Laughter and Liability: The Politics of British and Dutch Television Satire
| Date | 01 November 2009 |
| Published date | 01 November 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-856X.2009.00375.x |
| Author | Liesbet Van Zoonen,Anke Kuik,Stephen Coleman |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Laughter and Liability: The Politics of
British and Dutch Television Satirebjpi_375652..665
Stephen Coleman, Anke Kuik and Liesbet van Zoonen
Contemporary politicians face immense rhetorical and communicative challenges. Performing on
the intertwined stages of politics, media (including Internet) and everyday life, they need to master
diverse and contrasting repertoires of talk. Political communication research, at present, has
ignored the question of how politicians face and experience these challenges, and how they reflect
on the new communicative field. In this article, we begin to redress this situation by analysing
and comparing the motives, experiences and reflections of politicians who appeared in the British
satirical TV show, Have I Got News for You, and its Dutch adaptation, Dit was het Nieuws. Based
on in-depth interviews with seven Dutch and 14 English MPs, we conclude that they draw
from three repertoires to legitimise and reflect on their participation: a strategic, indulgent and
anti-elitist repertoire. The first repertoire is predictable in the context of current political com-
munication research, whereas the latter two add new dimensions of pleasure and bottom-up
representation to it.
Keywords: Satire; political communication; rhetoric; performance
Contemporary politicians face immense rhetorical and communicative challenges.
Performing on the intertwined stages of politics, media (including Internet) and
everyday life, they need to master diverse and contrasting repertoires of talk.
Nowhere is this challenge more pertinent than in the many genres of infotainment
that popular television offers. The combination of entertainment and information
defining talk shows, satire and comedy requires a much wider range of communi-
cative styles than a public speech, a journalistic interview or an intervention in
parliament. Performing a convincing political persona in these contexts requires
continuous and effortless shifts from anecdote to analysis, emotion to reason,
polemic to moderation, personal to political, serious to humorous and back again.
While a whole industry of spin doctors and media trainers continuously coaches
politicians for these sheer insurmountable trials, political communication scholars
have been slow to examine systematically if, how and under what circumstances
politicians recognise these requirements and manage to meet them. Studies on
infotainment have focused on questions about its alleged ubiquity (e.g. Brants
1998) or its possible effects (e.g. Baum 2003); studies on the articulation of politics
and popular culture have mostly addressed its democratic potential (e.g. Street
1997; Coleman 2003), and its meaning for citizens (Van Zoonen 2005). Some
analyses of political television talk have taken place in the field of linguistic prag-
matics, yet at present these do not add up to a coherent body of knowledge (e.g.
Lauerbach 2007). As a result of these research agendas, current scholarship has
The British Journal of
Politics and International Relations
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-856X.2009.00375.x BJPIR: 2009 VOL 11, 652–665
© 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2009 Political Studies Association
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