Humans’ minds are the most precious gifts god has given to us. However, sometimes our minds could be manipulated without being known by ourselves. As people know more and more about how our brains and psycho-activities are functioning, the ways to mislead people’s thoughts are being mastered by more and more people, especially politicians. Under this circumstance, it seems that people need a role of some outside instructions to guide people to think of our social events critically. Daily Show, having won 22 Primetime Emmy Awards, is a major “actor” who playing the role. Trevor Noah, a new host who succeeded Jon Stewart a few weeks ago, keeps using humorous tactics and keen satire …show more content…
After watched several shows presented by new host Trevor, I have reasons to believe they are applying similar strategies. In this essay, I’d like to mainly talk about how two of the three strategies are utilized in one specific clip of the Daily Show which discussed about the criminal justice reform(October 8th 2015 episode, Trevor Noah).
Parodic polyglossia, defined by Waisanen in his articleI A Citizen’s Guides to Democracy Inaction, is “the sheer degree of expanded linguistic and vocal capacities that Stewart and Colbert push in their perspectives by incongruity”. In fact, the whole show can actually be viewed as using parodic polyglossia. It keeps using a comedic tone to analyze news which are narrated in more seriously. However, there are more examples that can better help us understand how this means works. At the beginning of the show, Trevor Noah is trying to talk about prisons, which, according to him, is “a big house” and is “America’s second worst place to stay after Red Roof Inn”. He made a great conversion of tone from a serious discussion on prison to a ridiculous analogy between prisons and Red Roof Inn. This seemingly useless humorous …show more content…
Based on Waisanen’s article, contextual clash involves the multiplying and mixing of seemingly unconnected contexts with one another. One of the most obvious examples is how Trevor address how parties come to an agreement on the criminal justice reform issue. According to Trevor, “Criminal justice reform is an American issue, not like the divisive non-American issue they can’t come together on like climate change, which only affects profits, or healthcare, which only affects the sick.” Apparently climate change and healthcare have nothing to do with criminal justice reform, but Trevor compares those with each other. By doing so, It causes a brilliant satire of American government which is regardless towards “non-American issue” that are actually vital to the country. Also, the witty usage of “only” highlights the groups of people who are affected by those non-American issues to illustrate these events are definitely not non-American issue. Another funny example comes right after a report video that showed how America have more than a quarter of the world’s prisoner population. Trevor commented, “America really loves prison. No, no, going to jail is such a big part of American culture that you even have it included in your board games.” What? Prison and board games? How could they been related? That is exactly what Trevor Noah did. It not only provides a laughable