Don Waisanen

Crafting Hyperreal Spaces for Comic Insights: The Onion News Network's Ironic Iconicity

In 2007, the flagship humor publication, The Onion, launched the Onion News Network (ONN), a comic news organization producing online sketch videos. This article argues that ONN is a distinctive form of hyperreal social critique that uses ironic iconicity, rather than slapstick or the usual tomfoolery of much comedy programming, to invite rhetorical insights about contemporary media events and political practices. ONNs videos draw attention toward communicative dynamics, creating spaces for alternative civic understandings through a televisual technique that imitates but also reconfigures the structure, delivery, or content of mainstream news broadcasts like CNN and Fox News. Although not without limitations, this ironic iconicity crafts a multimodal online rhetoric and demonstrates the contingency, recursivity, and judgment of news communication norms and practices.

From Funny Features to Entertaining Effects: Connecting Approaches to Communication Research on Political Comedy

This article offers points of intersection and difference across communication research on political comedy. Based on our findings, we argue that political comedy scholarship can be usefully divided into two areas: (1) features and (2) effects. Under features, we find three overlapping but distinct areas of emphasis: political comedys rhetorical devices and conventions, its ideological and ethical functions, and its contributions to public culture. Under effects, we construct another four areas, including knowledge and learning, attitudes and opinion, cynicism and engagement, and processing, understanding, and affinity. The essay provides an overview of studies on political comedys features and effects, before concluding with five pathways that can bridge these divides and bring conceptual clarity to future research.

The Problem with Being Joe Biden: Political Comedy and Circulating Personae

This project examined comedic representations of US Vice President Joe Biden to analyze persona rhetoric in a media environment filled with circulating personae, or the many roles both created by and attributed to such figures. While sometimes supportive of the politicians intended roles, we found that circulating personae can disrupt the first persona, complicate the invitations and control exerted over the second persona, propel strategic and non-strategic authorships deflecting or silencing a third persona, and provide an undertow of multiple meanings supplementing a fourth persona. Several implications are drawn, including how circulating personae may neuter roles important to political rhetoric and public culture.

Bordering Populism in Immigration Activism: Outlaw–Civic Discourse in a (Counter)Public

This study involved a rhetorical ethnography and textual analyses of an anti-immigration group over a six month period. I argue the collective engaged in a deleterious form of bordering populism, in which communicators continually attack and praise the same targets. This populism was generated by outlaw–civic shifts between marginalized, outsider stances, and more official, general cultural logics. The group demonstrated a fragile, fracturing approach to a public issue, and local, vernacular practices that are employed to bridge pressures for agitative and integrative movement communication in a pluralistic, globalizing environment. Overall, each of the groups stark rhetorical shifts for and against the government, businesses, and immigrants concurrently crafted and dismantled rhetorical borders, creating an unstable (counter)public forgoing the possibility of democratic communication and community.

Academic Journalism: A Modest Proposal

The traditional business model of journalism is disintegrating. Meanwhile, the academy faces criticism over teaching quality and research relevance. Drawing on economics, communication, and journalism, we construct a modest proposal: that academia produce some forms of at-risk public-interest journalism, bolstering the civic mission of universities. To better understand current, realistic possibilities, our analysis also compares and contrasts academia and journalism—their economics, methods, cultures, and norms—and their respective weaknesses, accessibility, and complexity, to determine which journalistic public goods could conceivably be created in academia. We suggest criteria and examples for how academic journalism could address institutional weaknesses by producing investigations and analyses of complex problems, accessibly communicated. Precedents, barriers, and further implications are charted.

Political Conversion as Intrapersonal Argument: Self-Dissociation in David Brock's Blinded by the Right

Political conversion narratives are pervasive features of U.S. public discourse, yet their workings and functions are still relatively uncharted. This essay explores the rhetoric of journalist and activist David Brock, a convert from the political right to the left. I argue that Brocks controversial autobiography, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, demonstrates how conversion experiences can be enacted through dissociative argumentation. In particular, the author uses a series of what I term self-dissociations to define a new identity and advance movement advocacy. The paper concludes by evaluating political transformation in relation to dissociation, identity, and U.S. politics.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Decorum: Quintilian’s Reflections on Rhetorical Humor

This study examines ancient Roman ideas about humor’s boundaries in public culture. In particular, I analyze book 6, chapter 3 of the Institutio Oratoria, which covers Quintilian’s reflections on the subject. Following Cicero, Quintilian engages the tensions between humor and decorum in his political context, using urbanitas to refine the former and to loosen the latter’s strictures. In this process, the use of urbanitas implicitly points readers toward factors that can make humor rhetorical. Quintilian thus answers Cicero’s question about the degree to which humor should be used and furthers inquiry into how much rhetorical humor can or should be taught.

(Trans)national Advocacy in the Ousting of Milošević: The Otpor Movement's Glocal Recursions

Over the past decade a remarkable number of revolutions worldwide imitated the touchstone youth movement Otpor, which played an influential role in ousting Serbian President Slobodan Milošević in 2000. Given the continual presence of Western organizations and resources in Otpors uprising, I argue that the movement demonstrates a type of communication termed glocal recursion—a rhetorical strategy that invites social change by imitating global methods of resistance, with slight variations, in local contexts. In addition to its time-based connotations (in which activists ground new messages in old texts), glocal recursion advances a space-based understanding of recursive appeals (with activists creating local messages from global structures). This essay analyzes four aspects of Otpors glocal recursions, including its technological conditions, structured spontaneity, indigenous adaptations, and dialectical reappropriations. Various implications are drawn for communication research.

Using the Pecha Kucha Speech to Analyze and Train Humor Skills.

ABSTRACT Courses: Public speaking; communication courses requiring speeches. Objective: Students will learn how to apply humor principles to speeches through a slideshow method supportive of this goal, and to become more discerning about the possibilities and pitfalls of humorous communication.

Laughing or learning with the Chief Executive? The impact of exposure to presidents’ jokes on message elaboration

Abstract Using the White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD) and the State of the Union (SOTU) as stimuli, our experiment (N=403) examines the differential effect of exposure to humorous vs. serious presidential speech on the likelihood of engaging in post-exposure message elaboration. The results suggest that viewers are more likely to engage in message elaboration when viewing serious presidential speech like the SOTU rather than the more humorous WHCD. Additionally, disposition toward the president fails to moderate the impact of varied speech exposure on message elaboration. Our results ultimately show that, while WHCD humor may be quickly discounted, it can also provide a strategic distraction from political content. We discuss the implications of these results and confirm our main findings across the two most recent U.S. presidential administrations.