Laughter and liability: the politics of British and Dutch television satire
journal contribution
posted on 2009-12-22, 15:36authored byStephen Coleman, Anke Kuik, 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 communication
research, whereas the latter two add new dimensions of pleasure and bottom-up
representation to it.
History
School
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Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Citation
COLEMAN, S., KUIK, A. and VAN ZOONEN, L., 2009. Laughter and liability: the politics of British and Dutch television satire. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 11, pp. 652–665.
This article is closed access. It was published in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations and is available from: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/117980943/home