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2021 - Volume 4 - Number 2

“A Possibly Sick Bird that Could Inform Broader Public Policy”: Discourse Analysis of Humor and News Discourse in “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”

Baudelio Muro Samano * baudelio.muro@outlook.com * ORCID: 0000-0002-6075-8820
University of Guanajuato, Division of Social Sciences and Humanities, MEXICO

Open Journal for Studies in Linguistics, 2021, 4(2), 35-50 * https://doi.org/10.32591/coas.ojsl.0402.01035s
Received: 10 June 2021 ▪ Accepted: 30 July 2021 ▪ Published Online: 14 October 2021

LICENCE: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

ARTICLE (Full Text - PDF)

ABSTRACT:
Comedy news has become a relevant and influential referent of news media diet for people in the U.S. One of the major exponents of this kind of outlets in the U.S. is the show Last Week Tonight. This paper analyzes the objective value of comedy discourse and news discourse from this show and aims at investigating its persuasive effect on people. Van Dijk’s (1983) model of news discourse analysis, and Attardo’s (2010), and Attardo and Raskin (1991) sequences of joke organization and General Theory of Verbal Humor joke-forming resources were used to apply a conceptual framework for the jokes and the news piece structure of this paper. Results showed that humor is used in pieces of information as de-escalation to the seriousness of news discourse, and that this show has a robust news discourse structure similar to serious news programs.

KEY WORDS: comedy news discourse, canned jokes, news discourse analysis, “Last Week Tonight”, discourse analysis.

CORRESPONDING AUTHOR:
Baudelio Muro Samano, University of Guanajuato, Division of Social Sciences and Humanities, Guanajuato, MEXICO. E-mail: baudelio.muro@outlook.com

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