Date of Award
12-1-2013
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Department
Speech Communication
First Advisor
Gray, Jonathan
Abstract
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart uses humor to explore, analyze, and criticize current media and political trends, politicians, and campaigns. Reappropriation uses video as an argument against the original producers of that content, one of the tools used to highlight the problems with the political and current media coverage. The effectiveness of using reappropriated video is analyzed through a rhetorical analysis, combining argumentative analysis and functional analysis. Through this analysis a structure is developed for three types of arguments used by The Daily Show: highlighting absurdity, the political fact check and highlighting contradictions, and exposing social and media patterns. The analysis explores the strengths and weaknesses of each type of reappropriation, and the structural form of the argument.
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