The news these days seems dire, so much so that people are opting out. News avoidance is a rapidly increasing phenomenon, mainly because a growing number of people are overwhelmed by the sheer onslaught of negativity. Simultaneously, we have seen the continued rise in popularity of an entire genre of media whose job it is to find the funny in what many feel to be too much to bear. We are, of course, talking about late-night comedy.
In times of exceptional turmoil, many audiences turn to their favorite late-night host to experience some form of catharsis or distraction and slowly begin the process of making sense and making meaning out of tragedy. And yet, all too often, in moments of crisis, they are met with unusually somber or emotional monologues. Just think of Trevor Noah’s statements after the George Floyd killing, Jimmy Kimmel’s tearful speech in the aftermath of the Uvalde massacre or—more recently—Jon Stewart’s emotional response to the killing of Renee Good. All of these constitute what we have coined “affective shifts,” a rhetorical strategy deployed by late-night hosts and other comedians to enable effective political comedy in times of crisis.
Affective shifts share four common characteristics. First, they happen in a comedic context, the baseline starting point being the expectation that you are watching someone trying to make you laugh. This speaks specifically to the intent behind the act of communication. First and foremost, it is to entertain. Second, they involve the affect—the dominant displayed or elicited emotion—shifting from humor (mirth) to seriousness, i.e., corresponding emotions such as fear or anger. That is why you will sometimes hear people describe affective shifts (AFS) as “tonal shifts,” but this neglects the role emotion plays in how the rhetorical strategy is being deployed. Third, an affective shift serves the immediate purpose of persuading the audience of the gravity of an issue, importance of a topic, or earnestness of the speaker. Sometimes, comedians will use performative seriousness for comedic effect—this is explicitly not that! Finally, as the examples above show, AFS often occur in the aftermath of horrible events.
Now that we have defined the phenomenon, we can start to look for patterns and prototypical examples to more closely analyze why comedians might deploy this strategy and how it changes the role of political comedy in the U.S. media system. We started by collecting transcripts of late-night shows broadcast during crises—COVID-19, George Floyd, January 6, etc. (our final dataset was 14,451 sentences across three programs spanning almost three years), before performing a sentiment analysis of our data. This is a rather crude method, where one assigns every word in a given sentence a “sentiment score” depending on how positive or negative its connotations are, which then enables one to calculate the average “sentiment” of, say, a sentence. For an example from our dataset, the sentence “The President and his allies in the GOP and right-wing media have spent years feeding their rabid fan base deranged lies and fantasies of violent retribution, culminating with the effort to overturn the election in a violent insurrection” has a very negative score (-5.7), while the sentence “Now, look, if you’re at home right now with someone, and you high-five them because of how good that joke was, wash your hands,” (3.95) is one of the top ten most positive sentences in our dataset. As is clear from just these two examples, especially when applying a sentiment analysis to humoros speech, in and of itself, a sentiment analysis does not yield reliable conclusions. However, it can be a starting point for further, more in-depth analysis. Looking at the average sentence scores in chronological order, for instance, we find that the average sentiment drops starkly in the immediate aftermath of tragic events, only to recover within a week or so, indicating a medium-term affective shift. But we wanted to drill down into one monologue to better understand how comedians use affective shifts in the context of their craft to joke about tragedy. So we tried to identify the most egregious affective shift in our dataset. Using both the sentiment data and a qualitative analysis of our dataset, we landed on Stephen Colbert’s live monologue, the day after the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
Our next task was to isolate the actual affective shifts in this monologue. To do so, we looked for shifts in and out of what humor scholars call the “playfulness key,” a rhetorical tool that the entire art form of comedy relies on. In short, it is the shared assumption on the part of the audience that what is being said on stage (or on TV) is not to be taken seriously or literally, which allows the comedian to say outrageous things in their punchlines and get a laugh instead of a punch in the face. When this playfulness key breaks down, we get moments like “the slap,” but when used artfully, it enables comedians—and especially late-night hosts—to say things under a “comedic license” that would otherwise be more closely examined. To host a late-night show, where the subject of the jokes is “the news,” the comedians have to jump in and out of this playfulness key to delineate their jokes from factual information. This usually follows a very stable pattern though: exit the playfulness key to tell the audience about a news story, enter the playfulness key to make a joke. Laughter, rinse, repeat. The end result is a sustained experience of being entertained, while the information you receive is merely a means to an end. However, prolonged time spent outside the playfulness key, for example to voice the host’s feelings on the matter, changes the audience experience from pure entertainment to something that feels more sincere, more honest, more—for lack of a better word—authentic in its portrayal of the host’s emotions. Therefore, we focused on these prolonged exits from the playfulness key to identify four distinct affective shifts within Colbert’s monologue.
