A dual-processing approach to the effects of viewing political comedy

Abstract: Stephen Colbert’s announcement that he would take over Late Night for
David Letterman signaled the end of nearly a decade long project in political
satire. The evolution of political humor since Colbert began his satirical news
program has been accompanied by a dramatic expansion in scholarly understanding
of the effects of political comedy. This study contributes to research on
the effects of political comedy by adopting a dual-processing approach to determine
if exposure to political comedy can affect the political knowledge and
attitudes of viewers. Two experiments were conducted to test the learning and
persuasive effects of viewing a single clip from Colbert’s well-documented Super
PAC parody. The first demonstrated that exposure to Colbert’s Super PAC programming
generated modest short-term issue recognition characteristic of online
learning. The second experiment demonstrated a substantial priming effect such
that viewing argumentative forewarning in a Colbert segment about Super PAC
attack ads significantly diminished the persuasive effect of those attacks

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