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. As previously described, Chattoo tells of 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
In this fourth installment, I run through her second and third points.
Feeling: Humor’s route to persuasion
Audiences can be persuaded through comedy—but comedy’s route to persuasion is more about feeling and caring than learning.
The ELM
Chattoo turns to Petty & Cacioppo’s Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) here (especially as it has been applied by Zhang), which theorizes two routes of information processing: central and peripheral.
[W]hen individuals experience serious information and news—and are able to process the information and are highly motivated to do so—they use a central cognitive route of processing by focusing on the merits of the message itself. But in a humor context, attitude shifts may occur in response to peripheral or heuristic cues—such as emotional reactions, liking the message source and believing the source is credible and believable. Persuasion then moves through a different route than the one employed when encountering a strong message delivered in a serious way. As individuals enjoy the comedy message and the messenger, they are less likely to scrutinize and counter-argue against the information, which improves the conditions for persuasion.
The problems with dual models
Such dual-mode or processing models, in my educated opinion, are bunk – at least in the way they are applied to humor. They are one of the reasons I have to blog in the first place [– I’ll deal with a lot more of them on here soon; they crop up everywhere!]. While it may be true that we can pay close attention or not, why does humor necessarily make us “less likely” to?
Chattoo just argued that audiences actively seek out the information, and that they do so “with active “truth-seeking motivations” – they process the civic information in such a way that sparks ‘reflective thoughts…issue interest, and information seeking.’” Further, she cites Garber, who believes that all the outrage and celebrations of comics these days is ample evidence that we’re not taking their words for granted. So where did that all go? Aren’t these all instances of audiences taking comedy as “serious information and news,” that they are “highly motivated” to seek out and absorb?
And who’s to say that they are unable to do so? Obviously we don’t shut off our brains when the comic starts talking.
Further, there’s a lot of evidence that people are lazy and process many messages peripherally – even “strong messages delivered in a serious way” – particularly when they are from your in-group, clan, tribe [there are lots of terms]. Robert Cialdini posits this when he talks about perceived expertise and liking effects – we process our perception of them rather than the message. So the question is: Why single out any form of discourse as “exclusively peripheral”? It has always struck me as dumb.
Serious messages hurt comedy
Chattoo returns to the idea that overt persuasion can hinder the comedy:
And in fact, by letting the audience in on the idea that the comedy message is designed to be “a message”—overt persuasion—the comedy becomes (perhaps ironically) less effective, triggering the cognitive route to persuasion, including scrutinizing the information or counter-arguing against the messages. For comedy to be a successful vehicle for persuasion in service of a serious social issue, it can’t be seen as trying too hard to explicitly persuade even if it comparts serious information.
There’s the false dichotomy that dual-mode or processing models run up against: either we are scrutinizing the joke, or we are laughing. This brings back the common interpretations of laughter: that it’s an unconscious, embodied response, not a result of thought. Further, such thinking suggests that we can’t react twice, reassess.
This would have it that after it invokes initial scrutiny, a joke can only produce “clapter” – or “humor support,” like when your significant other says, “that’s funny,” which is not the same as laughing. Further, after laughing we apparently can’t go back and think it through; or perhaps we’re just less likely to.
The return of the sleeper
These understandings are obviously bunk. The best evidence for this is Chattoo’s own note that there might be that “sleeper effect of comedy—remembering and being influenced by the content of a funny message longer than a serious one.” Can we guarantee that every time we think of the message, we think of it in the same way? Can it’s influence not change over time?
An easy way to disprove this is the joke that you re-evaluate and laugh again at – the joke that gets funnier the more you think about it. If it can work that way, why can’t we find sense or wisdom in a joke after the laugh? I have.
Further, even if the above were historically true, idea that audiences are changing and becoming more active would call it into question: the fact that we tend to act in certain ways (that people have traditionally acted in certain ways) in no way means that can’t change (nor that it isn’t already changing).
Nevertheless, we’ll move on to Chattoo’s third point.
Entering complex social issues
Comedic treatment of serious issues helps make complex topics accessible—and amplifies serious information
Chattoo agrees with Popkin that people engage in cost-benefit analysis before actively seeking new information and getting involved in serious issues. Baum suggests that entertainment and comedic treatment of these issues might open the door, serving as a “gateway” to more serious attention, and Feldman and her colleagues have shown this to work. This last bunch argues that dealing with complex issues in an entertaining way can have two effects:
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providing minimal (new) exposure to complex issues, and
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providing an available knowledge framework that can help audiences make sense of serious information about the same issues in the future.
Chattoo is backtracking a bit, as she’s already noted (with Bartsch & Schneider) that audiences may find new information they would not otherwise encounter. However, the extra bit is that the exposure is “minimal,” that it’s not overwhelming and therefore can invite people into the conversation.
This second effect seems to recall the “priming effect” Chattoo previously noted (though she doesn’t make the connection herself), where we remember the characteristics of the issue that the comic focused on; this is part of the “framework” or terministic screen, comedy provides, from which we make sense of the issue. This also brings to mind the “sleeper effect” previously mentioned, where we remember more of a funny message, than a serious one – this “more” includes the frame or screen.
