Can Comedy Be Convincing? An Experimental Test

• In Event: Empirical Origins of Political Ideas

Abstract

This paper investigates the persuasive impact of political comedy and its possible role in democratic deliberation using experimental methods. Though there has been a great deal of research in American politics, political psychology, and communication studies on political comedy in recent years due to the rise and proliferation of programs like The Daily Show, this has tended to focus on questions regarding the effect of humor on political trust and efficacy, as well as behavioral outcomes like political participation and information search. There have so far been fewer investigations of whether political comedy has the power to actually change people’s minds.

Yet knowing whether comedy can be persuasive is an important question since comedic programs with political content reach massive audiences and could therefore play an underappreciated role in democratic deliberation. They could, for instance, function to bring novel or controversial ideas to widespread attention, or effectively neutralize weak or pretextual lines of argument for policies by holding them up to public ridicule. This paper deploys deliberative systems theory to make sense of the different possible functions comedy might fulfill, thereby integrating experimental research in political psychology with democratic theory to investigate political comedy’s role in democracy.

We report here the results of two survey experiments on comedy’s persuasive power, a single wave study (Study 1, N = 1,505) and a two-wave study (Study 2, N = 5996 (wave 1); 2752 (wave 2)). We use a piece of political stand-up comedy with rich persuasive content to test the effect that humor has on persuasion regarding the issue of gun control. The experiment has two treatment conditions in which one set of subjects watches the stand-up comedy routine and another watches a video that recreates the persuasive content of the comedic routine but without the humor. Both were compared to a placebo video. This design improves on previous studies in several ways. First, it brings much greater statistical power due to substantially larger sample sizes than previous studies. Second, it uses a control which was often missing from previous studies. Third, its use of video stimuli improves on previous treatments which relied on transcribed jokes or used more generic comedy with political content but that did not seek to persuade. Video stimuli are not only more intrinsically engaging, but they also better approximate the kind of content that subjects would be likely to encounter in their native information environment.

Our main results are as follows. We first hypothesized that persuasion would be aided by a comedic message. Yet our results suggest that the two kinds of message have indistinguishable but significant persuasive effects; both comedic and non-comedic messages persuaded, and with approximately the same power. This goes against our expectations that a comedic message would be more persuasive. However, we also found an interesting interaction effect between partisanship and comedic content. Republicans, for whom the pro-gun control message was generally counterattitudinal, found the comedic message significantly more persuasive than the non-comedic one, and the effect persisted better among them. This provides more reliable evidence that comedy can ‘disarm’ audiences by suppressing counterargument and thereby aid the uptake of persuasive content. These results suggest that political comedy does indeed play a role in democracy’s deliberative system because it can change people’s minds, though in this it has no overall advantage over conventional political communications. However, it seems to have a unique power to convince people who don’t initially agree with the persuasive message, providing an enticing possibility for real attitude conversion in the midst of an increasingly polarized political environment. Further research into comedy’s other possible effects is needed.

Authors

• Kevin J. Elliott, Murray State University

• Andy Guess, Princeton University