Susanna Liu
A Totally REAL Weekend Column
From yaledailynewds@gmail.com
Dear Yale Community,
We are writing to inform you of the latest steps the News has taken in light of the lack of laughter on campus.
Amidst this season of midterms and housing draw-ma, the deteriorating quality of Yale students’ humor has been unable to lift any spirits. To address this issue, the News is proud to announce that throughout the rest of April, we will be offering a new comedy training program for all students called Making Our Campus Kooky (MOCK).
With the help of Marvin Chnu and the Yall Colege Dean’s Ofice, we have been developing MOCK for some time, to guarantee that it will address all of the specific comedy interests of our student body. The majority of the program, in fact, will be intensive instruction in the art of the “fake email,” which has proven successful in our beta tests this school year. The Holiday Dinner fiasco was an open door, and we answered. Knock knock, who’s there? Comedy gold, that’s who.
After our success with this form under the guise of “Yale Dinining,” we began to collect further data over time, running a variety of tests, from the KBT Black Hole alert to the SillyMan announcement. Based on measurements such as ‘student hubbub’ and ‘number of reaccs when screenshot is posted on Overheard at Yale,’ our findings suggest this campus needs only one thing: more fake emails.
To meet this demand, the program will be jam-packed with workshops for important lessons focused on mastering the fake email. These modules include, but are not limited to: “How to know if your idea for the fake email is funny (it always is!),” “Graphic Design and You: How to Finagle the Formatting and Fonts of the diFferent Yale Administrative oFfices,” and “What a Lack of Originality Says About You: How to Navigate the Complex Dynamics of Reusing an Exhausted Comedic Form and Still Believing It’s Witty.”
MOCK won’t happen without your help! The News is currently looking for ideas that could serve as workshop material for MOCK lessons. These topics should have the potential to be misleading and also a little too cheesy. Imagine being the person behind a Guest Curator recommends … email whose suggestions digress from the RB show and a School of Music Concert to “Teaching Our Children About Graverobbing: A Screening of Pixar’s Coco at Grove Street Cemetery” and “Urban Beauty: An Architectural Walking Tour of Dumpsters and Their Spatial Relationships.” Picture the reactions on your friends’ faces when they open an announcement of a “last-minute change” to the Spring Fling line-up detailing how Lindsay Lohan (???) and two out of four Wiggles (!!!) will be joining forces to harmonize on a five-hour rendition of the 2002 Avril Lavigne pop hit, “Complicated.” And YOU were the mastermind behind it all! While these initial ideas may sound intriguing, our team is still in the early brainstorming stage, so please, don’t hesitate — at all — to reach out if you have suggestions for more practice topics.
With MOCK, the News hopes to usher in a new era of comedy, making the ability to be funny incredibly formulaic and very accessible to all. You may imagine that Yale students, of all people, would be more creative, but believe us, we’ve done cutting-edge research on the comedy of this campus and it’s true: Nothing is funnier than creating a lack of trust in your classmates’ inboxes. The real joke isn’t the ‘Bad Life Center’ itself, it’s the long-lasting fear created by all the false notifications, which make you question if official news like the Jackson School announcement was real or not. Soon, you’ll be wondering if your cousin Becky is really getting married, or if you have a cousin at all. And then when your mom is texting you asking why you missed the wedding, “Where are you, Jack?! You missed your flight!” you’ll laugh, knowing it was all just one big joke. Or was it? We don’t even know anymore.
Deep-set fear… it’s what gets us out of bed in the morning, friends. Not the giggles. The emotional distress. It’s like searching for a spoon on the top half of those silverware holders in the Morse-Stiles Dining Hall. You have to look below the surface. Will your comedy create a lasting impact?
If you have any questions, please email us at yaledailynewds@gmail.com. Want to learn more about MOCK? You can find more information and a sign-up page on our website (“Making a Believable Website for Your Fake Program” is even on the schedule for our last class!).
Sincerely,
Yale Daily News
P.S.: Congratulations on the birth of your baby!
Marty Chandler | martin.chandler@yale.edu .