Taken together, these two effects, allow audiences to “pay greater attention to more serious news about [these social issues] over time.” Additionally,
[Feldman and colleagues have shown] this impact … as particularly great for those with less formal education and less understanding of or exposure to the issue in the first place [From her section on Satirical News].
The general idea that Chattoo ends with is that comedy complements the serious message.
One final note
There is a trend in studies of humor where the joke is taken as a screen or filter, a way of doing a serious message. This line of thinking makes makes comedy and humor a “surface” tactic, where the serious message intended is “depth;” it’s a hermeneutics of depth. The deeper motive is always given preference over the surface tactic.
We see this also in the distinction between entertainment and social or political comics. Humor and jokes are what they do – “surface” – but the material behind the jokes, the intent, is “depth.”
To clarify fully why this hermeneutics of depth bothers me so much, I should return to the base of this project: what happens when you take away all the assumptions of bona fide, serious speech? What is accomplished?
Jokes and stories are ways of communicating; humor is an intention, but it doesn’t have to be the only one. Comics have traditionally claimed they’re not trying to do anything serious. Such statements are thought to help create the humorous space, and push us into the humorous, peripheral mode of the ELM, and I’ve already critiqued that here – the times, they are a’changin’.
If the times are changing – if comics are trying to directly address social and political issues through humor (and they say they are), and if audiences are looking to comics for treatment of social and political issues (and Chattoo says they are) – then perhaps there is no such thing any more as a meaningful distinction between bona fide and non-bona fide. But that makes this project all the more important. What can happen when someone tells a joke? Yes, people can and do express their outrage and adulation on social media, but do they actually change behavior? And can we really expect more of so-called bona fide discourse?
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
References:
Bartsch, A., & Schneider, F. M. (2014). Entertainment and politics revisited: how non-escapist forms of entertainment can stimulate political interest and information seeking. Journal of Communication, 64(3), 369-396.
Baum, M. (2003). Soft news goes to war: Public opinion and American foreign policy in the new media age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Cialdini, R. Influence: Science and Practice.
Feldman, L., Leiserowitz, A., & Maibach, E., (2011). The Science of satire: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as sources of public attention to science and the environment. In A. Amarasingam (Ed.), The Stewart/Colbert effect: Essays on the real impact of fake news, (pp. 25-46). Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.
Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology Vol. 19, (pp. 123-205). New York, NY: Academic Press.
Popkin, S.L. (1994). The reasoning voter: Communication and persuasion in presidential campaigns, 1st Edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Zhang, Y., (1996). Responses to humorous advertising: The moderating effect of need for cognition. Journal of Advertising, 25(1), 15-32.
However, Chattoo (& Young) points out that we’re living in a different time; perhaps now people approach and read comedy differently. Perhaps they both laugh and think, are amused yet still informed and engaged. “The Zombie Apocalypse” paradoxical example still gives us pause, but perhaps the changes are coming.
Chattoo notes that there’s a “sleeper effect of comedy—people remember and are influenced by the content of a funny message longer than a serious one” (here Chattoo cites Nabi, Moyer-Guse & Byrne). Yes, we’ve known at least since Aristotle that strong emotion is the key to memory. We shouldn’t be surprised that humor is no exception.
It’s good to see comics trying to do something with their power. One such is Salma Hindy. 
Chattoo cites a gaggle of research on the rise of online media, and how The Daily Show has lead us into “a surge of comedy programs—both on TV and online” with profound cultural influence. She cites Garber’s article on comedians as public intellectuals and asks, can comedy “cut through the zeitgeist,” “act as a connector” for people, and are comics “—the observers and savants of the cultural landscape—seen as the true authentic truth-tellers?” This leads her to the conclusion:
Chattoo begins with three qualities comedy possesses, as commonly understood by theorists, which can “serve as a helpful guide for a contemporary understanding of entertainment comedy in service of serious social issues”:
For a lot of the social commentary coming from George Carlin and the like, it was best understood in the cultural moment, when people had both the awareness of the topics and a need for catharsis. But more than these traditional understandings, Chattoo wonders:
Danielle Jester interviewed budding comic Dustin Wood for siskiyoudaily.com (7/27/2017),
As comics, we do have to negotiate our onstage personas with the audience; however, we don’t have to kowtow to their whims. Comics choose what we tell, the way that we tell it, and what we want to make funny about it. However, we also have to realize that the audience can take that up in a number of different and sometimes problematic ways.
Chattoo begins with the promise, citing Last Week Tonight with John Oliver’s success at getting action on New York City’s bail bond system. Basically, Oliver’s monologue culminating in a statement that “Increasingly, bail has become a way to lock up the poor, regardless of guilt,” had an immediate impact:
In an interview with Joel McHale of foxnews.com (7/25/2017), Blanche Johnson
This one’s an oldie, but I came across it in some research recently, and it needs to be in this discussion. 
Audience power
Again, it’s a “feeling,” but in the case of analogies, it’s of a different “quality.” Further, the best jokes “provoke” an “explosive laugh.” Here we see the first instance of