The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW: The Power of Political Satire for Good & Evil

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

Ever wonder why Late Night "comedy" shows have become so political? It's no accident — it's "laughtivism". Saul Alinsky said "satire is the most powerful weapon". Dr. Sophia McClennen talks about how satire is used in social movements and how it can be useful in dealing with absurd times in her latest book "Trump Was a Joke".Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here:SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation through Mail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

All right, welcome back. And our guest is Dr. Sophia McLennan. She's director of the Center for Global Studies and International Affairs. She's got a book, Trump Was a Joke. Here's what the book looks like. How satire made sense of a president who didn't. So we're going to have some fun with this because we're going to talk about the importance of satire. I think it's interesting that even though we are coming from completely different points in politics and Trump is usually known as someone who divides everybody,

I think he's kind of, he's put Dr. McLennan and I on the same page here. We're both united in our incredulity about Trump and what he has done here. And I think the appropriate way to respond to a lot of this stuff is satire. It's a very, very powerful weapon. Saul Alinsky said it was the most powerful weapon because there's no way to answer it. When we see that the emperor is bossing you around and he's got no clothes, it's just naked tyranny. The best thing you can do is point that out and start laughing. So just to give you an idea of her background, she's part of a research team that has proven the political power of satirical activism. I like what they call it, laughtivism, to advance social change. And she's been on a CNN six-part series,

The Story of Late Night night so we want to talk about that as well because you may have noticed that all the late night comedy shows have become very very politicized she's also got another book in the works called the revolution will be satirized I think it also be televised so joining us now is dr. Sophia McLennan thank Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. Let's talk a little bit about this book before we get into satire, because there's a lot course, you're focused on satire. And Trump is somebody who usually gets people really angry, one side or the other. But you were able to look at him and laugh.

Tell us a little bit about that. Well, the story is sort of a longer story because I've been working on satire and politics for a while. I started getting interested in it after 9-11, when I saw that it was actually the satirists who were some of the first to sort of ask questions about how we were framing the story of the terrorist attacks and our response to it. So I started doing a lot of work on whether or not satire actually had a bigger social benefit than just that laugh, you know, the personal sort of release. And the research on this is really good. People who consume satire are generally smarter about issues. They have better recall of information. They feel more confident as political actors. They tend to look at political issues with more nuance and subtlety.

So there's a lot of these, you know, very positive components. They vote more, they're more politically active. So I started working on that. And then, of course, the question was, well, what did Trump do to that landscape for us? Because that had been in place, clearly, you know, really throughout US history. You know, I like to go back to people like Ben Franklin, or you know samuel clemens right mark twain our country has a really long history of being very good at satire so so the book really tries to ask what did trump do to satire and how did satire make sense of him in ways that maybe we didn't see in the mainstream news media and of course the government itself believes in satire. I mean, they named it the Patriot Act, right? To the response to that.

That's a bit of a satirical title. And they do that frequently. They'll frequently come up with an acronym that is going to be exactly the opposite of it. But I guess with the Restrict Act, they finally dropped that satire and it just came straight forward. They're going to just restrict stuff for us. But that's the different part, right? You see it as satire and they are

trying to be sincere, which is why sometimes the satirical joke is written for you, right, by your target. Yeah, you mentioned when you were talking about satire, you talked about Tina Fey and Sarah Palin. And I thought you had a very interesting comment. Tell people your perspective on that. Well, you know, at the end of the day, all that Tina Fey did really was repeat, almost verbatim, the same things that Sarah Palin said.

And so that's a pretty unusual satirical impersonation because really Tina didn't add a lot. And so what it did, though, was that as you see the performance of Palin against Palin herself, suddenly the audience says, yeah, that is crazy. Right. She said what? So it turns out that there's really conclusive data that shows that the Tina Fey impersonations had a measurable negative impact on public perceptions of Sarah Palin. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I remember when I was in college watching Saturday Night Live and they had a very clear political perspective.