To further analyse these four affective shifts, we made use of the rhetorical concept of “modes of persuasion,” since AFS have a unique ability to appeal to the audience on multiple levels. Aristotle came up with the concept of “rhetoric”: the art of persuasion. Rhetoric contains three “modes of persuasion,” logos, ethos, and pathos. Logos appeals to reason, i.e., when a speaker uses logic to persuade somebody. For example, in Colbert’s monologue, he (non-comedically) argues how the enabling behaviour of Republicans helped Trump to push false claims about election fraud. The second mode is ethos. By appealing to ethos, speakers appeal to character to persuade an audience. To use another example from our case study: Colbert uses ethos when he attacks Trump’s character as a false prophet who does not care about his supporters. The last mode of persuasion is pathos, which is an appeal to emotion, such as when Colbert, after welcoming the audience, starts the show proper with this sentence: “There are some dark subjects that we talk about on the show occasionally, but I’ve rarely been as upset as I am tonight.” By relying on all three modes of persuasion throughout, Colbert’s monologue becomes simultaneously more emotionally impactful and more rhetorically persuasive.
Especially in times of crisis, people turn towards comedians to begin processing collective trauma. In turn, this kind of persuasive rhetoric supercharges the agenda setting capacity of programmes like late-night comedy and related content. It allows the comedian to both acknowledge the severity of the moment and improve the intended end-product: entertainment for an audience to amusedly consume. There are studies showing that not only does news satire contain sufficient information to fulfil journalistic roles like watchdog journalism and civic advocacy, but that, by and large, they engage in “attribute agenda setting,” which in short means comedians are not so much telling audiences what to think about, but through humorously framing and emphasizing certain aspects of a story, are influencing how audiences think about it. Comedians, when utilizing affective shifts, maintain their extraordinary ability to discuss serious events and topics in the overall context of playfulness, leaving audiences feeling informed, enlightened about the broader picture, and—most crucially, despite the dreadfulness of the topics talked about in the monologues in our dataset— positively entertained. In the larger context of the aforementioned rise of news avoidance and increasing distrust in traditional media organizations, this places extraordinary power in the hands of those comedians who have been using affective shifts to remain genuine, trusted communicators and increasingly persuasive messengers during crises.
It warrants mentioning that, although we are mainly concerned with liberal-leaning satire, affective shifts dominate the conservative media ecosystem as well. The most popular comedy podcasts, for example, are hosted by conservative comedians, who similarly use AFS to rhetorically persuade their audience on multiple levels. Suffice it to say that, across the political spectrum, comedians have become the opinion makers of our time. They are political pundits, trusted media figures and information aggregators, all rolled into one. Affective shifts constitute one very prominent example of comedians taking on a more journalistic function—whether they like (to admit) it or not. Some comedians, like John Oliver, realize their position and influence in the current U.S. media system and attempt to ground their jokes in sufficient evidence, though most others deny this new responsibility by saying they are just comedians telling jokes, nothing more and nothing less. Although the desire to keep comedy supposedly “pure” and separate from journalism or politics is understandable, this unfortunately does not reflect the reality of how audiences consume and experience comedy. Comedians, for many, have effectively taken on the function previously fulfilled by (opinion) journalists, while “the news” has become either rich fodder for ridicule or too disturbing to bear. Apart from the normative debate this calls for, at minimum, we urge today’s comedians to take their new role seriously.
Andreas M. Kraxberger
Andreas M. Kraxberger is a university assistant at the Department of Media, Society and Communication at the University of Innsbruck. His cross-methodological research is focused on the intersection between political communication, humor, and news avoidance, with a particular focus on crisis communication, election campaigns and climate change communication.
Beer P. Prakken
Beer P. Prakken is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen, a visiting researcher at Utrecht University, and a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. He researches how far-right politicians use humor and play and how this affects the relationship with their supporters. Moreover, Beer is interested in how humor and play are able to attract, mobilize, radicalize, and de-radicalize political support.
