A Citizen's Guides to Democracy Inaction: Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Comic Rhetorical Criticism

Abstract

This essay examines the discourse of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, two of the most prominent political comedians in America. Kenneth Burke's theories of perspective by incongruity and the comic frame provide a general structure for surveying Stewart and Colbert's comic strategies on their nightly television shows, and their roles across various media events. Stewart and Colbert use three rhetorical strategies, in particular, to critically reframe American political discourses: (a) parodic polyglossia; (b) satirical specificity; and (c) contextual clash. By illustrating how these strategies of incongruity are employed, this essay demonstrates that Stewart and Colbert are comic rhetorical critics, who both make important contributions to public discourse and civil society.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 52 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.