It wasn't my perspective. I enjoy the satire. I enjoyed laughing at even the people that I might be supporting more than the satire. I enjoyed laughing at, you know, even the people that I might be supporting, you know, more than the other side. But I saw how effective it was with the people around me who really were just kind of casually engaged. They would see that satire and it would really move them very quickly, which I think kind of brings us to what has happened to late night TV. That has really become so highly politicized and it all grew out of satire. But it seems to be where people are hanging out.

And we look at people like Jon Stewart and people like Stephen Colbert. Of course, people who are on the left, but they're using that satire very powerfully, aren't they? Well, so the nerdy way to describe this is a term called issue priming and so what happens is that uh and we see this across the country today and there's a recent poll that said that the dominant feeling in the public is exhaustion right when they're thinking about the 2024 election

issue priming means that um certain types of media get people to pay attention and open their minds to an issue. So satire is a particularly good gateway into a topic. And so we used to think of satire as the comment on the news. And when I grew up, I watched people like Walter Cronkite. And then, you know, maybe there would be some satire later. But the idea was that you got your news from a relatively objective source, then the satire came as a comment. That's not what it's doing anymore. Satire is your entry point into some issue. And then suddenly, you maybe then go and look up, oh, what is going on with this thing? Or how is that? And so we're seeing that as a complete inversion of the

traditional sort of process. But what it does do is it gets these, this broader audience, as you pointed out, the folks that you watched watching SNL, they suddenly watch the bit and go, huh, you know, maybe I do want to pay attention to this. So what I'm seeing in my research is that satire is keeping the U.S. public politically engaged. And that, of course, is always good for democracy. Yeah. Well, it is. It is a thing that pulls them in, you know, making it into entertainment. And then we go to the other extreme where we start to get these people like Trump, who is throwing names out at people. How is think about how satire and comedy dealt with him because he is already sort of an absurd, extreme, exaggerated figure. So the way I like to describe it is,

if the satirist has a certain toolbox, and in their toolbox, they have a hammer, and that hammer is exaggeration. And they have a screwdriver. And that screwdriver is, you know, infective. Well, Trump already took the your best tools out of your toolbox, he's waving them around. So the satirists that I study, what they did was they moved in two directions they started using like a mallet they became aggressive and meaner and more crude because they couldn't figure out how to get to trump without out trumping him but then they also got more creative and more subtle so it's sort of like you have the allen wrench and the mallet as the two tools that the satirists were using more frequently as opposed to the hammer and the screwdriver because Trump had already taken them.

So what's the Allen wrench look like? You know, it's like twisting. It's weird, right? So you get more creative than they typically need to be because the easy jokes were already being made at some level by Trump in a semi-sincere way. When you have Trump mocking Kim Jong-un, how do you make fun of that? You have to think of something else.

Yeah, it makes it very difficult. He really has reset the rules for a lot of things, and I'm not just talking about the precedents that he set in, but it really has changed things. Give us an example as to how social movements have used satire, because the foreword to your book is written by someone who has done that in his own country. Talk about how we have seen this work, let's say, in other countries before we get to the U.S.

Yeah, so we have a data set of about 420 cases of this dating back over 100 years and, you know, really with examples on every continent. So this is a major research project. And what we find is that contrary to what your gut instinct would be, right, the concept is, if we have a social struggle,, say, we want to protest Putin or we want to enact some sort of significant social change, we should be very serious. This is the gut instinct. We should be serious. We should be taken seriously. Well, our research finds that one of the core issues is that activists

tend to be described in negative ways because they seem like they're disruptive. They're threatening to the status quo. Maybe they seem selfish or marginal. So when you use an element of laughter visum, you can actually have the target be the center of the story not the disruptive activists so for example think of we like to think of the story of what happens in russia because there's many many many examples of this there in russia you're not allowed to protest so let's say you say well we have this thing we thing, we want to express it, we don't know how to do it, we're going to get arrested, we're going to look disruptive. So instead, one of our favorite cases is one where a group of people in northern Russia decided to set up their protest

with toys, with little Legos. And the Legos and little figurines were holding the signs they wish they could be holding up so they set this whole big uh toy pretend protest in the middle of a main square and then they step back and they start to videotape what's going to happen the The police show up. They say, this isn't good. We can't we don't like anything critical of the government, but it's toys. What do we do? So to make it even more ridiculous, they call the Kremlin and the Kremlin says you have to take them down. And the excuse that they make is that the toys are not Russian citizens. So therefore have no because they were made in China, capacity to express themselves, which then becomes, and your listeners will think I'm making this up. It really happened this way.

