Irony and Outrage - Hardcover

by Young (Author)

Irony and Outrage explores the aesthetics, underlying logics, and histories of two seemingly distinct genres: liberal political satire and conservative talk radio. While the audiences for conservative outrage and liberal satire come from opposing political ideologies, they both tend to have high rates of political interest and knowledge, engagement, and a lack of trust in core democratic institutions. While journalists and pundits have asked why there is no successful political satire on the right and why there is no successful opinion talk on the left, this book turns that question on its head. Perhaps opinion talk is the political satire of the right. Perhaps political satire is the opinion programming of the left. They look and feel like two different animals because their audiences are...literally, two different animals.

Author Biography

Dannagal Goldthwaite Young is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Delaware and the Center for Political Communication, a Distinguished Research Fellow with the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and member of the National Institute for Civil Discourse Research Network. Her research on the psychology, content, and effects of political entertainment has been widely published in academic journals and media outlets, including The Atlantic, The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Variety, and National Public Radio. She has also been an improvisational comedian with ComedySportz Philadelphia since 1999, and is the creator and host of Dr. Young Unpacks, a playful deep dive into the psychology of media, politics, and pop culture.