Why the Humor Project?
Every year in Freestyle Academy, the last thing seniors do to end their journey in English class is to create a Humor Project. The humor project is fairly simple: just make people laugh through talking about something funny, and it does not have to be too complicated. Personally for me, I love this project because I would say I have a good sense of humor, even though my sense of humor is different from my classmates. I have added some silly components to my presentations in the past, like the Explorations and Zenith project, and this Humor Project serves as a bonus.
For my humor project, I wanted to create something relatable for all Freestyle students, by mentioning some experiences most of us have shared. Since I got the Freestyle Student of the Year award for 2026, I decided to make my final video be a goofy YouTube tutorial style video on how to get that award.
Inspiration
For this project, I worked with my friends Stephen Messner and Mason Serna. Each of us enjoy different comedians and sources of humor, but personally for me, I get my humor from engineer and comedian Don McMillan, Malaysian YouTuber Uncle Roger, and my video editing style is from the Minecraft speedrunning highlights YouTube channel called HBG Highlights.
When analyzing my sources of inspiration for my humor project, I did a rhetorical analysis on an excerpt from Don McMillan’s standup comedy where he talks about his funny experiences as an engineer. Studying this clip helped me a lot with my final product because I was able to analyze what humor techniques he used, such as anecdotes, critical humor, and callbacks. Below, you will see the rhetorical analysis piece I wrote of McMillan, and some pictures of his shows.
Creating My Project
As mentioned previously, for my piece of humor, I decided to make an off-the-wall YouTube tutorial style of how to get the Freestyle Academy student of the year award. We also had other ideas for this project, like having Mr. Taylor (Freestyle film teacher) act out a scene from the movie “Invincible” but he acts like he is lashing out on his students. We also had an idea of doing a compilation of Freestyle canon events (moments every Freestyle student goes through) and interesting experiences, and decided to send out a survey for people to respond to, but we did not get any responses.
Since we were low on time, Stephen gave me the idea to make a humor video about my experience of being Student of the Year, and to make it imperfect and goofy so it doesn’t feel like I am showing off and putting other people down. I decided to also film a skit with Ms. P as I am a design student and I made a lot of big but funny mistakes in her class. Additionally, I got some inspiration from the previous Freestyle students of the year Nadine Sheridan and Lucy Wang. Below, you can read my entire script and brainstorm for my project.
After filming a video of me talking in my room, the video with Ms. P, and other short clips, I used Adobe Premiere to put the clips together, add text, and insert sound effects. Since there were a lot of places of just me talking with no footage over it, I made some animations in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe After Effects to add to the punchline.
My Humor Piece
And with that, here is my humor video, and my audience reacting to it. Overall I feel proud of my project and my audience found it funny, though I did feel like my editing and filming was slightly rushed, so if there was something I would change, I would film more takes of my monologue and test out different backgrounds. Also, I was featured in my friends Kingston and Nick’s humor video where they did a skit with Mr. Greco (Freestyle english teacher) and I will put it at the very bottom for you to check out. Oh, and by the way, if you watch the whole video and have no idea what to do for your humor project, you can do a sequel to mine (a video of someone following my steps but didn’t get the Student of the Year award, pretty funny humor project).