Humor And Persuasion

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Media plays an important role in today’s media driven society, it permeates every aspect of our lives, according to a May 2014 survey done by Nielson there are 116.3 million TV homes in the U.S. an increase from of 0.4 percent from the 2013-2014 estimate of 115.6 million. They also estimate that 296 million persons age 2 and older live in these TV homes, an increase of 0.5 percent from last year (Nielson.com). With statistics like those it is conceivable to believe the viewers of these programs are being subjected to humor while tuning in. The use of humor to convey certain messages are nothing new, humor predates modern media itself, however when used appropriately humor can be a powerful mechanism of persuasion. One study reports that …show more content…
That is, if humor elicits a positive affective response, a message paired with humor might eventually elicit a positive (agreeing) response (Markiewicz, 1972). Humor and its effects is a subject that continues to puzzle researchers, due to humor’s complex and unexplainable origins. Since the majority of the research reviewed has yielded non-significant results, one is faced with the question of whether humor in fact has no significant effects on persuasion, or whether the appropriate conditions or medium for the emergence of the effect have not been created (Markiewicz, …show more content…
My recording unit was any comment, discussion, or joke that focused on framing the issue with negative, positive, or neutral intent. I defined negative jokes as anything intended to make the target of the humor look incompetent or evil. Examples of this would be police depicted as using extreme force unnecessarily. I then defined positive jokes as any joke that framed the issue or target of the humor in a positive manner. Examples of this would be jokes made about cops catching “dumb” criminals, as seen on TV series “Worlds Dumbest: Criminals”. Neutral jokes were jokes that didn’t identify any particular issue positive or negative, and could be seen as filler or segue material. I used a blank table with each category: positive, negative, and neutral (see attached analysis coding sheet 1). For every case, I placed a tally mark in the corresponding box. I found this was the easiest way to analyze rapid joke sequences from some comedians. This is not a sophisticated or scientific method of increasing the precision or clarity of my data; however, I believe it significantly
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