Zigler's The Colbert Report

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Introduction
Popular comedians and funny people are described by their peers as smart, witty, clever, and quick-on-their-toes. These descriptors aren’t randomly chosen. It can be argued that they are based off of colloquial understandings of what most people believe intelligence looks like. Through analyzing understanding and utilization of comedy and connecting that to concepts of intelligence, we can evaluate the ways that intelligence can have an effect on how comedy is carried out and conceptualized. Before we can begin to study humorous people and their craft however, we must first understand what “humor” is.
Humor
The term “humor” has no unanimous, scientific definition. It is mostly regarded as a catchall term that considers various …show more content…

Appreciation of humor (versus comprehension of humor) is a subjective phenomenon for both comedians and their audiences and can also be dependent on cognitive as well as social factors. Zigler, Levine & Gould posit that “... understanding a joke invariably requires the cognitive capacity to meet the intellectual demands posed by the joke.” Jokes that are cognitively demanding enough are the most preferred (1967). Even if a joke is sufficiently complex enough to elicit humor, personal ideologies may disrupt understanding of the intended focus of the the joke. For example, political conservatives believe that the comedy-news show The Colbert Report aligns with their conservative ideologies and is trying to mock liberal politics. They fail to see the target of Stephen Colbert’s satire due to their political biases and Colbert’s dry, ambiguous forms of comedy (LaMarre, Landerville, & Beam, …show more content…

Granted, there are things like luck, chance, and motivation that are important factors in the lives of popular entertainers. But it cannot be said that a successful comedian doesn’t display some level of intelligence when they perform their material. Researchers have pointed out that it would be of benefit to the scientific community if we began constructing ways to take physiological measurements of humor and conducted more naturalistic observations of humor and it's relationship with human intelligence. One of the better subjects for these kinds of proposed study would be a professional

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