SATIRE IN THE DAILY SHOW TWITTER ACCOUNT

InfluenceTracker: Rating the Impact of a Twitter Account

We describe a methodology of rating the influence of a Twitter account in this famous microblogging service. We then evaluate it over real accounts, under the belief that influence is not only a matter of quantity (amount of followers), but also a mixture of quality measures that reflect interaction, awareness, and visibility in the social sphere. The authors of this paper have created “Influen...

Subversive Satire: the Glasgow Verses

The Glasgow Verses constitutes a formal anomaly in terms of genesis, appearance and meaning. Discovered only in 1995, the verses are part of a larger text, the so-called Hunter Codex, a manuscript MaruliÊ wrote and dedicated to his friend Dmine PapaliÊ. Closer investigation revealed that this collection of poems had been entirely overlooked by traditional scholarship, and that it was neither ch...

Thinking with Foucault about Truth-Telling and The Daily Show

This essay brings together two practitioners of critical irony, Michel Foucault and Jon Stewart, to examine problems in the standard critiques of the impact of irony on cultural discourse. For years, critics have bemoaned the increased use of irony in culture, arguing that too much irony in public discourse leads to the formation of distant and disengaged subjects. Using Foucault’s work on parr...

The Daily Show Effect Candidate Evaluations, Efficacy, and American Youth

We test the effects of a popular televised source of political humor for young Americans: The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. We find that participants exposed to jokes about George W. Bush and John Kerry on The Daily Show tended to rate both candidates more negatively, even when controlling for partisanship and other demographic variables. Moreover, we find that viewers exhibit more cynicism towa...

Satire for Dummies, Ver. 2.0