In May (2017), Caty Borum Chattoo, co-director of the Center for Media and Social Impact at American University and a comedy fan, released “The Laughter Effect: The [Serious] Role of Comedy in Social Change“, in which she summarizes the research and gives advice on how to use humor to further social issues.
Skipping ahead again, I want to discuss her Highlights and Strategic Recommendations in two parts. Some of these I agree with, some I question, mostly because I think we could do more, if we try. Here’s a quick overview of her points (paraphrasing):
- “Let the comedy be comedy.”
- Don’t shoot for behavior change
- Timing is key
- Amplify the message
- Satire mobilizes, but doesn’t convert
- Use consistent portrayals to normalize people and ideas
- Have a consistent, trusted messenger
- Representation matters
- Be self-deprecating, not mean
- Work with news sources
I’ll hit the first five here, the next five will follow.
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“Let the comedy be comedy.”
“Don’t make it do a heavier lift.”
I’m reminded of a Gin Blossoms lyric: “”and if you don’t expect too much from me, you might not be let down….” It’s a sad note to end on, and it comes entirely from Chattoo’s assumptions. She assumes that Petty and Cacioppo are correct, and that we must either process information consciously through the central route, or respond only to peripheral, heuristic cues. This leads her to say:
The precise way in which comedy works as persuasion means its power is diluted if audiences are aware they are being “messaged to” or persuaded…. Leave the comedy alone, and let it be optimally hilarious, without diluting it with overly massaged, safe constraints. This is hard to achieve in practice, but comedy may be useless otherwise.
But what if that’s not true? What if we can process consciously and peripherally at the same time? Maybe we can’t right now. Maybe we’re not trained to. Maybe we don’t expect to. Maybe we don’t want to yet. But if Young is correct, audiences are beginning to seek out “smart civically-focused comedy and entertainment,” like The Daily Show, and that,
[They] may do so for more than one reason—to be entertained and to make sense of serious information…. And when audiences seek and use entertainment with active “truth-seeking motivations,” they process the civic information in such a way that sparks “reflective thoughts…issue interest, and information seeking.”
If this is true, and if comics are responding with more social commentary and more addressing of social issues, then perhaps we are being trained. Cordoning off comedy from serious discourse is a step backward. Doing comedy that is both hilarious and has a message is, admittedly, harder to do, and I have yet to see one sustained special where it’s done, or even a chunk of one, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen, and perhaps it will soon.
Some would argue that, at best, this happens when the comic is “preaching to the choir,” that we can laugh because we didn’t have to scrutinize the message much to know that we agree with it. However, I don’t need to argue that everyone will do it all the time, I only need to prove that it’s theoretically possible.
In the meantime, we should definitely use “comedy’s ability to amplify a message.” Yes, we should also,
Send users and audience members to a website for more information, direct them to a separate serious place, and consider pairing the comedy appeals with other more serious information…. In other words, pair the comedy with the serious information and even a call to action.
However, the statements that “At almost all costs, the serious information should be separate from the comedy” or that we shouldn’t “embed the serious information within the comedy itself” are bunk. Why can’t we try both? Just because Chattoo hasn’t noticed it yet, doesn’t mean it can’t be done, isn’t already being done, won’t be done better in the future.
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Don’t shoot for behavior change
“Behavior change might not be the right objective for comedy in the context of social change.”
True, behavior change is a lot to expect from any message, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Still, we might be better served not focusing on it, and there might be other, sneakier things we could do. Chattoo reiterates her five forms of influence:
- Attracting attention & facilitating memory
- Feeling: comedy’s route to persuasion
- Entering complex social issues
- Breaking down social barriers
- Sharing with others
These are all worthwhile pursuits.
In this way, comedy can serve a reinforcing, amplifying role alongside serious news and information about social issues. And attention leads to sharing, fueling a multiplier effect of the original message.
However, while she’s got the Sleeper effect and Multiplier effects down, what she forgets is the more subtle aspects of the Priming effect. Properly composed, the comedy can introduce a particular frame – a terministic screen – that will stay with viewers. Beyond just setting the agenda and telling audiences what to think about and look more into, comics can set up the issue in particular ways that shape how the audience looks at and interprets the issue.
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Timing is key
“Comedy alone is not a magic formula. Leverage comedy’s attention-getting power with strategic timing.”
Comedy’s attention-getting power is most effective when paired with key advocacy moments or milestones—a call to action that makes sense and is optimally timed…. Simply producing and distributing a comedy piece— without the infrastructure for change (specific call to action) or the appropriate urgent moment— likely won’t lead to influence that can make a difference.
