Why should we build a community of young comedy writers at this time?
That is the question which I believe I can answer through twenty years of researching how writing comedy has been instrumental in the creation of one of the fastest growing industries in the 21st-century, the Creative and Cultural Industries
The bottom line is that some things have never changed. The benefits of laughter are still evident in the human experience. However, our understanding of how laughter is placed within the human condition has grown enormously, thanks to neuroscience.
I am particularly mindful that the benefits of laughter address the challenges in schools and families of young people in their middle school years. This site gives young people, and their teachers and families, access to comedic ways of engaging and motivating Years Six to Year 9 students in a number of topics such as
- creative and critical thinking;
- working collaboratively;
- working in a team;
- researching primary historical sources;
- playwriting;
- event organisation;
- digital marketing; and
- writing online with content strategies.
Unlike conventional approaches to putting on a school pantomime, Radical Pantomime uses lively and unique texts found in digital archives in the UK and Australia to create school and community events to enhance writing skills.
Programs and resources offered on this site are stimulated by successful comic pantomimes that occurred in the British and Australian theatres before the 1920s. These are offered to teachers and students as tangible learning opportunities for young writers to adapt to school-based entertainments for the classroom or for a whole school community.
A major aim of the programs is to enable students to explore the work practices of a ‘gig economy’. Give that theatres provide over two hundred years of examples in which artists have had to be simultaneously entrepreneurial and innovative, working as comedy writers offer school communities tangible opportunities for students to practice enterprise skills.
The end results can be seen as innovative school entertainment in live and online events.