Sarcastic Essays

More and more news programs are likely to go absurdist in the coming months and years.As faith in and loyalty to traditional anchors wither, one can even hear ironic Maddowian intonations creeping into the delivery of CNN’s not-so-funny anchor Campbell Brown on her new show.

More and more news programs are likely to go absurdist in the coming months and years.As faith in and loyalty to traditional anchors wither, one can even hear ironic Maddowian intonations creeping into the delivery of CNN’s not-so-funny anchor Campbell Brown on her new show.

Tags: Finance Homework AnswersBusiness Plan For Non Profit Organization ExamplesEssay Of Business CommunicationCritical Thinking MoviesHsc Speeches EssaysEssay On Watchman

” MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show made its debut in the fall of 2008 and by October had grabbed 1.89 million viewers, beating CNN’s Larry King Live in the over-twenty-five and under-fifty-four demographic for that whole month.

Maddow’s mocking on-air demeanor reminds many people of what they liked most about college.

In the twentieth century, though, news parodies were a bit more milquetoast.

This was true even thirty-three years ago, when Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” kicked off the modern form of news parody.

They show up on Saturday Night Live to rap, or to meet their comedy doubles.

They import self-parody into their own campaigns, as in Hillary Clinton’s faux Sopranos video on You Tube.Maddow asks the “awkward question,” as she puts it: Is Blago not well?She riffs a bit and then concludes, with a sarcastic smile, “Illinois, you are getting almost as fun to cover as Alaska!Karl Rove, on the other hand, is widely seen as a vile little prince of handling.Yet Deaver, if we remember, was as much a master manipulator as Rove was; he got Reagan, you’ll recall, to gin up fake remorse during the Iran-Contra affair.Along with her precursor, the five-year-old Countdown With Keith Olbermann, these are two “real” news programs permeated by parody. For starters, today’s bloggers and You Tube snidesters see parody as information and information as parody. Now, the news-with-satire approach can seem like the only thing that makes sense, since at least these shows are in on their own jokes.Even politicians sometimes embrace the idea of themselves as caricatures.Critical verbal humor is a very specific thing—one reason that American film comedies struggle for viewers overseas.Sarcastic ripostes call for sarcastic viewers who know how, and when, to laugh. Finally, we have a far more sophisticated audience today than in the past, one that sees more clearly behind the manipulations and stagecraft of its political leaders.In the 1990s and 2000s, this satirical mode built up a head of laughing gas with The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Air America’s Al Franken.Comic news has become so popular that it even saved the career of a louche pothead named Bill Maher, who in a few short years went from comic outlier to éminence gris.