Wingnuts Who Watch 'Colbert Report' Don't Know It's Satire
Not to be prejudiced or anything, but a short tour around the Internets pretty easily proves that conservatives don't "get" satire or parody. Why? The answer probably has something to do with "belief in simple absolutes" and "sex shame" and "childhood brain damage," and research from 30 years ago showed dogmatic people tend to be both dumb and unable to comprehend satire. And that's why wingnuts don't understand that Stephen Colbert'sComedy Centralparody of Fox News is, in fact, a comedic parody.
TO BE FAIR,a certain type of Libtard is also immune to satire and parody and comedy in general, as evidenced by the old joke, "How many lesbians does it take to change a light bulb?" (Answer: "That's not funny." This joke, obviously, predates our Modern Era in which lesbians are, indeed, very funny and often employed by the comedy industry.) It is our opinion that liberal types were not very funny in the 1980s and much of the 1990s -- they were far too worried about saying something Offensive. It is this, and only this, that explains the prominence of P.J. O'Rourke in the 1980s.
Anyway, new study proves it, wingers really don't understand comedy, and actual academics at Ohio State actually did a study to prove it:
This study investigated biased message processing of political satire in The Colbert Report and the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert. Results indicate that political ideology influences biased processing of ambiguous political messages and source in late-night comedy. Using data from an experiment (N = 332), we found that individual-level political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert's political ideology. Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism. Finally, a post hoc analysis revealed that perceptions of Colbert's political opinions fully mediated the relationship between political ideology and individual-level opinion.
Conservative Colbert viewers not in on the joke [Kottke.org]