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

Stephen Colbert’s announcement that he would take over 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.