The Political Content of Late Night Comedy

Abstract

During the 2000 national election season, there was unprecedented attention paid by the media, and by presidential campaigns, to the political content of late night comedy shows such as the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and the Late Show with David Letterman. Focusing on the more than thirteen thousand jokes about U.S. political figures from 1996 to 2000 on late night comedy talk shows, this study explores the choice of targets and subjects of political humor. The authors find that late night humor is heavily centered on the president and top presidential contenders, that the various late night shows tend to exhibit the same patterns in their choice of targets, and that the humor is generally devoid of issue content.

Satire, Punch Lines, and the Nightly News: Untangling Media Effects on Political Participation

“…Jay Leno himself has acknowledged that the jokes on his show cannot be too complicated and that he cannot appear to know more than the audience or ''you'll be sunk'' (as cited in Niven, Lichter, & Amundson, 2003, p. 121). In traditional late-night comedy, the jokes tend to be focused on the personal traits of public officials, and are remarkably consistent with each other (Niven et al, 2003;Young, 2004).…”

Primacy Effects ofThe Daily Showand National TV News Viewing: Young Viewers, Political Gratifications, and Internal Political Self-Efficacy

“…Not only is the study of entertainment television relevant to the basic tenets of mass-communication-related political communication scholarship (see Holbert, 2005b), but many scholars argue there is a need to study more than news content from a political perspective because the messages being offered via entertainment outlets are qualitatively distinct from those provided through traditional journalism programming (e.g., Gamson, 1999;Holbert, Kwak, & Shah, 2003). The satirical political messages offered via entertainment outlets like The Tonight Show, The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live, or The Daily Show are some of the more explicit examples of how audience members come into contact with entertainment-based political messages that are distinct from the storylines derived through traditional news conventions (Niven, Lichter, & Amundson, 2003). Shah (1998) noted that a diverse set of sociopolitical television messages needs to be analyzed to best reflect the inherent complexity of the medium.…”

The Daily Show: Discursive Integration and the Reinvention of Political Journalism

“…Still readily apparent on shows such as Letterman and Leno, the host makes brief references to current events to set up a punch-line. Although the politically oriented one-liner uses the news for its inspiration, its focus usually falls on the personal foibles and character flaws of the primary political actors (Niven et al, 2003). Thus, the late-night joke appears to contain little relevance to the sphere of policy and debate, what Bennett and Entman (2001) refer to as the political public sphere.…”