Laughing as participation: A textual analysis of the studio audience of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

This small scale study or pilot case looks into how studio audiences participate; as well as how we can characterize the interaction between host and studio audience in political comedy. The case used is "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" (US), as it is widely popular but also has a following in Europe and Sweden. According to Corner et al (2013), political comedy includes satire, mocking, spoofing and raillery; and has three main functions (imitative, descriptive and argumentative). The study focuses on the importance of the live context, although in this particular case it's the representation of this live context which is of importance. We can see that audiences of the particular programme (shown February 2012 on American television) largely agree with the host when it comes to subjects matters addressed (gender stereotyping and equality as well as military issues), and that the audience therefore makes up what is called a supportive and affirming audience. This is no surprise as a studio audience has this roll in general - this is why it is there - but it is worth mentioning that this barely can be counted as a participating audience. Carpentier (2011), writing on participation, would see this as minimalist participation, although this can be problematical as come of the maximalist participation characteristics could be argued for in this case, like the fact that there seems to be a wide definition of what the political can be, and this is included in the programme and hence communicated via the studio audience. Emotionality is also something that can be seen as communicated through this audience by the means it has available, and therefore the theories of the civic circuit, put forth by Dahlgren (2009), is a useful tool when looking at these matters.