“A Possibly Sick Bird that Could Inform Broader Public Policy”: Discourse Analysis of Humor and News Discourse in “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”

Comedy news has become a relevant and influential referent of news media diet for people in the U.S. One of the major exponents of this kind of outlets in the U.S. is the show Last Week Tonight. This paper analyzes the objective value of comedy discourse and news discourse from this show and aims at investigating its persuasive effect on people. Van Dijk's (1983) model of news discourse analysis, and Attardo's (2010), and Attardo and Raskin (1991) sequences of joke organization and General Theory of Verbal Humor joke-forming resources were used to apply a conceptual framework for the jokes and the news piece structure of this paper. Results showed that humor is used in pieces of information as de-escalation to the seriousness of news discourse, and that this show has a robust news discourse structure similar to serious news programs.