So now the protesters got their message out. They got major media coverage. And what they did was they showed that the Russian government is so overreactive to anything, any sign of critique. So they make them look absurd and the activists look clever. And so when you see this kind of process play out globally, we just have really, really good evidence that it makes a big difference. Yeah. And I'm thinking of China. When President Xi got so upset about anything that had to do with Winnie the Pooh, somebody put out when Obama went to meet with Xi, somebody put juxtaposed to it.

They had Winnie the Pooh and they had Tigger because Barack Obama was thinner and taller and, you know, Xi was shorter. And they put that out and he got very angry about that. And so then Winnie the pooh became the symbol of protest against she and and the more he tried to shut it down the more ridiculous he looked well what we find is when you have an autocrat with a particularly thin skin this stuff is even easier to do yeah so he's a really good example and so you get it with putin you get it with she you get it with erdogan you get it with lukashenko uh lukashenko in belarus for example needs a constant feeding of his ego so there's protests that we study where folks go and they're forced to listen to a public speech

but they air clap instead of actually clapping. And then what does he want to do? He arrests them. So the point is that when somebody is just being mocked and they respond with this vicious anger, it just makes them look stupid and it really helps the protesters increase their credibility. When they reply that they're a stable genius it doesn't really work out for their well we know that trump for example looked into

trying to censor snl and so again instead of the best thing you can do if you're in power and people are making fun of you is to laugh at the joke yeah right you laugh at the joke you go ha ha ha you know she says yeah yeah yeah i could lose some weight whatever then the joke is over that's right but these guys don't do that they get agitated in their in their you know they get outraged and so consequently it becomes even funnier their reaction adds to the humor. And so the satire is really kind of a litmus test for the kind of person that you don't want in authority, isn't it?

Well, you know, I mean, at the end of the day, satire is going to go after figures of power, period. It's what it does. And so again, the reaction is, is, is at some level is really part of the story like i like to tell the story of when chevy chase was impersonating um gerald ford and making him seem like a complete bumbling idiot i remember that that's what i remember from saturday night live yeah exactly right at the end of the day ford wasn't uhastic, as Chevy Chase portrayed him, but he joked about it. And so the joke was all in good fun.

They still did the impersonations, but it didn't have this sort of reframing of his persona that we see when the person in power really has a negative reaction. I agree. Yeah, a lot of people will say that it's not good for democracy. What would your answer be to that? Well, I happen to know the truth. Mm-hmm. And it absolutely is good. I mean, it's good, like I said, in the sense that it helps people be informed.

It helps them make better decisions, it helps them engage, and most importantly, it helps get them to the polling places. They vote, and they vote with better knowledge of issues. So all of those things, I think, come together to tell us that this is a very effective thing. And one of the things that is super important is the way it helps energize young voters. Yeah.

A lot of people will say, you know, that it just distracts people. It's just entertainment and that type of thing. And it can be shallow, but of course, a lot of people, people even if they look at the news it can still be a shallow thing if it gets them engaged if it gets them to think but as i said before i think it's a very important thing to to show the character of the person right you know that if they can't laugh this off there's something wrong here and that becomes a big red flag in terms of their character, their stability, how they think, how they view power and that type of thing. If they can't laugh at themselves, I think that is a key thing. But it is a very powerful weapon.

