Does humor really lead to Political Knowledge

According to this week’s article, Xenos and Becker believe that people’s attentiveness to political issues increase by exposing to comedy programs, especially to audience who are not political engaged. But no consistent association was found between political knowledge and exposure to comedy programs. In the first experiment, it is not surprising to find respondents exposed to comedy clips have higher attentiveness to relevant political issues compared with their counterparts since the easy and humorous atmosphere in comedy programs reduces the cost of learning about political issues. The second experiment reveals an unexpected result that the number of items people with high political interest correctly recalled is decreasing with comedy program is involved. The founding about people with low political interest is consistent with the first experiment.

I watched two Daily Show with Jon Stewart (Oct. 5^th and Oct. 6^th). I have to confess that I found Jon’s speech is brilliant and funny even to me, who totally not engaged in political issues. The show on Oct. 6^th talked about mid-term malaise and special reporter Mandvi visited the South and North part of Delaware where arouse controversial political opinions. In the last few minutes of this show, Philip Dray came up and talked about his new book on American labor which I found boring. In the Oct. 5^th show, Jon briefly talked about some funny stories about Guatemala and military green events in Pakistan. Then Lewis Black gave covered education crisis America is facing. He made wonderful speech in very humorous tone. In the end, Bruce Willis showed up and promoting his new movie.

Actually during watching the Daily Show, I kept Google some political events which had been mentioned in the show and I felt motivated to know more about these issues than ever but it is only a short-term experience. In the searching process, I did not pursue deep knowledge about political issues just information enough for me to understand what Jon mentioned in the show. Since I have low political interest, I probably would never want to dig deep about politics. When browsing news after the Daily Show, I may pay a little more attention to political issues mentioned in the show which I may never do before but just looked at the headline or at most scan the first paragraph. I was not motivated enough to learn relevant information about political issues.  I guess my results are consistent with majority of Xenos and Becker’s respondents.