genre
Explanation
This comic satirizes the formulaic nature of television news writing and how the same basic story can be repackaged through different genre lenses.
The setup shows a news producer urgently telling a writer that they need a script for a story in six minutes, about "that one damn thing." The writer says "On it!" and begins drafting. We see the writer crossing out words and replacing them in rapid succession: "And they were comedically..." gets changed to "melodramatically," then "satirically," then "romantically." Each revision represents a different TV genre treatment of the same event.
The punchline comes in the final panel where the news anchor reads the finished script: "And they were tragically killed by lightning." The word "tragically" is just the last in the series of genre-swaps, implying that the choice of tone -- comedic, melodramatic, satirical, romantic, or tragic -- is essentially arbitrary and interchangeable. The actual content (people killed by lightning) remains the same; only the emotional framing changes.
This is a pointed commentary on how news media and entertainment treat tone and genre as superficial coatings applied to events rather than emerging naturally from the content. It also jokes about the rushed, last-minute nature of news production, where the framing of a story can change on a whim. The absurdity of cycling through comedy, melodrama, satire, and romance before landing on "tragedy" for a death story highlights how disconnected the packaging of news can be from the reality it describes.