What do you think is going to what is this next campaign going to look at? Like, because we know that Trump is most likely going to be the Republican nominee. I mean, it's still very early in that, but he doesn't want to have any debates. And clearly, everything that happens to him endears him even more to the MAGA crowd. So what do you expect to see different this time around? Because we've now had, by the time he's running, we're going to have about eight years of Trump. And so if he tries to do the same types of things, will they work? Or is he going to try to do something different? And how will people react to what he does

differently? So from what I see, he's just circling the wagons because his base of support is is smaller but it's still that base is very devoted those voters are voting for him period you know where we are today it won't matter what happens he can't he could get indicted he could have some other scandal. Those folks are voting for him, period. So what we are more interested in when we think about things like voters and, you know, the effect of satire on voters is that big middle that maybe could go either way, or even more importantly, doesn't necessarily always vote. So those are the folks that you're curious about. And from what I can see, again, there's not, I don't think we should expect a lot of surprises from Trump. Because at this point, we kind of know what he's going to do um and we know how he will react to criticism

what what we want to see i think what is going to be interesting is how the satire will deal with biden because you know at the end of the day biden is really old he can make lots of verbal gaps. He has been a pretty predictable subject for satire. So we have to see what happens there, right? So does that sort of joking at Biden hurt him? How do we handle all of that? So I think at the end of the day, that's probably the more interesting part of the story.

So is satire going to be primarily personal? Because we look at this and we're thinking about Trump's ego, the lawsuits that are there. So it's really kind of about him personally. We talk about Biden and it's about his mental capacity

and his kind of quasi-d quasi dementia or full dementia, depending on your perspective. Is it going to be about that or is there going to be is it fundamentally about the person or can it be about the issues? Will people satirize them on issues? That's a really excellent angle to take. And it's important to recognize the answer is yes. We will get all of it. We will get all of it. And it's going to be a spectrum. And at some level, it'll move from satire to just mockery and sort of insult comedy. And so, you know, you have to be prepared to analyze that full spectrum. I think what makes satire particularly powerful in US politics or global politics is the way that it goes after policy, and is the way that it reframes narratives. One of the most important things that satire can do is say, hey, you know, CNN is

representing this as this or that. But you know what? That's wrong. These are not the two choices. That's when satire is at its absolute best. That's when it really, really helps the public rethink what it wants from its government. Right. Yeah. Because the ad hominem attacks don't really get us anywhere. And I think they can frequently backfire. You know, you can start to feel like somebody is being unfairly picked on. And so there's always that danger that it's going to backfire if you go ad hominem. It's kind of one of the things that I think has really backfired on trump because he goes ad hominem with the people that he doesn't like you know coming up with uh vicious nicknames for them

that are just nasty they're not they're not clever and they don't seem to help him so you know sometimes that type of an attack personal attack i think uh think backfires. What is the difference between that kind of personal vicious attack and clever satire? How would you distinguish those? Well, like I said, sometimes it's a very blurry line. But in Trump, what we see is that he does have a fairly, you've got to give him credit, he has a fairly, you got to give him credit. He has a fairly clever way of denigrating anyone he sees as a threat. And coming up with some, you know, Ron DeSantimonious, lying Ted, you know, little Marco, some little phrase that gets stuck, frankly, in people's minds they may not agree but trump's characterization

is there yeah and so uh what happens is that he's he's basically gotten ahead of who he sees as a an opponent he's framed them according to his idea and then they have to play a game to re-pivot out of that. It's a very powerful tool. What's, I think, interesting is that I don't believe we've ever had a candidate on the left or the right that was so vicious towards his own party and will go after his, you know, technically peers. I mean, it's if he thinks that you're not 100 percent behind him, he's just going to hammer you. And again, come up with some really, you know, frankly, at times, immature criticism. And and and yet that becomes a really powerful part of the story. Meanwhile, satire tends not to live in that space. You can have, again, that insult and mockery. In my view, that's not

true satire. That's just, like you said, ad hominem. that's just mockery. Real satire goes after ideas. It goes after policy. It goes after failures in logic. It goes after, you know, again, these sort of larger concepts, not individual physical traits, things like that. Talk a little bit about leftivism. And, you know, you said that you look at that as a social activism. Is this something that is a very specific formal area we study. We have a very particular definitions. We you have to have particular components in your activism for us to designate it. Laugh to them. The most important thing about it is that you've designed your activism where you put your opponent in a dilemma where that dilemma is going to reflect badly on them so if we go back to the example of putin

with the toys uh putin doesn't have a choice right if he lets the toy protest stand he looks weak if he dismantles the toy protest he looks absurd like he's scared of toys so when you do that you really have a lot of power same thing with Lukashenko we're air clapping you let us air clap. What happens then? You look weak. You arrest us. You look absurd as though you just, you know, you're misdirecting your power. So that's really at the heart of what effective laughterism is doing. It means that no matter what the response of your target, it will help your cause and diminish theirs.

