‘Two polar bears walk into a bar …’ is an unlikely opener for a joke, but memes and parodies are surprisingly effective ways to get people talking about climate change.
From Netflix docuseries Making a Murderer.
Netflix
If people are starting to look much worse in democratic terms, trees are starting to look much better. We are learning that plants engage in meaningful and, more to the point, truthful communication.
People wait in line for Stephen Colbert’s debut on The Late Show.
Brendan McDermid/Reuters
In shedding the caricature of a conservative pundit, Colbert can have more substantive conversations with his guests, while still employing his unique brand of satire.
Jon Stewart’s tenure at The Daily Show may ultimately be remembered more for how he skewered the mainstream media than for the laughs he generated.
Jason Reed/Reuters
Jon Stewart’s Tuesday night announcement that he’ll be leaving the Daily Show garnered an audible cry of disbelief from his live studio audience. Stewart himself was visibly emotional: “What is this fluid…
Stephen Colbert created an extraordinary character: a right-wing, bloviating pundit who was both outrageous and adorable.
Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
If you were following politics over the last few election cycles, you were most likely getting some of your information from satire. In fact, research has shown that in today’s political climate, satire…
Comedian Stephen Colbert at the 2010 Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.
Reuters
John Oliver’s new program Last Week Tonight is the most recent addition to the parody news genre. Like its predecessors, the show frequently mocks American politics; for example, an attention-grabbing…
Stephen Colbert slicing and dicing them on the Colbert Report.
Dan Correla
The news that Jimmy Kimmel’s contract as host of ABC’s late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! is being extended for two years completes a period of upheaval in this great American genre. Jimmy Fallon…
Will we recognise the “real” Stephen Colbert when he discards his persona to become the host of The Late Show?
EPA/Paul Buck
What happens when an actor who has built an amazing persona is called upon to reveal a truer self? When Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report, discards his right-wing talk show host persona and takes…
Some Republicans may be yearning for a return to the gold standard, but the idea has lost its lustre among the vast majority of economists.
Image from www.shutterstock.com
A few years back, mock-conservative TV pundit Stephen Colbert famously introduced the notion of “truthiness” into the political lexicon. As Colbert put it, truthiness pertains not to whether beliefs are…
Professor of Environmental Studies and Fellow in the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado Boulder