KSU MAPW Students Create Story for Comedy Broadcast

KENNESAW, Ga. (Oct 23, 2019) — Students in the gateway course for Kennesaw State University’s Masters in Professional Writing (MAPW) recently collaborated on a very short story that will be performed and broadcast on the radio program The Funniest People I Know. The show airs on Saturday, October 26^th at 1PM on the Georgia Radio Reading Service—which broadcasts from Georgia Public Radio—and will be downloadable as a podcast from Itunes, Spotify, and other platforms on Sunday, October 27^th.

The story was created via an exercise that Dr. Chris Palmer, Associate Professor of English, typically conducts with his graduate students to practice different types of sentence structures. The story starts with a sentence about watching a Golden Girls marathon, and ends with aliens vowing never to return to Earth. Each student is then tasked to contribute exactly one sentence in between this beginning and ending, in any order of their choosing. As the sentences fill in, the story tends to get wilder and zanier.

Palmer’s husband, George Koulouris, is a co-host on The Funniest People I Know. After learning about this assignment, he pitched it to co-hosts Will Amato, Alexandria Sweatt, and TJ Jackson—all of whom are comedy writers and performers—to do a live, “cold” reading of the story on their show.

The Georgia Radio Reading Service is a nonprofit radio station that provides information and original entertainment for the visually- and print-impaired. The Funniest People I Know is a weekly comedy show and podcast featuring original comedy sketches, comedian interviews, ridiculous lists, old movie reviews, bad advice, and really funny stories.