So what should Putin have done? Should he have made up signs praising himself or denigrating the protesters and have his police go out there and take off the other little toy signs and put their signs on there? Yeah, sadly, the problem with this research is that we're basically giving a playbook to autocrats on what they might do that could be better. And actually, that sort of playful response is would be the best response. The playful response would be, you know, having the local police put their own little police toys out or something like that, that would then be, you know, it would completely disrupt the activists, you know, intentions.

There's lots of ways to do it. I'm not especially excited to help consult with autocrats on how to stay in power. So I'll leave it there. Keep them dry, humorless, and egotistical, right? That's where we want them. They better. No helpful hints there. Yeah, I think it's going to be a much bigger part of this campaign because, as I was just talking about earlier, both Biden and Trump said we don't want to have any debates.

Of course they don't want to have any debates. Everybody is tired of them. They don't want them to run again. And they're going to try to, I think, minimize their public exposure. When Trump gets his public exposure, it's going to be things that are going to solidify him with his MAGA base, I think, as we go through this. Yeah. What I was going to say is what that does, though, is it may really depress turnout. Because, like I said, there are people today who are going to vote for Trump no matter what he does. And there are people today who are going to vote for Trump no matter what he does. And there are people today who are going to vote for Biden no matter what he does.

But the big middle, which in this country, in terms of voting demographics, is a solid one third of the electorate. Right. They aren't sure. They haven't decided yet. And so if those guys don't debate, if they don't give, if they don't give us, uh, you know, the folks that imagine themselves as independent or cross party voters, if they don't give them any help, they may not turn out. Yeah, that's absolutely right. Uh, so I, I guess, you know, there's's a little bit of material that they could do there to make fun of them for not debating.

But other than that, it's going to be really about satire. Let's talk about late-night TV, because that has been a tremendous change in the way that we see everything, as you point out. The news begins with entertainment. It's an entry point to take people into it how do you see this uh changing moving forward because it took a pretty big hit during the pandemic as they were shutting everything down they've they've uh picking a big hit on their audience uh how do you see this happening

thing's going to revive during this um during this campaign are they going to play a big role in this or have they diminished? So I think it's a pretty complex question what you're asking. One of the things is that when we talk about late night taking a hit, we tend to look at viewers of the show in terms of things like Nielsen ratings. But at the end of the day, many, many, many people are now just watching clips. So there was a bunch of news coming out when Greg Gutfeld's show at Fox News was outperforming shows like Stephen Colbert on CBS. And the story was, wow, look, these guys don't have the ratings and support they used to have. Except that when you look at YouTube, Gutfeld maybe gets 500,000 viewers on a good day, whereas, you know, he's getting 3 million or so when he airs on Fox. Meanwhile, Colbert that gets like 2.2 million on CBS gets about 5 million on

YouTube. So I think at the end of the day, we really are talking more about recognizing that cable news, or cable television is not the dominant media that people are consuming. So when you break it out and you look at things like Twitter and you look at TikTok and you look at YouTube and you look at even shares on Instagram, you start to see, oh, this stuff that we thought of as TV is actually showing up in all of these other media spaces. And if you aggregate it there, it is not waning at all. Yeah, I think, though, when you look at YouTube, I think that what we're seeing there is the fact that they're curating the content, they're promoting some content and not allowing.

