content to work with. It was also a challenge to put what we research into the context that we wanted it to be received by the audience. I think that’s where the research of more visual texts later on in the process came along.

Click here for link to proposal document