Ron Howard Is Here To Teach You The Secrets Of Being Extremely Irritating Online

If you’ve spent approximately four minutes on the internet, at least three and a half of those have probably been spent skipping Masterclass ads.

Masterclass — an online-only series of courses that features acclaimed instructors divulging the tricks of their various trades — has saturated its way into the pop culture consciousness over the last few months. No matter that it’s rare to meet someone who has actually signed up for the courses; by sheer virtue of being bloody everywhere, the platform has become recognisable enough to be satirized.

Enter Nice Shorts from stage left. The digital comedy series is the brainchild of Jazz Twemlow (he of The Roast and Tonightly) and Nick Boshier (Bondi Hipsters and viral sensation Beached Az), and features such lauded comedians as Greta Lee Jackson (Skit Box), Bjorn Stewart (Black Comedy), and Penny Greenhalgh (The Checkout).

And for their very first episode, they’ve gone straight for Masterclass, unveiling a trailer for a new course by acclaimed filmmaker and one-time child star Ron Howard. But nope, the Apollo 13 director isn’t here to teach you how to wrangle big sets, or draw award-winning performances out of your cast. After all, he’s already done that, in a real life Masterclass.

Nah, instead, Howard is here to teach you how to troll.

In the five minute Nice Shorts sketch, Howard instructs a group of budding internet troublemakers and refines their singularly irritating skills, teaching them how to scream “NAZI” at anybody that they disagree with, and the importance of weaponising the extremely personal trauma of their day-to-day life in order to become prickly and hostile to every one of their digital neighbours.

Truly the sketch has it all, from searing contemporary comedy, to a man in a bald cap doing a disarmingly on-point impression of the director of In The Heart Of The Sea.

Watch it below, and keep your eyes peeled for more Nice Shorts content.