One man, a teleprompter, and seven hours of solitude. 

 

As I mentioned in the remediation section, writing satire is hard. It would appear as though the second half of the gateway class would be a series of difficult trials; each one posing new feats to overcome. The final project was the repurposing assignment, which required us to take our piece from remediation and convert it into a new visual medium. I chose to convert my onion article  and turn it into a Daily Show-esque comedic bit. 

 

Jon Stewart makes fake news correspondence seem easy. He will take the stage, rant about Fox/CNN/the Rebulican National Party for apprximately 10 minutes. Then upon coming back from a commercial break he will launch into a five-minute exploratory piece looking at something that is going on in the world. All the while, his audience is giving him the attention and feedback that he thrives off of. This is when I learned that...

 

IT IS HARD TO TRY AND BE FUNNY WHEN YOU'RE LOCKED IN A ROOM,

ALONE, IN A BUILDING WITH NO CELL RECEPTION OR SIGNS OF LIFE.

 

I spent seven hours in the advanced podcasting room in the library at the university. There is something slightly concerning that happens when you are alone for that long and trying to be funny. You occasionally hear thunderous laughter, even though nobody is laughing. 

 

I also learned that there is an art to taking a written text and converting it into something that can function as a dialogue. This proved to be one of the most difficult components to the repurposing project. The end result was actually a choice to deviate from the scripted content on the teleprompter, and occasionally just ad-lib it.

 

Overall, this was an interesting experience, one that I hope to do again. I actually heard that Colbert is leaving Comedy Central, I think I might need to step in...