Please Read Responsibly.

On my present topic of humor, I found this article. It mostly pertains to business owners, but humor improves businesses and advertisements in the same ways as journalism. Everything is a business, including journalism. So even if I don’t agree with the use of humor to spice up news, I never really considered humor as a means of keeping the industry alive. Worldwide changes in how people get the news have changed the field of journalism from an emphasis in print media, to broadcast and digital media. Newspaper readership is down; everyone knows this, but the downward trend in voter participation isn’t showing signs of stopping either. If humor is what it takes to get people educated on current events, then so be it. Just as I concluded with the subject of The Daily Show/Colbert Report, if the population is knowledgeable about their world, then who cares how it happened? Let’s say they read USA Today, awesome. Let’s say they read The Onion and watched Bill Maher, that’s awesome too.

Politicians themselves can also use humor. I never listen to radio. But when I do, it’s with my parents, so NPR is the station of choice. NPR has a great storyon humor and politics. (I don’t think it will work on Macs, I had to get on my roommates computer to hear it.) I never thought about the humor actual politicians use, this radio segment gives more of an inside view on humor from the other angle. At a different ASU (Arkansas State University), Dr. Patrick Stewart conducted a study where he analyzed the 2008 presidential candidates by the humor they used (this was directly following his brief stint on the U.S.S. Enterprise). He makes quite a few claims about the candidates just based on his or her sense of humor and how they deliver jokes.

“ ‘Looking at the other candidates and seeing how they use humor will tell us a little bit about them, but also tells us how Americans respond,’ Stewart said.”

Americans are going to feel more comfortable with a candidate if he or she is able to crack a few jokes every once in awhile. Humor can make even the most pretentious person very relatable. The moral of the story; humor is okay, in politics and journalism. This probably makes me bi-polar, because I certainly didn’t feel that way yesterday.

This is what happens when humor in news just gets completely ridiculous. But of course, it’s still funny.