This article uses the concept of cultural citizenship to understand engagement in political comedy. The concept stresses popular culture’s value for identity and community construction, as well as the importance of learning about and respecting others. Using empirical work on Swedish young adult political comedy audiences in the form of data from in-depth interviews and focus groups, the article argues for analysis of engagement in various discursive forms, in studies of media and citizenship. More specifically, the article answers the question: which citizenship values are defended by political comedy engagement? In order to identify such values, the study focuses on the ways in which audience members construct identity and community, in relation to their political comedy engagement. Four themes of community construction are found: lacking social contexts, ideology and strong emotions, knowledge and education, and irony as a discursive mode and disposition. From these, the values of playful and emotional modes of engagement are conceptualized. The final parts of the article argue for those modes’ legitimacy and significance – both in relation to engagement in, and through, political comedy.
News satire plays with the political in ways that transgress journalistic as well as social and moral boundaries. But the ways in which audiences in different contexts engage with news satire are under-researched, despite the implications of the genre’s role for contemporary citizenship. This article asks how Swedish young adult audiences construct and negotiate news satire’s inherent transgressions, spanning across the ‘serious’ and ‘silly’. Based on interview and focus group data, the analysis shows how sustained news satire engagement entails genre work that aids the development of ‘transgression skills’. This process is stimulating, constructed as part of a complex and emotionally authentic mode of political communication, within a context where journalistic certainty has dominated. By achieving transgression skills, audiences are symbolically put on the same level as political elites and develop abilities to shift perspectives; thereby experiencing a deeper engagement with, and understanding of, political issues and performance.
This article explores news satire engagement and civic motivation, an area of concern in satire scholarship. Focused on what audiences ‘do’ with media, the ways in which young adults who regularly engage in news satire construct political efficacy is studied. Using a qualitative contextualising audience study, including in-depth interviews and focus groups with 31 young adults, a thematic analysis of transcript data identifies three discursive themes relating to civic anxieties; development and invitation, performance and knowledge, and conflict and ‘packaged deals’. These emphasise news satire as cultural form as well as shifting civic ideals and development processes: exposing how news satire’s ‘kynicism’ (non-nihilist criticism) connects to civic performance anxiety. The identified anxieties are understood as related to fears of exclusion, embarrassment and misrepresentation. The metaphor of civic stage fright is developed to further understand these, underscoring the role of emotion and social interaction in civic performance.
Offentliga anklagelser leder ofta till kontrovers. Anklagelser har studerats utifrån hur de ger upphov till vissa typer av försvar, liksom hur en anklagande part kan övertyga om skuld och förstärka uppfattningen om anstötligheten i en handling. Vi undersöker ett satirprogram som anklagelse, med särskilt fokus på hur dess retoriska struktur strategiskt möjliggör vissa gensvar och motverkar andra. Vi visar hur ett inslag i nyhetssatirprogrammet Svenska nyheter konstruerade en komplex anklagelse mot det svenska friskolekösystemet, och mot karaktären hos den utbildade medelklass som främst använder systemet. Inslagets konstruktion placerar den anklagade medelklassen som adresserad publik i tre olika subjektspositioner, och relationen dem emellan motiverar botgöring snarare än försvar. Analysen visar hur en växlande positionering av samma grupp som domare, offer och anklagad kan fylla särskilda funktioner i anklagelser som anger vägar till upprättelse och öppningar för försoning
Public accusations often lead to controversy. Accusations have been studied as causing certain types of defense, as well as for how accusing parties persuade audiences of guilt, and amplify an act’s offensiveness. We investigate a satire programme as a strategic act, with a specific focus on how its accusatory rhetorical structure strategically invites certain responses, and counteracts others. We show how a segment in the news satire programme ‘Swedish News’ constructed a complex accusation against the Swedish private school queue system, and against the character of the educated middle class who tend to use it. The segment’s structure places the accused middle class as an addressed audience in three different subject positions, wherein the relationship between them motivates penance rather than defense. The analysis shows how a changing positioning of the same group as judge, victim and accused can perform certain functions in accusatory speech, indicating roads to redemption and opening up for possibilities of reconciliation
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