Uptown Showdown

A summary was already given, so I’ll just mention a few things I noticed….

Firstly, after doing the debate in class (apples vs. oranges), I realized one thing was missing from the debate at Uptown Showdown. The debaters there seemed to have each been doing their own thing. There was no rebuttal from the other side on the exact points that were made. Additionally, even within a team, there did not seem to be a sense of cohesiveness amongst the group. It did not seem like the preparation for the show was done together. Like Amanda mentioned, the Hanukkah side was more focused on the history of the holiday, whereas the Christmas side was more focused on the festivities of the holiday.

Secondly, as Professor Ugoretz mentioned in class to keep an eye out for, I noticed that people did indeed look around for “approval” before/ during letting out a laugh. As we were sitting in the front few rows, it was difficult to get a full study of this, but I was able to see our class (including myself) looking around at fellow audience members (unless we were all just checking if everyone else was looking around in order to gather this “research”).

Thirdly, I found the Q & A to be quite a fail. The questions asked did not really add anything to the debate. And, they were either dumb, irrelevant, rude, or even crude. But, the attack back to the questioners was reminiscent of the way the pitchmen involve the audience and not-so-subtly (here, even obviously) insult them.