There's no denying society is ruled by social media, a place where people can share their every thought through video, photos or in 140 characters. From the mundane to the downright ridiculous, everyone is getting in on it, hell, even the Leader of the Free World is using twitter to troll the FBI. Honor Wolff and Patrick Durnan Silva are sick and tired of social media and in Cull, they decide to purge their Facebook friends one by one.
The two methodically work through a long list of annoying social media users in weird and wacky sketches. At the same time however, these sketches manage to humanise the people they are portraying and show the anxieties and longing they have to be connected with other people. This includes the Instagrammer who shares millions of photos of her cat on a daily basis, the Facebook couple posting love-affirming statuses and the zany You Tubers creating videos that are purely attention seeking but who are like, totally doing it for their adoring fans you guys. No one is safe in this cut-throat exploration into the black hole that is social media and its cult members.
We've all had that moment going through our Facebook feed and see the 17th meme from someone in two hours, or another baby update or another instance of keyboard activism and wonder why exactly we are friends with these people. Returning to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Honor Wolff and Patrick Durnan Silva's CULL delves into the deep dark recesses of social media as they bring to life all the annoying people we so desperately wish would leave the platform, or at at the very least, unfriend them.
The show is based on a conversation that Silva and Wolff had about the 'personalities' that appear on Facebook and with the constantly changing ways of using and interacting with social media, there have been some changes made to the show since its initial prodcution. "Whenever we see a new social media trend or meme
that’s really funny or bizarre, we seek to include it in our show," Wolff tells me.