Anyone who knows anything about comedy knows that timing is key. Anyone who knows anything about persuasion knows that this is true there as well. We must take into account Kairos, the appropriate moment. Also true, there must be an infrastructure to support specific change.
However, students of the Rhetorical Situation will note that Lloyd Bitzer’s idea of an exigence, “an imperfection marked by urgency,” is somewhat flawed. Vatz points out that perhaps the speaker determines when the moment is right in some instances, and others have gone further off the deep end, suggesting the whole thing is a result of the audience, or the message itself.
The upshot of this line of theory is this: Perhaps sometimes we can be just as effective at creating a moment as we can be responding to one. The key is to try, and we won’t if we listen to Chattoo and think that this effort constitutes “a heavier lift.”
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Amplify the message
“Comedy is a powerful media tool. The audience is not just the public, but media.”
This seems, on face, to be just a restatement of her Multiplier effect – we aim to magnify the impact of the message through sharing, which captures further attention, and sets the agenda for larger media attention. This allows it the largest potential to reach “an activated, motivated audience—a group we want to learn, feel or do something…. [B]oth target audiences and decision-makers who are able to directly impact the issue.”
This echoes another part of Bitzer’s Rhetorical Situation: that for persuasion to happen, we must have an audience that is motivated to and capable of acting. The issue I take here is, who says anyone we reach is not, at least potentially, an “activated, motivated audience”? Especially if they’ve sought out social and political comedy, they certainly may be. The idea is just to reach as many people as possible, and let the message do the work.
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Satire mobilizes, but doesn’t convert
“Use satire to mobilize a base of supporters, but don’t count on it to change minds around deeply polarizing issues.”
To add to this, it’s not just that satire frequently uses irony and parody, which can be gotten or missed and thus leave different audiences with differing understandings of the message, though that’s true enough.
If I mock a flat-earther on Facebook or in a bit, some might “get it,” and laugh at flat-earthers. Some might not think that it’s strong enough criticism and laugh at me, or others might think it’s just a ridiculous critique, and both might laugh because they think I don’t know how the world works. Some might “get” something else (cats push things off tables), and laugh in agreement with what I’m saying, but remain flat-earthers.
However, Chattoo’s point is that when the critique is too sharp, deep, cutting, it will polarize your audience. “Research supports the idea that people with deeply-held partisan or ideological beliefs will retain them in the face of satire.”
On the other hand,
Mobilizing a base of supporters is also a valuable way to use satire, particularly when the timing is strategic to coincide with a meaningful call to action.
I might add that, if the bit is well constructed, the opposing audience will still find reasons to laugh – in fact, to be recognized as satire and not just ridicule it must be funny, at least to some – but they won’t be persuaded by the underlying message, as Chattoo says, “it won’t work to turn naysayers into the choir.”
However, the idea that someone can laugh at something peripheral in a joke and yet recognize that they fundamentally disagree with the message would adequately display that we can process both paths, simultaneously. Nevertheless, satire probably won’t even re-frame the issue for that audience member in a meaningful way – unless you land it within an audience’s latitude of acceptance.
Briefly, Sherif, Sherif and Nebergall’s Social Judgment Theory suggests that around a person’s position on an issue are a cluster of other positions they find viable, acceptable – though not as good as their own. The idea is to hit the edge of this latitude of acceptance, and by doing so, make these positions seem better, causing the audience to reevaluate their position and perhaps shift slightly your way. This is persuasion 101, and would suggest that we could change minds using satire, at least slightly, if we’re sensitive enough to the audience.
Certainly, however, Chattoo is right that,
Satire’s role is to serve as a gateway to more complicated information…. For issues that are new or nascent—or for which ideological or partisan camps have not already divided the culture—satire can be a good tool.
This is again a restatement of a couple of her forms of influence. I just wish we could try to do more. The rest of her recommendations are up next!
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
References:
Lloyd Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy & Rhetoric, 1(1) (January 1968):
Sherif, M. and Sherif, C. W. (1967). Attitudes as the individual’s own categories: The social-judgment approach to attitude and attitude change. In C. W. Sherif and M. Sherif (eds.), Attitude, ego-involvement and change (pp. 105-139). New York: Wiley.
Sherif, C. W., Sherif, M. and Nebergall, R. E. (1965). Attitude and attitude change: The social judgment-involvement approach. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders.
Richard E Vatz, “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy & Rhetoric, 6(3) (Summer 1973)
Young, D. G. (2013). Laughter, learning, or enlightenment? Viewing and avoidance motivations behind The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 57(2), 153-169.