That's kind of been abandoned by a lot of people who have been kicked off of that platform. And so I think, you know, part of that is you're seeing the power of gatekeepers, you know, like YouTube, like social media, that type of thing. But, you know, it's kind of interesting. You mentioned Gutfeld. And it is interesting to me that he has now probably after Tucker's gone gone i guess he's maybe the most uh popular one there at fox news and essentially he's uh you know a comedian who is coming into politics and that's his entry point is is comedy uh to a lesser extent maybe you know jesse waters kind of has that same type of a vibe and they're becoming much more popular than say you know the sean

hannity's or laura Ingram's who seem to be losing popularity, uh, on the right. It's now, you know, the, the right is, is getting into, uh, comedians as, uh, you know, the, uh, entry point to this. Well, I mean, at a simple level, you can think of it this way. If we want to compare like Gutfeld and Hannity, uh, Gutfeld, let's say they're effectively their messages are the same. The information that they're sharing is basically the same. But the difference is that Hannity is angry and bitter. And Gutfeld is sassy and snarky and has that sort of impish grin when he's telling you the same basic thing. And so if you could choose, which is the source you want to go to?

Do you want to go to the source that makes you angry and bitter and kind of ruins your night? Or do you want to watch Gutfeld, who's, you know, basically, again, saying the same thing, but doing it where you're like, ha ha, you know, we have a way through this. And so, again, a lot of research that i looked at uh we know that that the human being just prefers the pleasure of comedy over this doom and gloom everything is you know you know going up in flames sort of messaging we get whether we're watching cnn or fox or msnbc doesn't matter right and so so the comedy is this like real uh you know emotional boost even though the content in it

may be very similar to what you're getting in street news i agree yeah when you go back and you look at um you did a cnn series uh the story of late night i'm assuming you went back and you look at, you did a CNN series, The Story of Late Night. I'm assuming you went back to Johnny Carson and Hal Carson and Leno and David Letterman, certainly in the early days, how they would cover politics as a current event. But they, in the early days, they were not partisan about that, right? No, no, they were not. They were, it was very rare that you would see them really cross into it. Of course, you could go all the way back to folks like Lenny Bruce, who,

of course, was quite outspoken about the things that he was passionate about, but he didn't have a regular televised show. The one show that i think is super important in the history of uh televised comedy is the smothers brothers who oh yeah again started off as basically a variety show with a lot of comedy and then became more political in their condemnation of vietnam and then were you know taken off the air for it. So what we see today is that the politicization of late night brings viewers in and sort of protects these shows because they make money. And, you know, the ideological impulses that we saw that, you know, shut down this mother's brothers, for example, we don't see that happening in the

same level anymore with cable yeah you know when I look back that's a good point about the Smothers Brothers and also about Lenny Bruce and you can see in the biography about Lenny Bruce and I've seen it in other political activists you know they can start out as a comedian and that's the way the Smothers Brothers were but then as they got more attached to their topic, they went from Greg Gutfeld to Sean Hannity, if you will. They lose the humor as they get angrier and angrier about it. And certainly there was censorship involved on the part of CBS. They didn't want him talking about that Smothers Brothers, but they were also losing their audience because they were getting very strident and angry about it because, you know, they became very partisan, very attached to whatever these issues were. And that's the key thing that is really kind of fatal

to the satire stuff, isn't it? Well, it depends, right? Because at some level, when you play the center and we've certainly had a lot of examples, I mean, Jimmy Fallon has mostly stayed out of it. He lost viewers at the beginning when he kind of refused to to engage with some of the political that we saw right after Trump was elected was the fact that if you didn't talk about him, then people didn't watch you. So, that is a very significant shift that is quite different from, for example my book that I think is really stunning is that for most of U.S. history, satirists are critical of systems and they try to get people to think about things and to rethink how they engage with issues. It started after 9-11, but during Trump, we could really see this new facet of the satirists where they were defending our institutions. So you had Seth Meyers chastising Trump for not being presidential after the Charlottesville attacks. You had Hassan Minhaj chastising Trump for not understanding what the First Amendment stands for. So this was a really strange sea change where suddenly the satirists were operating as defenders of the core institutions that frame our democracy. And at some level, once you start to see that that transformation has taken place, you can see that we're really dealing with a new era that is completely different from, say, what the Smothers Brothers were doing.

