We Literally Think Differently Than Conservatives With Dannagal Young // Reconcile the Aisle Podcast

“I’ve been asked over the years a lot for the potential of humor to bridge these divides and I have not figured out a way it work. .... Unless you’re someone who is willing to targets the machinery that creates the division in the first place.”

- Dannagal Young

I recently interviewed Dannagal Young on my podcast Reconcile the Aisle. 

Dannagal G. Young (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, 2007) is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Delaware where she studies the content, audience, and effects of political humor. She’s the author of Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States.

In this episode we speak about: 

• How our media landscape is a direct consequence of changes in media legislation. 

• The Coronavirus response is actually the opposite of how we’d expect conservative and liberals to act. 

• Comedians more often lean left and yet conservatives think that liberals can’t take a joke. 

• People’s perception of how they get information and what they know are often different. 

• Because of how liberals and conservatives are oriented affects the type of programming they seek out. 

• True satire comes from people without a stake in the system. 

• We no longer have a mass media to unite people so we have to find other ways to unite people. 

Then my character Melania Trump asks how we can make Donald more funny.

Links to listen are here.