Hello Scrawl Nation!
We had a great show this week discussing the connections between hosting awards shows and tutoring. Unfortunately due to a technical glitch, the podcast is unavailable this week! Lucky for you, we’ve got a detailed recap here for you!
We started the show with a definition of the word boffola. We discovered the word, in fact, has nothing to do with baboons, ebola, former Scrawl host Kevin Kauffman, or the sentence Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. In fact, a boffola is joke in a script designed to get a laugh- a punchline really! Your friendly Scrawl Radio hosts hope to have many boffolas in their script as they act as hosts to the Pennys: an annual award show the UCWbL uses to celebrate and honor the work of your friendly peer writing tutors each year.
In light of this great honor of hosting the event, the Scrawl team wanted to research successful and, well, less-than-successful hosts of major award shows like the Emmys and the Oscars for tips, pointers, and areas to avoid. So after honoring the passing of the late great BB King with our first musical break, the team dove into some rhetorical analysis of hosts.
We started with the accomplished, hilarious, and successful host of the 2001 Emmys (and many others), Ellen DeGeneres!
The team noticed a few especially great characteristics of this clip and of Ellen as a host. She equated herself with the crowd, making sure that everyone, the audience at home included, felt comfortable. This show was broadcast shortly after the September 11th terrorist attacks, so this kind of approach was especially effective. The Scrawlers noticed that this is also a great approach to take with tutoring; we are, indeed, peer tutors. One article called Ellen’s performance the right balance between poignancy and punch lines.
A much less successful awards hosting gig was performed by two very talented actors: Anne Hatheway and James Franco.
What the Scrawlers sensed in this pairing was two hosts who were not on the same page. This can show the dangers of not setting an agenda together when working on a team, much like how, in a tutoring appointment, not setting an agenda can be a problem! Additionally, James Franco was not approaching hosting in the same way Anne Hatheway was. Check out this clip from one of the writers from the Oscars:
Harsh? Maybe, but the contrast between the hosting styles is obvious. The Scrawlers learned a lot about how to be good hosts from the comparison, and they also reviewed some great tutoring techniques as a result.
Our sincerest apologies for not having audio for you today, but here’s hoping you can still learn a lot from what we discussed live on Radio DePaul today! Tune in every week at11am at radio.depaul.edu to hear Scrawl Radio!