The Irony of Satire: Study on Colbert

Tip of the hat to my good friend Dimitri for the pointer.

Ohio State's own scientists are publishing a new study on satire which will appear on volume 14 of The International Journal of Press/Politics.

This is a most interesting idea which those of you who are Stephen Colbert fans are bound to enjoy. I look forward to reading this on the journal as, I reckon, it will be a good addition to my current literary [and other] references. Often when asked to tackle the concepts of irony and satire, I tend to rely on the work of Bertolt Brecht, especially his Choräle. Congratulations to Ohio State's faculty members: Heather L. LaMarre, Kristen D. Landreville, and Micheal A. Beam who produced this original study. I will be reviewing it here shortly.

The abstract says:

"This study investigated biased message processing of political satire in The Colbert Report and the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert. Results indicate that political ideology influences biased processing of ambiguous political messages and source in late-night comedy. Using data from an experiment (N = 332), we found that individual-level political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert's political ideology. Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism. Finally, a post hoc analysis revealed that perceptions of Colbert's political opinions fully mediated the relationship between political ideology and individual-level opinion."

You can get more information about this new study here.

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Interesting Sentence From New Study

This is quite an interesting premise. Tip of the hat to TC for the pointer.

Consider the following:

"According to a new study in Psychological Science, humans engage in a process called “moral self-regulation.” Basically, we’re constantly calculating the trade-off between being able to see ourselves as good people and the cost of engaging in all that non-advantageous goodness."

Read more here

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My Radio Episode: What is Gender Theory? Who Was Havelock Ellis?

I created and recorded this piece for public radio. I was asked to contribute a piece that would tackle gender theory. So, this is a short piece on theorist Havelock Ellis who, before Sigmund Freud, contributed much to our understanding of gender and psychology. Freud, folks, didn't come up with all the things he is often associated with.

And this piece is my tip of the hat to Havelock Ellis.

You can listen to this piece here.

Feedback welcome.

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