By Bronwyn Cook
For the 35th time, international and local comedy superstars gathered their wits, wrote and presented their arguments, did some light opposite team roasting along the way – all with the aim of winning the Melbourne International Comedy Festival annual debate, with the topic for this year being “That social media is good, actually”.
Moderated by Steph Tisdell, the affirmative team was led by team captain Pierre Novellie (UK/Sth Africa), with Jenny Tian and Chris Parker (NZ), and the negative team was lead by Alexei Toliopoulos with Gillian Cosgriff and Desiree Burch (USA).
With each speaker having 10 minutes to present their argument, the debate moved along at a snappy pace, with Tisdell not having to ding anyone for going over time. Novellie and Toliopoulos then presented closing statements before the audience voted (by round of applause) on the debate winter.
It’s pretty undebatable that social media is an intrinsic part of our lives. That fact cannot be argued. Especially by comedians who use social media to promote themselves and their shows! But is it the angel or the devil on our shoulder?
As the first speaker for the affirmative team, Novellie argued that social media itself isn’t bad, but it’s what society puts on social media that is bad e.g. CDs aren’t bad, because you burn bad things onto them like Nickelback. Social media is good actually, when you put good things on it! If AI feeds off the internet, we need to use social media for good to feed AI so AI doesn’t take over the world.
Leading the negative team opening argument, Toliopoulos argued that social media is bad, because it has ruined movies, the movie experience (see the recent Minecraft movie trends), the movie making experience (stars are selected based on the size of their social media follower base) and forced internet trolls out from safe hiding places (like the closed IMDb forums) and unleashed them into the general population.
Next for the affirmative team was Tian who proposed that the negative team are just bitter comedians because they have less followers than the affirmative team, and that social media is creative, gives solid life advice and it isn’t actually creating new problems – they all existed before social media! And in a very obvious ploy to pull on audience heartstrings showed how organisations like Aussie Ark are thriving due to crowdfunding efforts driven by their social media presence.
As the next speaker for the negative team Cosgriff pretty much ran away with the debate, leading with her argument that social media is bad because of the people that created social media networks i.e. “teenage boys that no-one wanted to have sex with”. Zuckerberg. Musk. Wiener. Those facts alone could have won the entire debate, but leaning into her musical theatre composing and singing chops, Cosgriff strengthened her argument with “Distracted”, a song she wrote documenting her debate writing process and the absolute time destroying rabbit hole social media is. Backed up by a song dedicated to her latest social media spiral “I Got Blocked by Jenny Tian”.
Cosgriff was a hard act to follow and the third speakers for both the affirmative and negative sides were the teams weakest.
Parker’s positive social media argument was that to diss social media is to diss the communities that they help build. He demonstrated this by telling the story of his 2022 MICF experience, where he used social media to attempt to connect with the firefighters at the station he walked past every day on his way to his shows. Long story short, it worked. But there was then his awkward bit where one of the firefighters made a ‘surprise appearance’. It was just weird.
Burch’s negative argument quickly descended into an uncomfortable manifesto rant against social media, comparing it to drug addiction. She did make a good point in that social media requires comedians, and all of us really, to work for free. I hadn’t thought about that angle before.
Not helping either Parker or Burch was intermittent microphone and sound issues, which just made their arguments challenging to follow.
Novellie’s closing rebuttal points for the affirmative included:
- Social media gives us the chance to fight back against the one way feed from TV, radio and newspaper
- That there is no point deleting social media, we’ll just go back to the same reality
- Would the negative team sacrifice everything for the win and delete their social media accounts?
- It’s the same argument that was had against TV – we’ll just find something else to get addicted to
Toliopoulos’s closing rebuttal was not as strong, as he basically told part two of a story he started in his opening arguments, which was a reading of a few posts he made what Minions (yes, the animated characters) might taste like. It was…odd. But his point was basically, social media is bad because there is now no place to tell these stories in private i.e. the now closed IMDb forums.
Tisdell was a fine moderator, some of her interactions with the team members and summaries of each argument didn’t land and were hard to follow, but what was delightful was watching her reactions during the arguments. She was clearly enjoying it as much as the audience, and wasn’t afraid to laugh out loud!
So, at the end of all of that…who won?
I’m not going to spoil it for you, as I know the debate was filmed for an eventual TV airing.
