Chai Yang
Professor Emily Freeman
Composition 150
25 September 2015 January 12, 2015, CBS announced Stephen Colbert as the new talk show host of “The Late Show”, previously hosted by David Letterman. Millions of Colbert’s avid followers and fans rejoiced when they heard Colbert was coming out of retirement. The new host was famous for his satire political talk show “The Colbert Report” and his former position on “The Daily Show”, two worldwide news sources for the general mass. As many other political satire shows, Colbert’s show points out the absurd issues and controversial topics with skits, parodies, spoofs and debates, but the defining traits is that Colbert is unafraid to speak his opinions and backing it up with facts and research.…show more content… This setup aims to disarm the audience with humor, but also challenges the audience to be smarter, form their own opinions and views and reflect on these. Satire opens peoples' minds to ideas they might otherwise reject when presented within normal circumstances, by using the emotional lever of humor. Subsequently satire is not a easy genre to pull off, as it involves being the perpetrator of a damaging ideal, only to have a mirror held up with the ugliest parts of our humanity reflected back. It often hits home at people’s beliefs and values, cutting too close to the bone and that is often a component lethal enough to end one’s…show more content… I'm a comedian from stem to stern. You can cut me open and count the rings of jokes. If people learn something about the news by watching the show, that is incidental to my goal.” (Stephen Colbert, Harvard Institute of Politics”), which gives question to his ethos. If he does not care about the impact he leaves on his audience, despite hosting a satire political talk show, can his opinions and words actually have weight? Apparently it can. Research shows many of the younger audiences get their news from his show and gives credit to his show as a trusted news source, despite being on a comedy channel. “Pew Research Center’s recent report on Americans’ media habits finds that a portion of online adults get their news from two Comedy Central staples, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. And other studies have shown that people do, in fact, learn from these programs while they laugh.”( Jeffrey Gottfried,