Irony and Outrage : The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States

Irony and Outrage explores the aesthetics, underlying logics, and histories of two seemingly distinct genres: liberal political satire and conservative talk radio. While the audiences for conservative outrage and liberal satire come from opposing political ideologies, they both tend to have high rates of political interest and knowledge, engagement, and a lack of trust in core democratic institutions. While journalists and pundits have asked why there is no successful political satire on the right and why there is no successful opinion talk on the left, this book turns that question on its head. Perhaps opinion talk is the political satire of the right. Perhaps political satire is the opinion programming of the left. They look and feel like two different animals because their audiences are...literally, two different animals.