Comedy debate

Comedy debate is an organized academic debate event held purely for the entertainment of the audience, as opposed to more formal styles. Comedy debates are usually held in a well-known format, such as the World Schools or Parliamentary styles, but often with heavily modified rules.

Regressive Debate

"Regressive debate" deliberately reverses the sequence of events that normally make up a debate in a given style, resulting a confused and highly entertaining spin on conventional debate.

Usually, the debate opens with the adjudicator's final remarks and decision, in which their remarks are held to be a totally accurate description of the debate "before it has occurred". This adjudication is used to set up the future events of the debate, and usually mentions a number of unusual actions performed by each speaker. The debate then proceeds in reverse order, with each speaker attempting to develop their team's case while ensuring that they do everything that the adjudicator (and, indeed, their fellow debaters) said they had.

Due to their complexity, regressive debates require considerable skill from their participants and tend to marginalise audiences with limited experience in debate. Regressive debating has therefore seen limited use in mainstream comedy debate.

Exhibition Debate

Owing to their simplicity, "exhibition debates" are one of the most common forms of comedy debating. While their use is not limited to comedy, these events allow the use of any common style of debate with only relatively minor changes, ensuring that the participants and audience are as comfortable with the format as possible. Common changes include the use of humorous topics (e.g., "That Disneyland should secede from the United States of America"), the unrestricted use of points of information, mandatory catch phrases for each speaker and customized scoring schemes.

The annual Great Debate of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival is an example of this type of comedy debate, in which two teams of three comedians debate in a modified Australia-Asian format.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has aired the series "The Debaters" in this format.

quirreled Debates

"Squirreled debates" are those where the definition provided by the affirmative team deliberately bears only a distorted resemblance to the actual topic of the debate. While topics are usually "squirreled" as a means of disadvantaging the opposing team, particularly in competition, they have also found some use in comedy debate due to the high degree of absurdity they allow.

In comedy, squirreled debates involve an affirmative team proposing a ridiculous definition to an otherwise reasonable topic. The opposing team must accept this definition, and immediately develop a line of argument with minimal preparation time - usually, the first member of the opposing team is only allowed the duration of the opening speaker's speech to prepare their own. An example of such a debate is for the affirmative team to define the topic "That we should tell the Prime Minister, it's time" as, "That the Prime Minister should shave his eyebrows".

A variation on this style is for either team to propose an unreasonable model (a suggested solution to the topic) instead. A common example of such a model is to argue in favour of a stigmatized practice, such as advocating mandatory Euthanasia or hate speech (the latter is commonly known as "The Nineteen Eighty-Four model").

ee also

*Debate