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In:The Power of Satire
Edited by Marijke Meijer Drees and Sonja de Leeuw
[Topics in Humor Research 2] 2015
► pp. 33–46

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The Authenticity of Play

Satiric Television's Challenge to Authorative Discourses

Published online: 22 October 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/thr.2.03jon
Employing the heuristic of space, target, media, rhetoric, and time, this chapter reexamines US scholarship on contemporary television satire. What we see repeatedly are struggles over what constitutes legitimate and illegitimate forms of public speech, language, and actions within televisual and non-televisual spaces. Satire has emerged, employing various forms of fakery and a rhetoric of play, to challenge the representative roles that politicians and news media have claimed for themselves, including the language of authority that undergirds their positions of power. Play and fakery invite popular participation and direct forms of representation, including across media forms. Finally, satire, parody and irony are seen as more authentic forms of public language and critique in an age dominated by the professionally packaged and managed discourses employed by politicians and commercial forces.
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