BRB #2 Cancelled and New Class Movie!

Welcome back to English! Some important reminders are the BRB #2 is canceled and if you got a zero on your dodgeball assignment check it to make sure you handed in the right document. The final podcast has been moved to Monday due to the half day we have Friday. Headphones must be brought to class Thursday and of course, always have your charged Chromebook! We began class with a discussion on how the SNL sketch we watched last Friday portrayed conservatives and liberals. Some arguments the text makes about liberals is that they only say what they know people will want to hear and that they are insincere. The argument the text makes about the conservatives is that they are racist. We then finished the “Satire Paradox” with Malcolm Gladwell. He talked about how Stephen Colbert was a totally different person off camera because on camera he was acting satirically. This involves a lot of aggression and finger-pointing. However, this method of comedy is called motivated cognition. Motivated cognition pleases both sides of the political spectrum by being interpreted in multiple ways. For a conservative, it sounds like he's grilling liberals and for a liberal, it sounds like he's grilling conservatives. Is all about what the individual wants to hear.

G: What does LaMarre find when she studies audience reactions to a clip like this? She finds that the more liberal you are, the more you see Stephen Colbert as a liberal skewering conservatives; but the more conservative you are, the more you see Stephen Colbert as a conservative skewering liberals.
HL: So, essentially, they saw what they wanted to see. So the big takeaway here of this study was that this is what we would call motivated cognition or biased perception.

Next, we began the next class film Thanks for smoking. We were told to share a pre-planning document with our podcast members because we will have to do a podcast about this movie. Things the podcast must include are
How does the film use satire to make arguments about the tobacco industry and/ or the government's attempts to control the tobacco industry?
How might the satire paradox affect the way audiences interpret this film's arguments?
How would the film be different if it were Thank you for vaping