Right. And of course, the other pitfall for people is they're going to become partisan when they're no longer in opposition. They lose a lot of their material, um, because they don't want to criticize their guy as much. And so that's, that's something that I guess they can look forward to a period of growth here through this, at least through this campaign, uh, and, uh, if the other guy wins, it's going to be, uh, you know, a box office bonanza for them. When that happens, uh, the book is Trump was a joke and how satire made sense of a president who

didn't before we finish, give us a sense, an idea of, uh, how anything made sense of Trump, make sense of Trump satire. How do you make sense of it? Well, I mean, the simple way of saying it is that Trump was the most absurd president this country has ever had. You know, like I said, to imagine a president that was tweeting at all hours and often in ways that are incomprehensible, regardless of what you thought about his policy, his just public persona was absurd. So the best foil for that was a, you know, absurd satire, not just somebody the next day on the news saying, well, Trump last night decided to tweet. So that doesn't work. You know,

I like to think of it as if you're at the circus, you want to hold up the funhouse mirror, right at the clown, because that's how you see what the clown is really doing. And when the straight news is just like, oh, this person's a clown, it doesn't work, your brain can't process it in the same way. So at some level, I think one of the most exciting parts of my book is actually the part where I talk about sort of the neuroscience of what satire does to your brain brain and how it's really effective at countering things that you are processing that are absurd uh that you know again are exaggerated make no sense well tell us a bit more about that what what does it do to your brain um in terms of

as you're processing satire how does that differ it's it's okay so at at one basic level satire? How is that different? It's, it's okay. So at one basic level, satire is all about irony, which means that it uses words and representations in ways that are not literal. So for example, when I lie to you, I, I'm also not using words in a way that's you know true and accurate but that depresses you right if i say hey you know the atlantic ocean is the biggest ocean in the world your brain says wait what and it says no but it but that process of refuting it it depressing. And if you do it again and again, if I say, hey, I won the 2020 election, the brain's like, no, you didn't. But it gets depressed. And what we find is that if you say it enough times, if you lie again and again, the other example I like to use is the relationship one. It's like, no, I really am.

I love you. I'm so good to you. And you're like, it doesn't feel like that. So that process is really, really bad for your mind. It has to think this through, but it's coupled with depression and anxiety and fear. So it's like cognitive dissonance between what you're hearing and what you know is really true. And it's fatiguing.

And that's what we're living through so much, right? Satire, though, does an almost identical thing. Stephen Colbert, when he had the Colbert Report, used to say, George W. Bush, great president or greatest president to people he was interviewing. So this is perfect because it shows he's giving a false choice, but he's playing with it. You watch that and you go, ha ha, because you know he doesn't mean anything he's saying. And so what's fascinating there is your brain, again, takes in a misrepresentresentation but it's a playful misrepresentation

and when you get it you feel clever you feel smart and you feel energized because he framed it as oh this guy is messing up and but he doesn't say it that way he He says it in this clever, playful way. And so that's sort of the easy way to recognize the differences between the two. And so satire just has this huge capacity to light up your mind. And when they do fMRI research, they literally see your high cognitive capacity firing up as well as your pleasure and your brain. And that's what makes satire so powerful. Well, that's interesting. You know, because I did, I used to enjoy, again, even though his politics were different,

I used to enjoy Stephen Colbert's report. I find that he got much more didactic, you know, as he's doing late night TV now. And so, and that's absolutely right, because you can look at that and you can laugh, as he's doing late night TV now. And so, and that's absolutely right because you can look at that and you can laugh at that choice. You know, the greatest president or a great president

or the greatest president. You know, that's a good example of that. It's a lot more, I think, as you said, playful. That's the key thing about it that seems to be as people get drawn into this. Again, I go back to the examples of Lenny Bruce and others, they lose that playfulness because it just gets so serious with them, and they lose their sense of humor and their sense of playfulness in it.

I think that's a key part of it. Well, it's great talking to you. Very important subject, and we all need to understand how effective that is, satire is, satire is, to nudge people and to influence behavior because that's kind of the world that we live in right now is behavioral psychology, isn't it? So thank you so much for joining us. Again, the book is Trump Was a Joke,

How Satire Made Sense of a President Who Didn't, written by Dr. Sophia McLennan. Is that the right way to pronounce your last name thank you so much very interesting subject the common man they created common core to dumb down our children. They created common past to track and control us. Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future. They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated,

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